Organic Architecture

Organic architecture is a design philosophy, rather than a fixed visual style, that promotes harmony between human habitation and the natural world; the term was coined by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who lived from 1867 to 1959. Wright reworked a phrase from his own mentor, the architect Louis Sullivan, restating that form and function are one and pointing to nature itself as the clearest example of that unity. He defined organic architecture as an architecture that develops from within outward in harmony with the conditions of its own being, as distinguished from a design merely applied to a site from without, an approach meant to make a building, its furnishings and its surroundings into a single, unified composition. The philosophy is often misread as simply meaning the use of natural materials, but that usage is a frequent result of the approach rather than its guiding idea, since organic architecture is fundamentally a way of thinking about a building's relationship to its site and purpose rather than a set of stylistic ornaments.