Romantic, Positive, Extrovert, Versatile, A good communicator, Orator, Educator, Intellectual, Youthful, Energetic, Speedy, Nervous, Temperamental, Easily distracted, Inquisitive, Curious, Compassionate, Superficial, Impulsive, Passionate, Driven
Frank Lloyd Wright was a romantic Gemini with one foot in the past and the other in the future.
He was consequently enamoured with the mythological, romantic and almost Hollywood cliché of the Japanese and the Mayan/Aztec.
The Ennis House, which comes from Wright's Hollywood- Mayan period and now sits in decay in the hills of Los Feliz, is one of Frank's master works. Yet Wright was equally invested in the future—the Ennis House is more than just a flirtation with a foreign style. With this work he developed an entirely new building technology: the precast concrete textile block. Wright, also a great advocate of the American individual, found as much romantic mysticism in the flat plains of Wisconsin. Wright understood the vital aspect of the American conception of space. It was big, radiant and horizontal and demanded a new architectural imagining.
The Gemini holds the capacity to see all points of view equally. With these things in mind, Wright developed the free plan. With no singular perspective, everything radiates outwardly and omnidirectionally from the central core of the hearth. In the Wrightian plan, the hearth is the loci, the bearing element from which everything originates and to which everything returns. These ideas are embodied in his Prairie Houses and later in his Usonian Houses.
Despite Wright's obsession with the horizontal, some of his best buildings are the few vertical towers he built. With the S.C. Johnson Headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, Wright masterfully combines streamline fantasies with picturesque romanticism, with the columns reflecting the lily pads of a 19th-century botanical garden. The columns umbrella the office workers, sitting below at their desks, as a sense of intimacy is contrasted with the monumentality of the structural verticality.
Gemini possesses natural skills as an orator and is ruled by Mercury which is the messenger, according to Roman mythology. Like another infamous American Gemini, Donald Trump, Frank had a natural and unabashed capacity for selfpromotion. Exaggerating and embellishing stories, he was able to project a mythic image. Wright did not discriminate, publishing his work in Time Magazine, Life Magazine, Home Beautiful and Ladies' Home Journal.
After hard times, Frank relaunched his career with a doublepage colour spread in Life Magazine with his newly designed Fallingwater. A scenic Hollywood domestic idyll meets Niagara Falls fantasy house cantilevering off rocky Pennsylvanian outcrops. Frank bounced back. In an interview with Mike Wallace, Frank declared that he would outlive Elvis in the collective memory of the American people. Time will decide who remains more pervasive.
His ego grew towards the end of his life, verging on megalomania. Yet as a childlike Gemini, even at 90 Frank was a perpetual adolescent at heart.
Dan Graham, Jessica Russell
As one of the most influential conceptual artists of his time, Dan Graham first emerged in the 1960s alongside the Minimalists. His work crosses multiple mediums including performance, film and video, exploring shifts in individual and group consciousness and the limits of public and private space. This has evolved into the installations and pavilions for which Graham is most internationally famous. All his projects are democratically rooted in everyday urban life.
Jessica Russell studied and practiced art in Melbourne, Australia, where she also worked in film and television before relocating to New York where she currently studies architecture at The Cooper Union.