MoMA showing famous architect Wright’s drawings
NEW YORK — It’s been 150 years since the birth of the United States’ bestknown architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.
But his innovative designs continue to fascinate the public, from New York’s Guggenheim museum, where the circular building itself is a sculptural work of art, to the Fallingwater house built over a waterfall in the Pennsylvania woods, to his modernist home on the Wisconsin prairie, Taliesin, which served as a laboratory for his ideas.
Some exhibits and events are being offered in the summer and fall, including a major show called Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Running through Oct 1, the show displays Wright’s drawings, 3-D models, furniture and other material from an archive the museum jointly owns with Columbia University.
One of the remarkable things about Wright’s enduring legacy is how popular his buildings remain as pilgrimage sites for his fans.
In all, about 380 Wright structures are still standing, and those that are open to the public often sell out their tours weeks in advance — even in relatively out-of-theway places like Taliesin, in rural Spring Green, Wisconsin, and at the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, at 19 stories high the only skyscraper Wright ever built.
Wright is “the only architect more popular with the general public than he is with practicing architects”, says Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s architecture curator.
Jeffrey Chusid, a professor at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning, agrees, saying that Wright “was always doing what he wanted in his own style, and that style was often more accessible to popular taste than it was to academic taste”.
For example, the MoMA show explores Wright’s frequent use of color, patterns and ornamentation, which Chusid says “essentially marked him as a 19th-century architect”, putting him at odds with the stripped-down minimalism generally associated with modernism.
The MoMA exhibition also demonstrates Wright’s adept use of publicity to enhance his reputation. Displays include Wright’s photo on the cover of Time in 1938 and videos of his 1950s TV appearances, including the What’s My Line? game show where blindfolded celebrity contestants guessed Wright’s identity by asking questions.
A large part of Wright’s appeal also seems rooted in the notion that he was an arrogant genius who wouldn’t be dissuaded from the purity of his philosophy. According to one much-told tale, when a client complained that a Wright-built roof was leaking on his desk, Wright retorted, “Move the desk!”
Those famous leaking roofs are among many structural issues that make Wright’s buildings challenging to preserve, Chusid says.
Wright would build “things that a moment’s thought would have suggested would never work”, he adds.
“But the thing is he also was making architecture and spaces and buildings that were passionate and astonishing to experience.”
He earned his fame not only as “the dramatic figure with the cowboy image, the lone architect against the world, but it was the fact that he created such fantastic buildings so often”.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy lists all public Wright sites on its website.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation in partnership with the geographic mapping company ESRI has launched a digital story map of Wright buildings.
Wright’s knack for publicity and egocentric insistence on the rectitude of his philosophy and designs all contributed to the staying power of his larger-than-life reputation.But at the end of the day, it’s the buildings themselves that prove irresistible and not just because the “technical details were way ahead of their time ”, says Joel Hog lund of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.