If You Had a World-Renowned Architect Designing You

Ever wish you had a world-renowned architect to design you?

I recently visited Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home in Scottsdale, Arizona. The home and laboratory are a living, breathing representation of Wright’s work, immersed in stunning desert landscape.

We learned about Wright’s thoughtful use of organic materials, integration of light, and elementary forms.

Wright believed architecture is not simply about designing buildings. It is about creating art where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This includes landscape, materials, form and structure, and how all of those things interact.

That's what people are like, too! We are about form, structure, the landscape around us, and what's inside too.

What if we could understand humans as an elaborate form of art where we, too, are greater than the sum of our bodies, experiences, emotions, and memories?

Humans, too, are complex, whole creatures made of organic materials that sometimes need some new perspectives or some rearranging in order to show up to our fullest potential.

It’s clear from Taliesin West that Wright did not just build structures, but he was also a brilliant designer of interiors. According to a book by Margo Stipe, the director and curator of collections at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Wright had four principles of interior design:

1) Bring the outdoors in

2) Design to human scale

3) Edit out the unnecessary

4) Retain the original vision

Oh, how I love these principles for our interiors as humans too!

Bring the outdoors in: How do we create a seamless integration of the outside and the inside for us as individuals? Isn’t that when life can be most meaningful, when we are immersed in nature and nature becomes part of us? Human nature and nature are meant to be one. Bring the outdoors in.

Design to human scale: Imagine if our lives were appropriately scaled for what we each can handle. What kind of day/week/life is optimal for you as a human being? We can’t burn the candle at both ends. We must design lives that make sense for our senses and experiences. We are human beings with all of the vulnerabilities and limitations that come along with that.

Edit out the unnecessary—ah yes! Don’t we all need to do this? To take out that which is life-draining and not life-sustaining? So many people I know (including Moi) struggle with boundaries and when to say no. As Marie Kondo suggests doing with your clothing and items you own, hold each element of your life up to the light and ask, “Does this bring me complete and utter joy?” If not, let it go. Edit out the unnecessary.

And finally, retain the original vision. What were your dreams of what you wanted as a child? What did you want to be, do, or have? What is your core purpose? What does your soul know about you and what you need? That's the most authentic road map for where you need to go.

Wright once said, “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.”

I believe this is what Wright wished for the world and its people. No person should ever be just on the planet. We should be of the planet. Belonging to it.

Ahh, Frank. Here we thought you only designed buildings. But you were actually a designer of people—both of the spaces and of the people who move within them. Even after visiting your winter home, you have helped to design me.