Wright still fascinates, 150 years after birth
Tours of architect’s buildings often sell out in advance
NEW YORK — It’s been 150 years since the birth of America’s 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 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 public than he is with practising architects,” said Barry Bergdoll, MOMA’s architecture curator.
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 colour, 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.
The MOMA exhibition also demonstrates Wright’s 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 celebrities guessed Wright’s identity.
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 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.”