… Now to be an architect-at-heart is all right to start with, but you aren’t going to get very far with just that.  You’ve got to put the foundation under it, and what is fundamental to the architect-at-heart?  What is it he must have?  He has to have health, he has to have strength- strength of character most of all - strength of mind, strength of muscle.  He has to know life, and he has to know life by studying it.  And how do you preceed to study life most successfully and directly?  By living it.  To live the life that goes with being an architect-at-heart means the study primarily of Nature.  Your own nature, of course, is important, because you are going to build buildings some day, I hope, that you can be proud of yourselves, and how are you going to do it unless you are the masters of the thing we call Nature - in yourselves?

Architects are, after all, all that’s the matter with architecture.  If we had architects, we wouldn’t be in the fix we are now.  Just think what would have happened if we’d had an architect on the “Mayflower” who was familiar with organic principles: we would have a great culture now, instead of none.  And inasmuch as architecture is the cornerstone of any true culture whatsoever, you young men are the most important members of this body politic we call the United States of America.  And you are the most needed.  If you can learn to see into the thing called architecture and learn to build it as you ought to, you’ll be the great saviors of civilization in your day.  Yours is the opportunity to shape and to determine the shape of things to come.  You are shape-hewers and shape-knowers, or you are not architects-at-heart.

But it takes a long time to make that kind of architect.  You can’t jump into it.  You can’t get it by wishing to be.  Unfortunately too, you can’t be it by just thinking you are it.

Frank Lloyd Wright, 1959, Address to the Taliesin Fellowship

Architectural Forum, June 1959, back inside cover