10.31.2004
The Ennis-Brown House:
I first came across the house in an English publication Bridge for Design. It tends to be a stuffy magazine highlighting what the English will think is novel or American. Regardless, the magazine's photos of The Ennis-Brown House were great; much better then those on the House's web-site, from which this photo was taken.
So what kind of house has its own website: one built by Frank Lloyd Wright, listed as a national treasure, recently added to the World Monument Fund's roll call of the 100 most endangered cultural heritage sites (because a 1994 earthquake nearly destroyed it), and used as a setting for Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.
I have always liked the movie Blade Runner and it was immediately on my mind while skimming through the magazine, prior to reading the article or visiting the website. It was nice to read there was a relation between the film and building as I have long felt the same unsettling notion about the cultural results of Blade Runner and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Blade Runner, as with Wright's work, set forth ideas which have become visual standards/formulas for their respective industries, even though the typical practitioner gives little credence to origin of the thinking which produced the visuals.
Case and Point in Two Illustrations:
Movies: The Matrix Trilogy
Architecture: Any number of bad Neo-Prairie Style developments in the Greater-Chicago Area (details to follow).
Enter here my long-winded thoughts on the following topics:
1. The depth of the Existential argument
2. What Wright meant in saying: "No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other."
3. What the fuck was the hopeless, heroin junky, god-freak, sci-fi guru Phillip K. Dick really after?
4. Wright's time in Japan, a country which seemed to have perfected all his ideas centuries before he bothered to visit, before returning to America and becoming a really cocky fuck.
The rest of this is babble. Its always been. I'll not sort it out here. I'll simply let the above act a reference for some future ramble.
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