Art: Native Genius

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But what earned Frank Lloyd Wright the grudging but nearly universal respect of his fellow architects was his insistence that architecture must be an art. "What people want, what they desperately need," Wright said, "is some communication of the spirit, some quality of the soul." It was toward that aim that Wright's whole genius was directed. Almost uniquely among architects, he was able to develop his own particular vision in terms of one highly individualistic but consistent idiom of forms. His prodigious explorations of space and form marked and celebrated Frank Lloyd Wright and his own time on earth. But for the nation, they also comprise a heritage testifying to man's concern with his own nobility and his abiding need for beauty.