Hi, my name is Paul and welcome to Upecha, Changing How the World Sees Art. Today we're going to look at a building from a famous architect named Frank Lloyd Wright, and we're going to look at it from the perspective of structure, using the concepts of asymmetrical balance and the brightness weight illusion. In the comments of this video is a link to a video that goes into detail about these two concepts so that you can better understand this video. This building by Frank Lloyd Wright is listed in Smithsonian 28 places to visit before you die and was listed in 1991 by the American Institute of Architects as the best all-around work of American architecture.
And let's have a look at this building now from a structural or a compositional perspective. How is this building composed? Well, according to the brightness-weight illusion and asymmetrical balance, I feel that this building is quite balanced.
And I'd like you to take a moment to think about how the parts of this structure work together. Look at the dark parts in relationship to the bright parts and how they're working together. So remember the brightness weight illusion is that dark objects appear to have more psychological weight. And so if we take that into account, we have dark parts here and here and here. And when you aggregate those together, then they form the small dark of the small dark to large.
bright ratio. The bright areas are here, here, and this wall here. So small dark versus large bright.
And I'll bring up some animation to help illustrate that a little bit better. Let me move this up a little bit here. So again, so again, This dark area, this dark area, and this dark area form an aggregate of the small dark, which is counterbalanced by the large bright area here, here, and here to create asymmetrical balance.
What are your thoughts? Do you agree or disagree? There are some components here that I have excluded. For example, this shadow.
because depending on the brightness of the sun or cloud cover time of day, that's going to change. So I've tried to focus the analysis on parts of the building that would not change dramatically. Of course, at night, that's a different story. The other issue is the camera angle from which this scene was recorded.
What I find is that regardless of where you're looking at this building, it does... tend to balance. This is just one angle, it's actually from the back, but again I would be very interested to hear alternative comments, alternative points of view.
Interestingly, Frank Lloyd Wright learned about asymmetrical balance and the brightness weight illusion from these Japanese woodcuts. Can you see how those concepts are at work in this image. Well, my interpretation of this image is that these small dark figures in the bottom middle left are the weight of the image and the rest of the scene is the counterweight.
Yes, there are dark objects elsewhere in the frame, but primarily the construct, the structure, the form of this image. is based on the weight of these figures here, counterbalanced by the weight of these figures over here, and again small dark counterbalanced by large bright. Purely as an aside, more kind of trivia but still kind of historically interesting, Frank Lloyd Wright used these paintings to decorate the interior of the homes such as falling water. And it's said that he actually made more money.
selling prints of these images than he did from the contracts to build the structures themselves. Also, it's documented that Mr. Wright used these images as training aids at the University of Chicago School of Architecture in order to articulate the concepts of balance, and the brightness weight illusion to the students of that school. This has been a brief look at one building by Frank Lloyd Wright to illustrate that these concepts I've been talking about in other art forms, such as photography and painting, are also used in other mediums, such as architecture and interior design and cinematography and even music. I will be making videos in the future to articulate and demonstrate the use of these concepts in other forms.
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