Frank Lloyd Wright's observation highlights the sometimes burdensome nature of wealth and material possessions. While the affluent may possess an abundance of assets, the accumulation of these items can lead to a life focused on maintenance and upkeep rather than genuine fulfillment or enjoyment.
The term "janitor" evokes imagery of individuals tasked with cleaning and managing spaces, suggesting that wealth can often lead to more work and responsibility. In this context, Wright seems to imply that those who are wealthy may spend so much time and energy managing their possessions that they lose sight of what truly matters in life.
This statement serves as a critique of consumerism and the societal pressures associated with wealth. It invites reflection on the idea that true richness may lie not in the quantity of belongings, but in experiences, relationships, and personal growth. Ultimately, Wright challenges us to consider what we prioritize in our lives and the value we assign to our possessions versus our experiences.
“The truth is more important than the facts.”
“There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.”
“...pseudo-scientific minds, like those of the scientist or the painter in love with the pictorial, both teaching as they were taught to become architects, practice a kind of building which is inevitably the result of conditioning of the mind instead of enlightenment. By this standard means also, the old conformities are appearing as new but only in another guise, more insidious because they are especially convenient to the standardizations of the modernist plan-factory and wholly ignorant of anything but public expediency. So in our big cities architecture like religion is helpless under the blows of science and the crushing weight of conformity--caused to gravitate to the masquerade in our streets in the name of "modernity." Fearfully concealing lack of initial courage or fundamental preparation or present merit: reactionary. Institutional public influences calling themselves conservative are really no more than the usual political stand-patters or social lid-sitters. As a feature of our cultural life architecture takes a backward direction, becomes less truly radical as our life itself grows more sterile, more conformist. All this in order to be safe?How soon will "we the people" awake to the fact that the philosophy of natural or intrinsic building we are here calling organic is at one with our freedom--as declared, 1776?”
“Less is more only when more is too much.”
“The longer that I live the more beautiful life becomes.”
“Every idea that is a true idea has a form, and is capable of many forms. The variety of forms of which it is capable determines the value of the idea. So by way of ideas, and your mastery of them in relation to what you are doing, will come your value as an architect to your society and future. That's where you go to school. You can't get it in a university, you can't get it here, you can't get it anywhere except as you love it, love the feeling of it, desire and pursue it. And it doesn't come when you are very young, I think. I believe it comes faster with each experience, and the next is very simple, or more simple, until it becomes quite natural to you to become master of the idea you would express."Idea and Essence" September 7, 1958”