The Journal Times Online - Racine, Wisconsin

"Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward" at the Guggenheim

Photos of exhibition models by David Heald / (c) The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.Text and all other photos(c) Mark Hertzberg


    The Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition which opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City on May 15 is like many of Wright’s buildings. It succeeds in some spectacular ways, and falls short in some others. “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward” marks two 50th anniversaries. One is the 50th anniversary of Wright’s death (April 9, 1959), and the other is the anniversary of the opening of the Museum (October 21, 1959). The celebration also marks the completion of a three-year renovation of the Museum.

 The museum was shrouded in scaffolding for much of the renovation. 

  The exhibition is not designed as a retrospective show, but, rather, to use Wright’s work as an example of how to meet the challenge of designing not only aesthetic and functional buildings, but also ones that improve the quality of our lives.

    The title of the exhibition is a paradox, when we consider the nature of the museum building itself. Wright was famous for bringing the outside environment into many of his buildings, as curator Margo Stipe notes in her introduction to the exhibition. But, when it came to some of his most famous public buildings, including the Guggenheim, he turned the building inwards.
    
    That was also the case with Unity Temple and the Larkin Building, two of the first buildings we encounter in the show, and with the SC Johnson Administration Building which is prominently featured in the exhibition. Wright disliked the neighborhood in which the Johnson company was located in Racine so much that he tried to persuade H. F. Johnson Jr., his client, to move the company outside Racine. Mrs. Wright finally told her husband that if he did not drop the argument, he would lose the commission. Wright’s solution was 47 miles of Pyrex glass tubing in lieu of windows. This enabled light in, but did not expose workers to the outside. Instead, Wright brought the outside-in with a canopied forest of dramatic dendriform columns in the Great Workroom.

                                               The Great Workroom

    It is ambitious to seek to cover Wright’s life and career in one museum show that will be visited by a cross-section of people. While the exhibition is not a retrospective, it cannot help but be regarded as just that by many of the people who will see it. It is, after all, presented in a chronological overview of his career.

    Arguably, no architect has had as many books and papers written about him, and no architect has had as many ties, pieces of jewelry, and other gift shop items inspired by his designs. There will be many layers of visitors to the show, and therein lies the challenge of mounting a show such as this one.
    
    Visitors will range from scholars, to the man we once overheard telling his companion about the installation of the living room from Wright’s Arthur Little House at the nearby-Metropolitan Museum of Art, “It was designed by one of the Wright Brothers who invented the airplane.” They will range from people who have memorized Wright’s lexicon and his writings forward and backwards, to those who may be introduced to him for the first time by the newly-announced LEGO sets of Fallingwater and of the Guggenheim.

    Although Wright meant for Guggenheim exhibitions to be viewed as the visitor descends his spiral ramp from the top floor to the ground floor, visitors to the Wright show are surprisingly led up the ramp.

  They start by viewing one of the highlights of the exhibition, the newly-restored stage curtain from Hillside Theater (1952) at Taliesin, and finish with drawings and a model of the museum itself. The curtain restoration was arranged by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, a former apprentice to Wright, who is Director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives at Taliesin West, and who helped curate the show.

The Hillside Theater Curtain at Taliesin

    There are models, photos, and 201 drawings of Wright’s work, many on exhibit for the first and, perhaps, last time. The museum skylight has been shielded to lessen the impact of light falling on these rare drawings.

  Many of the drawings have often been reproduced in books, but it is a treat to see them firsthand. Perhaps the best known drawing is the famous color perspective of Fallingwater. Some drawings of Taliesin West are on butcher block paper, which Pedro Guerrero, Wright’s photographer, once noted was all Wright could afford at the time.

    There are also animated videos of his work, including a 3-D visit through Taliesin III, Wright’s home in Spring Green, Wisconsin. I had been asked to contribute photos to the latter, and was anxious to see the final result. I was pleased to see that it is in black and white rather than in color. Color would arguably have distracted from this engaging, fast-moving tour of the house.

    Some visitors who are not deeply immersed in Wright said that their eyes glossed over from the drawings, after a certain point, and that they wanted to see more about Wright’s personality and personal life. Scholars may be tired of talk about Wright’s persona and private life, but those are an inextricable part of his work. Those subjects are more part of a retrospective than a challenge for building for the future, but this exhibition will attract not only architects and scholars to the Guggenheim. Recent books, such as The Fellowship, Loving Frank, The Women, and the not-always-accurate Death in a Prairie House have exposed a new audience to his work. We are given nouns and verbs about his career, but are missing some of the adjectives and adverbs that would help tell his story.

    One of the challenges of the Wright World is to diversify. The audience at most Wright functions is generally homogeneous. Some Wright scholars have scoffed at the notion of popular or anecdotal histories of him and his work. They should not. Living spaces and working spaces are for everyone, and there should be no exclusivity in enjoying Wright’s work.

    We see Wright’s drawings for the famous desks and desk chairs he designed for the SC Johnson Administration Building, but there is not an example of either in the exhibit. Indeed, other than the Hillside curtain, there are no materials, furnishings, or other architectural artifacts. Wright famously often designed the furniture and windows of his buildings and it would have been beneficial to have even one of his famous leaded glass windows on display.

Wright's original design for SC Johnson was for 3-legged chairs.

    The models take us into some of Wright’s designs in ways that no drawings and photos can. We look into the sanctuary of Unity Temple and Meeting House in Oak Park (1904) in three dimensions. We see the SC Johnson Administration Building (1936) and Research Tower (1944) in Racine with lights glowing through the first-story clerestory windows of the office building and of the Tower. 

The model of the SC Johnson buildings is lit from within.

    There are models of unrealized projects, including the Gordon Strong Automobile Objective (1924), which may certainly be the most unusual name of any Wright project; Crystal City (Washington D.C., 1940); the aquarium for the Pittsburgh Point Civic Center (1957); and his Plan for Greater Baghdad (1957). The model of the futuristic Jetsons-like Huntington Hartford Sports Club/Play Resort (1947), shows an ambitious project which pre-dates the space-age television show by 15 years.

  Huntington Hartford Sports Club/Play Resort  

  One of the most ambitious and eye-catching models is the exploded view of the Herbert Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin (1937), one of Wright’s first Usonian homes. The Jacobs model is suspended from the ceiling, and shows the layers of the house as it was constructed, with rock and the pipe for the radiant floor heating below the floor, the sandwiched board and batten walls, up to the roof. 

   We are treated to views of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1912-1922), but then skip in large part over some 20 years of his career before getting to Jacobs 1 and the Johnson building. These are some of what Prof. Anthony Alofsin calls “the lost years,” in Wright’s career, from 1910-1922. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer recognizes the importance of this period, as well, in his new book, Frank Lloyd Wright: The Heroic Years, 1920-1932.

    Although there are drawings and photos of Hollyhock House (1916) in Los Angeles in the exhibition catalogue, there is no mention of it in the exhibition itself. Hollyhock House is one of Wright’s most famous designs. It was one of the few completed buildings on Olive Hill, a ambitious project which was abandoned because Wright feuded so much with Aline Barnsdall, his client.  

   There is also scant evidence of Wright’s four built textile block concrete homes in and around Los Angeles. Hollyhock House and the four 1923 concrete block homes, Ennis, Freeman, Millard, and Storer, represent an entirely different vocabulary for those who may think that Wright’s homes are defined only by his Prairie-style and Usonian homes. We see photos of one of the four, the Freeman House, but those photos need more explanation and context. There is more attention paid to two unbuilt concrete block projects (the Doheny Ranch Resort project,1923, and the San Marcos resort project, 1928-1929) and the concrete block house Wright designed in 1929 in Tulsa for Richard Lloyd-Jones, his cousin than to the better known California homes.

   There are some 27,000 of textile concrete blocks in the Ennis House, the garage and chauffeur's quarters, and the retaining wall, in Los Angeles.

        The exhibition also covers Broadacre City (1935) and The Living City (1958), Wright's concepts for decentralizing the American city. Wright was prescient in anticipating the importance of the automobile in decentralizing the city, whether that has been a positive or negative influence on our urban landscape.

   The flow of the crowd was well-managed. This may have been an intentional decision on how many people to admit to the museum at once, or by coincidence because we visited on a holiday weekend. This was in marked contrast to many ‘blockbuster’ museum shows at which one feels pressured to move quickly from exhibit to exhibit. It was surprising to note the paucity of Wright books on sale in the two gift shops during the exhibition. This seems like an ideal time to trade places on the shelves with other art books and sell Wright, Wright, Wright.

    Much of Wright’s work in the exhibition will be familiar to many devotees of his work. Still, the opportunity to see the Hillside curtain, the models, and this unique public exhibition of drawings makes it a show worth seeing. The exhibition runs through August 23. It then moves to the Guggenheim’s museum in Bilbao. A companion exhibition, featuring models, drawings, and photographs of 20 shelters built over 70 years by Taliesin students, is in the museum's Sackler Center for Arts Education. This exhibition is not part of the traffic flow of the Wright exhibition, and is easy to overlook.

By the Numbers:
201 drawings
12 newly commissioned models
4 historical models
9 videos/animations

Bibliography:
Exhibition Catalogue:
The catalogue has a bright cover, featuring Wright’s unbuilt proposal for the Fair Pavilion (1957) for the Marin County Civic Center. Published by Skira/Rizzoli, it is 355 pages. It is filled with black and white and color drawings and photos, and includes essays by Margo Stipe, Joseph M. Siry, Richard Cleary, Neil Levine, and Mina Marefat. Some of the drawings and photos, such as of Hollyhock House, appear in the catalogue, but not in the show. Many of the photos and drawings have been published previously, but the new essays and the voluminous collection of photos and drawings published together here make this a book to consider for one’s library. The book costs $45 for the softcover, and $75 for the hardcover edition.

A new book about the Guggenheim will be released in August:

Hillary Ballon, Neil Levine, and Joseph Siry, The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2009). The museum’s press release promotes the book as the “first-ever book to explore the process behind one of the greatest modern buildings in America.” Though at 226 pages it may well be the best such book, it is not the first. A number of books have been devoted to the subject, including the museum’s own The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum  (88 pages, copyright 1995, 1997, 2001). It will retail for $65.

Ballon, Levine, and Siry put the Museum in the context of the City of New York, museums designed by Le Corbusier and by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the work of other architects, including Frank Gehry, Louis Kahn, and I.M. Pei. The book is a rich collection of photos, letters, telegrams, drawings, and newspaper accounts of the history of the museum, and of other buildings by Wright and other architects. The cover of the softcover edition is inspired by the museum’s design, and is striking. There is a gem of a New York Times headline about the opening of the Museum on page 217:

10,000 Flock to Wright Museum,
But Only 6,039 Manage to Get In
      -----------------------------
Art Lovers, Tourists and Beatniks Jam
Upper 5th Ave.----Some See Just The
Cafeteria From the Outside

There is also this description of Wright in an article from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

"No, No, Not That.

Frank Lloyd Wright, the architectural iconoclast who is forever designing buildings that look like old pizza curled up in the hot sun, is at it again...We trust (city agencies) will do something to dissuade Mr. Wright before it is too late."

Another perspective on Wright’s work:

   One can be overwhelmed by the number of new books about Wright’s work, some of which do not break new ground. We take note of Myron Marty’s new book, coincidentally released concurrently with the exhibition, Communities of Frank Lloyd Wright: Taliesin and Beyond (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009). Marty is a member of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s Board of Trustees and the Board of Taliesin Preservation, Inc. The book studies Wright and his work, as he related to other people or “communities,” from his early years in Chicago through the Taliesin Fellowship.

    This is an interesting, different perspective about Wright’s work. The book is well researched and it is meticulously footnoted. While there are many wonderful photographs of Wright and people he was associated with, there are not enough photos. For example, we read about Wright’s relationship with Rudolph Schindler, without ever seeing a photograph of Schindler or his work on Wright commissions such as the Freeman House or Hollyhock House. The book is 316 pages, with 75 photos. It retails for $45.

Links:

Guggenheim Museum Exhibition Information:

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view-now/frank-lloyd-wright

Diversity in the world of Wright:

http://my.journaltimes.com/post/wright-in-racine/a_challenge_finding_fresh_perspective_on_wrights_work.html