Frank Lloyd Wright, born 150 years ago, still fascinates

NEW YORK (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.

Jeffrey Chusid, a professor at Cornell University's College of Architecture, 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 strippeddown minimalism generally associated with modernism.