In search of (lost) connection: organic architecture and bioethics The case of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959)

Abstract

Taking bioethics not only as a (new) biomedical ethics but as the ethics of biological sciences
(V. R. Potter) or a broader ethics related to all the aspects of bios (F. Jahr), is not without
consequences: it implies the questioning of our existing knowledge and understanding of
other forms and images of modern society. Although architecture plays an important role in
our culture, it has unjustfully been ignored by bioethics as an integrative discipline with a
pluri-perspective approach.
The answer to the question what arhitecture is, can hardly be reached within one paper, if
one would like to take into account the technical and the functional, but also the esthetical
and the cultural aspects of architecture. Like institutions, architecture works as a mediator,
providing shelter and delivering the fullfilment of other needs (safety, privacy, the homesweet-home feeling, services, etc.), but it also limits the freedom and intervenes with the
intrinstic relation between man and nature.
As a reaction to the changes and challenges of modern science and society, the 20th-century
architecture has provided several original concepts. Following the main ideas of the organic
arhitecture, this paper aims at finding out its major relations to bioethics, especially having in
mind the life and work of Frank Lloyd Wright, deeply enrooted in Wisconsin, the state where
V. R. Potter’s bioethics was born.