Frank Lloyd Wright and Paul Mueller: the architect and his builder of choice

Extract

In recent years there has been mounting curiosity about how architects and engineers work with one another to make buildings. Studies of such collaborations have their present use for furthering technique and efficiency in construction. As a historical exercise, one might view the tendency as part of a broader, revisionist trend – an overdue project for setting the record straight, and releasing architecture from the velvet manacles of art history. Acquaintance with the making of any sizeable building soon teaches that the Vasarian concept of disegno – of a creative process anterior to and set apart from construction – suits only a minority of architecture's modes and moments. As an explanation even of the more imaginative paths that lead from the blank sheet to the occupied building, it is intellectually reductive, humanly ungenerous, and actually untruthful.