Wright, born 150 yrs ago, still fascinates
Frank’s Phoenix home given to architecture school
This May 4, 2004 file photo shows Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s 600-acre Wisconsin home, in Spring Green, Wis., on June 8, marked the 150th anniversary of Wright’s birth. (AP)
NEW YORK, June 10, (AP): It’s been 150 years since the birth of America’s best-known 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 of Wright’s buildings, now historic sites, marked his birthday milestone Thursday with parties and $1.50 tours. Other exhibits and events are being offered into the summer and fall, including a major show opening Monday at New York’s Museum of Modern Art called “Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive.” The exhibition, which runs through Oct 1, showcases 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-the-way places like Taliesin, in rural Spring Green, Wisconsin, and at the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, at 19 stories tall the only skyscraper Wright ever built.
Wright is “the only architect more popular with the general public than he is with practicing architects,” said Barry Bergdoll, MOMA’s architecture curator.
Accessible
Jeffrey Chusid, a professor at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning, agreed, saying 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, pattern and ornamentation, which Chusid said “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 magazine 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.
Wright’s sensational personal life contributed to his notoriety. He was married three times, and his longtime mistress was murdered at Taliesin by a house employee who also killed six others and set fire to the house.
But 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 said. Wright would build “things that a moment’s thought would have suggested would never work,” he added. “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.”
In addition to Taliesin, the Guggenheim and Price Tower, other Wright sites worth a visit include Kentuck Knob, in Chalkhill, Pennsylvania; the Duncan House, Acme, Pennsylvania; the Stockman House and Park Inn, Mason City, Iowa; and the SC Johnson Co site in Racine, Wisconsin, known for tree-shaped columns supporting the structure’s Great Workroom, and a research tower with windows made from 7,000 glass tubes. The Zimmerman House, in Manchester, New Hampshire, is an example of Wright’s modest Usonian homes and the only Wright house open to the public in New England. Oak Park, Illinois, has the largest concentration of Wright buildings in the world, including his home and studio, according to the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy lists all public Wright sites on its website along with the 150th events . Exhibitions on view this summer include “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Journey to the Prairie” exhibition at the Price Tower, through Aug 27, and “Buildings for the Prairie” at the Milwaukee Art Museum, July 28-Oct 15. And 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,” said Joel Hoglund of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.
“There’s this intangible thing when you’re in one of his buildings that you’re in the middle of something special,” he said. “People come from all over the world to experience that because there’s not a lot of architecture that gives people that feeling.”
PHOENIX:
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A Frank Lloyd Wright house in Phoenix that the famous architect designed for his son and was saved from demolition by its current owner was donated Thursday to the architecture school that Wright founded.
Owner Zach Rawling announced that he is giving the David and Gladys Wright House to the School of Architecture at Taliesin, formerly known as the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. The announcement came on the iconic architect’s 150th birthday.
Nestled at the base of Camelback Mountain, the house is constructed in the form of a spiral that appears to rise from the ground and offers 360 degree views of Camelback and other mountains that loom over the city.
The house completed in 1952 is regarded as the precursor to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, said Aaron Betsky, the school’s dean. The Guggenheim Museum is one of Wright’s most revered works. The architect designed over 1,000 architectural works, 532 which were built, and he is regarded by many as one of America’s best architects.
Betsky said the donation “will allow us to use that great legacy to be a living laboratory in which we will figure out how to use what Frank Lloyd Wright taught us about living in the desert Southwest, to make the life in this desert and in this community even better in the future.”
Rawling bought the Phoenix home in 2012 for $2.4 million to save it from being demolished by its previous owners.
He had plans to restore it and turn it into a museum, but neighbors complained doing so would generate excessive traffic in the well-heeled residential Arcadia area where the house is located. He said he hopes the donation will engage the community and continue the school’s mission.