Frank Lloyd Wright roadside Architecture Notecardsmuseum of Modern Art
"My manner has been too long and as well solitary," Frank Lloyd Wright telegraphed Philip Johnson shortly earlier the 1932 opening of the Museum of Mod Fine art's (MoMA) epochal International Style showroom, in an unsuccessful attempt to withdraw from the show, "to make a belated bow to my people as a modern architect … " Wright's way was certainly long. Born but ii years subsequently the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and dying only four years before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy—from the Historic period of Steam into the Age of the Atom—Wright outlived every era and style into which curators like Johnson have always been eager to place designers. To measure his long span in some other fashion, consider that H.H. Richardson was 30 years sometime when Wright was born, and Frank Gehry, FAIA, was 30 years old when Wright died.
And Wright'due south way was certainly lonely. Despite all his accolades and acolytes—the latter more cultishly organized than most thanks to the Taliesin Fellowship—Wright's formal language was at once so inimitable so mutable that, dissimilar the reducible and thus reproducible formalisms of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe (his 20-years-younger peers), Wright left many mourners but no real heirs. "Wrightian" is thus the almost repellent of designerly adjectives, indicating the insistent presence of Wright's many tropes—sweeping horizontals, Cherokee reds, pinwheeling plans, catch-and-release cross-sections, hollyhock pictograms in leaded glass—only the profound absenteeism of whatever information technology was that blithe those tropes into enduring fine art. The enthusiasm of civilians for this sort of thing by and large horrifies contemporary architects only slightly less than a client's expressed interest in, say, Louis Comfort Tiffany or Christopher Alexander.
Yet in his long and alone way, this historical outlier and self-described contrarian ready the universal template for the contemporary performance of architect as cultural effigy: the Randian secular prophet in the mode of Howard Roark, the universal theorist in the mode of Buckminster Fuller, the worldly artiste in the style of, well, Philip Johnson and everybody else. The unpunctuated telegram Wright sent Johnson in 1932 connected with the refusal to make that belated bow, "in visitor with a self advertising amateur and a high powered salesman." That was a dig at Raymond Hood and one-fourth dimension apprentice Richard Neutra, respectively—however much Wright's own mastery of the American arts of serene amateurism and sanguine salesmanship paved the way for Hood, Neutra, and all the residuum.
Wright'southward work, despite his telegrammed demurral, was ultimately featured in MoMA'due south 1932 show—admitting with visible ambivalence in both architect and curator. He was the offset architect, in 1940, to receive a solo retrospective at MoMA'due south new midtown edifice, and now he is dorsum in "Frank Lloyd Wright and the Metropolis: Density vs. Dispersal," an exhibit on the occasion of the recent joint acquisition of Wright's archives past the museum and Columbia University'southward Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. On the rather slender premise of Wright as a theorist of high-rise hyperdensity in service of a landscape of pastoral sparsity (call it "towers considering gardens"), the exhibit assembles exquisite original drawings and models of Wright'south notable tall buildings, plus the Broadacre City project he began in 1934.
The showpieces are towering 1956 elevations for the unbuilt Mile High Illinois skyscraper that Wright proposed for Chicago, plus three large-scale models that were part of the archive acquisition. An eight-foot-tall, 7-foot-wide 1940 model of an unbuilt 24-story Sullivanesque skyscraper, originally developed for The San Francisco Telephone call newspaper in 1913, features low-relief, white-painted woods worthy of Louise Nevelson. There's also a six-foot-alpine wood, plastic, and metal model of Cost Belfry, the mixed-use residential and commercial tower incongruously built in the low-lying town of Bartlesville, Okla., in 1956; and a 12-pes-by-12-foot wood-and-cardboard diorama from 1935 of Broadacre Metropolis, cinematic in detail and as gorgeous every bit a Persian carpet in its muted jewel-similar colors. Dwelling house movies show Taliesin apprentices tinkering with the Broadacre model in a scrubby Arizona field—a landscape inside a landscape—while an entertaining menstruation film illustrates, among other things, how easily a pencil-skirted secretary tin ascend an elevator in Wright's 1943–50 Racine, Wis., Johnson Wax Inquiry Laboratory Belfry, to deport a file from her desk to an obliged chemist'southward easily.
Despite the charisma of the models, the real stars are the smudgy working drawings and annotated structure documents—many presented in glassed-in moving-picture show boxes, tilted in the way of drafting tables, that call back Wright'south ain installation of his piece of work at MoMA in 1940. Mixed in with more polished and familiar images, the drawings reveal all the fuss of an architecture office hard at work. There, in the margins of Call building perspectives, is a set of hasty cross-sections in which Wright appears to work out where he might conceal electric lighting in the overhanging cornice. At that place, on the obverse of a Mile High tower sketch of a typical floor, is a pour of calculations for different foursquare footages and budget targets. There, scrawled in Wright's looping hand across the superlative of a night-time rendering of a carport, is a note to someone named Peter, to "build this upwardly in black and white for reproduction." Side-by-side with a much-published ink-on-paper axonometric of the unbuilt 1924 National Life Insurance Company Building in Chicago is the far more than energetic certificate that must take been its underdrawing, all graphite and blueish pencil on xanthous trace—and, scooting forth the base, swift little doodles of Duesenbergs and Packards.
The picture that emerges from all these documents undermines, of course, that cultural effigy, perfected by Wright, of builder equally alone genius. All those underdrawings have the look of documents passed through many easily. The same pick of works would have equally served an exhibit premised on collective creativity in practise. Only a picture as well emerges of atypical obsession and compulsion. The all-time example of this is the pinwheel-plan, corncob-acme design of the Price Tower, which first recognizably appears in 1927 equally the unbuilt St. Mark'south-in-the-Bouwerie Towers projection for Manhattan. Its detail program geometry may accept had something to practice with the angle at which Stuyvesant Street hits East 10th Street and 2nd Avenue, and later with obscuring lateral views between towers when Wright proposed multiples for the St. Marks's churchyard. Just by the fourth dimension the aforementioned essential design was congenital in Bartlesville 30 years later, or was planted across Broadacre City like then many toothpick flagpoles, the form was entirely self-referential.
And dissimilar the spatial layouts of the early Oak Park houses or early Usonian houses (which show up in Broadacre, as well, in charming pinkish cardboard), the course isn't especially functional or closely calibrated to ergonomics or routines. All perilous parallelogram stair treads and triangular rooms and awkward acute and oblique angles, the Toll Tower program is more a fugue on diamonds and triangles, radiating similar the stamens and petals of a flower, than it is a blueprint for life. As with Johnson Wax and the Mile High tower, the Price design insists on a poetic but not specially efficient "taproot" structural system in which a single primal foundation pier anchors successive floors that are purely cantilevered from center to perimeter. Draft construction documents for Bartlesville show the intricate extremes to which Wright's function went, embedding steel-mesh reinforcements at advisedly calibrated angles, to finesse those concrete floor plates down to a palatable thinness at their edge. It's an practice in ingenuity that is the opposite of the organically integrated architecture whose image information technology serves.
Wright's work is so familiar that it is piece of cake to miss how foreign it is. Grandiose solipsism, as modeled past Wright, is so much the manner of gimmicky architects that it goes largely unexamined. To contemplate the elaborate frontispiece to the Mile High tower, with its stentorian Memorial Dedications to the likes of Elisha Otis ("Inventor of the Upended Street"), its Salutations to the likes of "Professor Pier Luigi Nervi", its cocky-descriptions of its author but as "Son of Chicago" (and, endearingly, as recipient of honorary degrees in engineering from Frg and Switzerland), is to observe less a proposal for a particular building than the construction of a private cosmology.
To contemplate the Broadacre Metropolis model, equally jolly and creepy as a model railroad in its self-contained perfection, in its aggregating of tidy bogus solutions for tidy artificial problems (including a grand house on a convenient mesa whose notional resident much surely have been Wright himself), is to encounter less and less the public proposal with which the exhibit, with perhaps willful credulity, presents it—and to run across further and farther into a private world. The model has the feel of one of those projects that, upon his expiry, an otherwise undistinguished clerk or draftsman is discovered to take constructed, complete with syncretic mythology and personal gods, in his basement.
The opening of "Frank Lloyd Wright and the City" coincided, in January, with MoMA'southward announcement that it would demolish the neighboring edifice that once housed the American Folk Art Museum. While the loss of that much-loved design by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects is noteworthy, so is the loss of the fortuitous juxtaposition of the definitive mod mainstream with the vernacular and outsider tradition that is both its perpetual shadow and occasional inspiration. It'southward easy to imagine Wright'southward Broadacre City permanently installed in the Folk Fine art building, where it could splendidly anchor the use of that model-and-drawing-scaled-structure every bit MoMA's architecture gallery. And where it would hold its own amid the memories of Henry Darger's "Realms of the Unreal," or Achilles Rizzoli's "Expeau of Magnitude, Magnificence, and Manifestation," and every other such private world made poignantly public. Architects' most gratifying cocky-understanding is that they are those worldly artistes: businesslike creatives, tasteful technocrats, visionaries who can also run a visitor. Perhaps their difficulty in assimilating Wright is not only aesthetic, simply in how his thrilling weirdness, compounded by his scandalous domestic life and cultish enablers, reveals in him what architects all fear in themselves: that they are primarily authors of internal worlds, crowded and invisible, intricate and unbuildable. And that their outward success is not methodical or anticipated, but occurs primarily in the embarrassing fashion of, say, J.R.R. Tolkien, when some splinter of their interior landscapes and languages serendipitously pierces the culture at large.
Perhaps architects will concede the erasure of the Folk Art Museum building from the streetscape of West 53rd Street because, in some gesture of simultaneous pride and shame, they would erase that embarrassing shadow, that inference of interiority, from their ain façades. Maybe because architects are, in their own eyes, outsider artists: the kind of artists who, even every bit they seek recognition and remuneration, also have the impulse to distance their work from the fabric world it ostensibly addresses, to exceed the tiptop and breadth of that worldly reach—to respond, every bit Wright did in the terminal words of his telegram refusing Johnson's invitation, "sorry but kindly and finally drop me out of your promotion."
Source: https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/outsider-architect-frank-lloyd-wright-at-the-museum-of-modern-art_o
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