#UsonianFocus
In the 1930s, Frank Lloyd Wright reassessed the design of the American home, leading him to create the Usonian house. Although Wright was trimming the fat in the design, he kept the fireplace as a functional and structural part of the home. This was at a time when the fireplace’s role of the day-to-day was supplanted by other technologies for heat. The fireplace for Wright was the geometric, spiritual, and symbolic focal point of the house, despite it no longer having an essential function for the home. In fact, the word focus, in its Latin origin, means fireplace or hearth. Frank Lloyd Wright’s philosophy on the hearth is the catalyst for #UsonianFocus. In entering the digital age we have begun to replace that idea of the fireplace with digital screens. We gather in isolation around the glow of a screen and meet up communally in a virtual space. Our environments now flicker with a digital glow, and this obsession in our culture with screens we have entered into a new age of light. The paintings for this project are based on interior photographs taken at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Affleck House, located in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and owned by Lawrence Technological University. Digital light sources were the only light used, such as a tablet or laptop, to light throughout the home, while keeping a main focus on the fireplace. Wright’s architectural philosophy of the Usonian provides the direction of the discussion in the paintings, and possibly brings insight in to our own living spaces and digital lives.