A little bit of Haima!!!

Its been a while,
Having been running a mile,
A wasted song...
Am afraid to smile...
The candle is burning bright
I don't get the light...
I am turning away
To the other side...

I dream a desert dream
I smell a desert rose...
An unknown fragrance
Stirs up my soul
My thirsty mind
It yearns for more
I'm in darkness for long
Now I open a door...

One of the greatest influences in my life, my ideology and my work has been Frank Lloyd Wright. He was born more than a century before me but what he believed in, his troubled genius and all that he stood for seems so timeless and immortal...
Recently I found this wonderful collection of what Wright had to say about the little idiosyncrasies of life...

On Art and Architecture

..."Architecture is the triumph of Human Imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own Earth. It is at least the geometric pattern of things, of life, of the human and social world. It is at best that magic framework of reality that we sometimes touch upon when we use the word order.

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.

Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

No stream rises higher than its source. What ever man might build could never express or reflect more than he was. He could record neither more nor less than he had learned of life when the buildings were built.

Classicism is a mask and does not reflect transition. How can such a static expression allow interpretation of human life as we know it? A fire house should not resemble a French Chateau, a bank a Greek temple and a university a Gothic Cathedral. All of the ism are imposition on life itself by way of previous education.

Consider everything in the nature of a hanging fixture a weakness, and naked radiators an abomination.

Space. The continual becoming: invisible fountain from which all rhythms flow and to which they must pass. Beyond time or infinity.

The space within becomes the reality of the building.

Space is the breath of art.

A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart..."

Form follows function-that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union

On Unity Temple

"...Why not, then, build a temple, not to GOD in that way - more sentimental than sense - but build a temple to man, appropriate to his uses as a meeting place, in which to study man himself for his God's sake? A modern meeting-house and good-time place.

Build a beautiful room proportioned to this purpose. Make it beautiful in this simple sense. A natural building for natural Man..."
."

On Organic Architecture

"...Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders' spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment, married to the ground.

Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.

I would like to have a free architecture. Architecture that belonged where you see it standing - and is a grace to the landscape instead of a disgrace.

True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At its best it is an emphasis of structure, a realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented.

So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal.

Think simple as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles..."

On God and Nature

...God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has been said often by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And, I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll find it in the nature of that thing.

Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain...

On Government and Institutions

"...Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.

A free America, democratic in the sense that our forefathers intended it to be, means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.

Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy.

Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture.

We should have a system of economics that is structure, that is organic tools. We do not have it. We are all hanging by our eyebrows from skyhooks economically, just as we are architecturally.

A vital difference between the professional man and a man of business is that money making to the professional man should, by virtue of his assumption, be incidental; to the business man it is primary. Money has its limitations; while it may buy quantity, there is something beyond it and that is quality.

Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can't nail them to a wall.

Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes..."

On His Own Work

"...I have been black and blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life from too intimate contacts with my own furniture.

Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves..."

On Cities

"...It is a great monument to the power of money and greed - a race for rent. (about New York City)

Tip the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.

Abandon it. (on being asked how he would improve Pittsburgh)

Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world..."

On Life

"...The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.

Life always rides in strength to victory, not through internationalism... but only through the direct responsibility of the individual.

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities

If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

The present is the ever-moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.

The scientist has marched in and taken the place of the poet. But one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world and remember, it will be a poet, not a scientist.

Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances..."

On Nothing in Particular

"...I hate intellectuals. They are from the top down. I am from the bottom up.

Don't eat it. It will kill you before your time. Avoid it. (speaking of pepper)..."

stairways always fascinated me…It is one part of the building that depicts movement …of course an elevator does that as well but it is an external element not really a building part…but a stairway helps you to climb up…
from time immemorial man has been trying to ascend…to move skywards… to some concept fascinating and spellbinding that exists somewhere above what he can see which he somehow needs to reach …probably the concept of heaven so high up came from this…and everybody is all the time trying to take a stairway to heaven….
being an architect I see what perfect beauty in form can sometimes be achieved through the beauty of a well designed staircase…sometimes resembling the keys of a piano…sometimes the natural volute as found in nature…
stairways still fascinate me…as long as I want to still climb higher in life they will continue to do so…

years roll by and we grow older, wiser and not necessarily happier...sometimes we stop and think if what we are doing with our lives currently is really what we set out to do when we were younger, foolish and perhaps a little happier!! and that is what brings us to view ourselves from a different perspective...have our dreams changed or have the way we dream our dreams changed? or is it possible that the same thoughts which seemed all important at some stages of our lives now no longer feel the same way?
some years ago i used to be an obsessive mother with two small children...since bringing up kids was pretty much like trial by fire, i used to always be anxious about whether i am doing it the right way...nothing seemed as important as the wellbeing of my little ones...i felt like i was playing god and shaping two destinies...
many many years ago when i was still a teenager i had read gibran's prophet and he had said about children...
"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for
itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
Which you cannot visit not even in your dreams.
You may seek to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life not goes backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are
sent forth..."
which makes me ponder how life teaches you to let go of all those whom you hold so dear to you at some point in your life...which also makes me feel so joyous at having let go, for now there is a sense of freedom from the cloying anxiety that you felt before...you are suddenly glad that you are yourself and have space in your life for thoughts about yourself... don't we all crave for this space in our togetherness with all the people who matter to us? how different this road is from the one in which we started our journey when we were actually alone and wanted to crowd our lives with togetherness...
gibran had also said
"Love one another, but not make a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your
souls.
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you
be alone...
Even the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with
the same music..."
this i had really really not liked when i read it for the first time way back when i read it for the first time...what kind of a togetherness is he talking about where being together you needed to be alone? back then, young that i was and full of expectations, this was so very confusing...
the road that i tread today is so beautiful because i do it on my own and i do it alone...today gibran makes so much more sense...