"During
the incredibly long and fruitful career of Frank Lloyd Wright
there are two constants: Nature and Geometry. That Nature was
Wright's deity is well known. He summed up his attitude in the
following language: I wish more life to creative rhythms of
great Nature, Nature with a capital N as we spell God with a capital
G. Why? Because Nature is all the body of God we mortals will
ever see. Donald Hoffman traced this vein of thinking to the
organic analogy in the works of Viollet-Le-Duc and noted that
it was present in a variety of other thinkers as well. Recent
scholarship has stressed the importance of Wright's feeling for
geometry. Anthony Alofsin has pointed out the impact of Wright's
contact with the geometric forms of the Vienna Secession. Referring
to Wright's use of the rectilinear grid, Narciso Menocal writes
that it "...was contingent on his conception of the universe
as a geometric entity that architecture mirrors".
Whether or not Wright was aware of such concepts as the Golden Mean and the Fibonacci series is a moot point. Wright used nature as the basis of his geometrical abstraction. His objective was to conventionalize the geometry which he found in Nature, and his method was to adopt the abstract simplification which he found so well expressed in the Japanese print. Therefore, it is not too shocking perhaps that in this quest his work should foreshadow the new mathematics of nature first put forth by Benoit Mandelbrot: fractal geometry."