China Daily Global Edition (USA)
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.Butattheendoftheday, it’s the buildings themselves that prove irresistible and not just because the “technical details were way ahead of theirtime”,saysJoelHoglund of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.
Former US president Richard Nixon was surprised when Chinese folk artist Meng Xin performed rhythmic storytelling with a pair of ox scapulas when the former US leader visited Beijing in 1993.
The president said Americans had long had beef, but ancient Chinese were smart enough to turn ox bones into performance instruments.
That art form, known as ox-bone shulaibao, dates to about 700 years ago. But its popularity fell after famed artist Cao Dekui stopped performing in the 1930s.
Cao was famous for rhythmic storytelling with the help of ox scapulas but was disheartened to see the art form being misused by some people. So he asked his disciple, Gao Fengshan, to pursue it with bamboo clappers instead.
Gao was orphaned at age 6 and struggled on the streets before beginning to learn shulaibao in the Beijing neighborhood of Tianqiao in the late 1920s.
After Cao’s death in 1939, Gao explored the art further, changing the performance position to standing instead of kneeling on one knee. He also became head of the Beijing Ballad Singers’ Troupe in the 1950s.
“In any performance, Gao sought to excel in breathing, tone, rhythm, clapping ... everything,” says Meng, who followed Gao back then.
But shulaibao, like many other art forms, was suspended during the “cultural revolution” (1966-76).
Meng had to leave Beijing not long after he declared his lifelong devotion to the art.
“Gao told me not to give up before my departure to the rural area in Inner Mongolia,” Meng says. “He gave me his clappers and said, ‘Remember that a man can never become a saint without adversity.’”
Despite poverty and unemployment, Meng persisted shulaibao. with shulaibao and even incorporated folk art of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region into it, before he resettled in Beijing in 1979.
He was a meat seller at a department store until his talentwasrediscoveredandlanded him a job at a performing line and four plus three characters in the next.
The 20th-century artists Hai Feng and Cao Dekui took it further on the road to popularity. troupe in Beijing about a year later. It later became Beijing Children’s Art Troupe.
Yet Gao’s health wore out quickly. Gao was moved to tears when he saw Meng bring self-prepared food 10 days in a row.
“He told me that he had not shulaibao wanted to teach me. But since I had done well with the art form, he decided to help me learn,” Meng says of Gao.
“I would shut myself in the troupe’s rehearsal hall, so I could see myself in the mirror and the blanket would soften the damage if the folk artist
Legend has it that construction workers in the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220) told each other stories in simple verses to keep themselves entertained while working with bricks and tiles.
This rhythmic storytelling kept evolving and acquired the title And the tools that served as the alternative to musical instruments included sorghum stalks, small copper clips, bowls, ox or cow scapulas and bamboo clappers.
The verses rhymed with three plus three characters in the first The ultimate delight comes from the audience.”
bones dropped.”
He finally got the rhythms correct, after breaking baskets of scapulas and injuring himself during practice.
A chance came in 1992, when he was asked to write about old Beijing and perform with ox scapulas.
“The next day I borrowed more than a dozen books, chewed over the contents and ended with boxes of notes,” he says.
The final work, titled Singing of Beijing with Shulaibao, is an account of people entering and exiting the gates of old Beijing.
“Gao told me that a piece of work has to be new, unique, ancient or strange to attract an audience,” Meng says.
“I added three elements — intellectual, interesting and beautiful.”
He once took a whole week to draft copies of rhymes. The work won him top national prizes both in performance and in creative writing in 1997.
His another work, Xiaoping Listening to Storytelling, also won a national prize in 2002.
“The ultimate delight comes from the audience, my mentor always told me,” Meng said after an open-air performance in Taoranting Park in southern Beijing recently.
Now, he is searching for more young faces in the audience, who can perhaps inherit his art. thought the language would benefit her in the future.
“I forgot many words and grammar, but the (Chinese) poems remained (with me),” Murray says of her inability to pursue Chinese-language studies for a while after school.
“On Leaving Cambridge is a beautiful poem,” she says, adding that it makes leaving a place easier.
Last year, Murray left California to study electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also enrolled in a Chinese course.
In addition to places of academic interest, the contestants of Chinese Bridge get a chance to visit the Great Wall and the Summer Palace in Beijing.