Monday, September 11, 2017

Come and Get It


When APS strung power lines just in front of his view at Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright turned his perspective around, moving to the rear of the complex looking upon a garden and statuary toward the McDowell Mountains. Things do get in the way. Odd that I had read about Howard Roark before knowing or seeing anything of Wright. Legend has it that he was the progenitor of that character. Have looked at a biography of Rand and don't recall if it was so confirmed. Distilled, she had an issue about altruism in that it really isn't "Help you." but rather an entree seducing one into dependency. This in the context of her living through the Russian Revolution hence, in toto, dependency upon the State.

You see this played out often. People needing assistance but the old saw of giving a man a fish or teaching him to do so the dynamic. Once given, always given... why fish? The Soviet State guaranteed everyone a job. The same job for life along with a compartment to keep warm; inclusive vodka, a State monopoly. But I digress.

Roark is the vaunted individual the socialist program sought to eradicate. And so they did in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia... North Korea. Peaceful coexistence? Problematic. Wright, like Roark, contended with Beaux-Art facades. The function over form crowd, eh? Things came to a head when the utility services were placed outside the Pompidou Center. Ah, yes, marvelous! The irony, with respect to Wright's consternation, is precious. Having not a thing to do with it all, we can mostly be glad that socialists are no longer in the ascendency, so to speak, yet buildings to the sky provide another dense dilemma.

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