Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive
June 12 to Oct. 1 at the Museum of Modern Art
Wright proposed a mile-high skyscraper. It was never built. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
In 1957, Frank Lloyd Wright, 90 and still tirelessly hawking himself as America’s greatest architect, sat for a television interview with a young, chain-smoking Mike Wallace.
Does New York’s skyline excite him, Wallace asks. “It does not,” Wright says. “Because it never was planned – it’s all a race for rent, and it is a great monument I think to the power of money and greed.”
“I don’t see an idea in the whole thing anywhere, do you?” Wright asks Wallace. “Where is the idea in it? What’s the idea?”
Wright was in New York to oversee the construction of the Guggenheim Museum.
Not just because he moaned about skyhigh New York rents, Wright is still, 60 years after his death, a man for our times. Image savvy, he fought to stay on top of the architectural heap by mastering a swiftly evolving media landscape.
And by the 1950s, television was obviously the medium to master. Before the Wallace interview, Wright had already appeared on a short-lived celebrity talk show in 1950. In 1956 he failed to stump blindfolded panelists on an episode of “What’s My Line.”
Both the Wallace interview and “What’s My Line” video are in “Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive,” a fine exhibition, the first show to occupy the smartly renovated galleries on the third floor of the old Goodwin and Stone building at the Museum of Modern Art.
Five years ago, the Modern and Columbia University’s Avery Library acquired Wright’s enormous archive (55,000 drawings, 125,000 photographs, 300,000 sheets of correspondence, countless telegrams, hours of home movies) from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. To celebrate the acquisition, and Wright’s 150th birthday, Barry Bergdoll, longtime curator at the Modern and a Columbia professor, enlisted scholars, mostly not the usual Wright suspects, to mine the trove. Their assignment: choose one thing ripe for fresh exploration.
What resulted is not a retrospective exactly but a far-flung baker’s dozen of mini-shows.
Among them is a section with Wright’s New York building models, including one for the Guggenheim. Fewer and fewer New Yorkers may recall that the museum, in a then-grimier city, used to be beige.
Robert Moses thought it looked like “jaundiced skin.” The building is now painted a bright white.
Archival drawings are a reminder that Wright had contemplated some pretty far-out colors — Cherokee red, orange, pink:
The thought of a pink Guggenheim leads down a rabbit hole of alternative New York history. Closed off to the city around it, the building’s antiseptic, spanking-white facade, today is in keeping with the neighborhood.
New York was never Wright’s idea of America. Elizabeth Hawley, from City University of New York, digs into archival drawings for Nakoma Country Club, a golf resort in Wisconsin, where Wright appropriated Native American art and artifacts for a decorative scheme as part of his larger project to define and own “Americanness.”
Never mind that he clearly didn’t know the difference between a longhouse and a teepee. American diversity was a skin-deep concept for Wright. Mabel O. Wilson, an associate professor of architecture at Columbia, has unearthed drawings from 1928 for a never-built school Wright designed to serve African-American children:
Julius Rosenwald, a scion of Sears in the early years of the last century collaborated with Booker T. Washington to construct many schools for young black students across the South:
Rosenwald enlisted Wright, who tossed aside Rosenwald’s utilitarian, New England clapboard style buildings, many of which were U-shaped:
Instead, he came up with a doughnut-shaped plan, elaborately ornamented, with chevron-patterned shingles, diamond-shaped windows, a greensward and patio:
A “colorful, vivacious thing,” Wright called his design, using a minstrel slur to describe the children who, thanks to his building, would “have something that belonged to them — something exterior of their own lively interior color and charm.”
As Ms. Wilson points out, Wright adapted for Rosenwald progressive ideas about education that he had developed doing projects for wealthy white clients — applying them to segregated schools serving African Americans he maligned as “childlike, enjoying music and dance, bright colors.”
Wright was also a man of his own times, in other words, a bundle of competing ideas — another familiar motif in the exhibition. In that television interview with Wallace, the architect who considered himself a champion for the everyman complained about a “mobocracy” of unwashed Americans too blinkered to grasp his vision.
“I don’t think they matter,” he said. “They’re not for me so why should I be for them.”
At the same time, Wright was reimagining America as a continent-wide, quasi-agrarian sprawl of subdivisions and small family farms. He called the scheme Broadacre City.
In 1917, he foresaw mass-produced homes,
looking to cut costs and keep production values high by outsourcing construction to factories. He imagined people choosing them the way they selected different models of cars or suits off a rack:
And in later years, when many factories shuttered, he came up with do-it-yourself housing. Even if they ended up being too difficult for most people to build, his so-called Usonian houses were like “trees in a forest,” Wright once said, the analogy implying a social ecology of architecture.
The same prairie-loving populist who loathed New York and its density, in 1956 unveiled a plan for Mile-High, a tower to house 100,000 people. Even today, if it had been built, it would still be twice the height of the world’s tallest skyscraper.
It, too, had its origins in nature, Wright insisted. What he called its “taproot” construction entailed a central, supporting core, like a tree trunk, embedded deep in the earth, from which the building’s floors cantilevered.
Mr. Bergdoll, the Modern curator, has exhumed from the archive the architect’s spectacular eight-foot-tall section drawing for the tower, which lists a legacy of designers and engineers, famous and obscure, who, according to Wright, laid the groundwork for the project— in essence, Wright’s personal history of the skyscraper, culminating in him. Overshadowed by Europeans like Mies van der Rohe,
Wright clearly saw Mile-High as a late gambit to outshine his rivals. For his archival dive, Neil Levine, a longtime Harvard professor, reminds us of Wright’s earlier “Skyscraper Regulation” from 1926.
Mr. Levine shows how Wright, despite his reputation as an anti-urbanist, explored configurations for city blocks over the years and elaborated on ideas that had been brewing since the turn of the century about the impact of cars and people on cities.
Wright’s “Skyscraper Regulation,” with its skywalks, garages and courtyards, conceived around a nine-block plan, built on these ideas.
And late in Wright’s life, at a time when so many city centers were in freefall, the victims of deindustrialization, white flight and sprawl, he returned to the problem of the inner city, conceiving fantastical megastructures for places like downtown Pittsburgh,
Baghdad,
and Madison, Wisconsin.
In retrospect, they were city-based but anti-urban projects, divorced from the streets, in thrall to cars. A mass of contradictions, Wright, the inexhaustible genius, was, in these as in so many other projects, a maker and mirror of the American century. His archives should keep scholars busy for at least the rest of the post-American one.
