Recognized throughout the world as an icon of Modernist architecture, the white ribbon of sculpture that is New York’s Guggenheim Museum has always been a part of the show. Now, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the building is the biggest thing in a show on its creator, Frank Lloyd Wright.
Granted, there have been great Wright exhibitions before, but none has focused on Wright’s interior space the way “From Within Outward” does. Wright believed that interior space was the most important component of design. He believed interiors should enhance individual development, enrich social rituals and encourage meaningful engagement with the world around us. Consequently, his work broke free of the box to deliver free-flowing spaces that impart an air of tranquility.
Early on, Wright commented that most Americans cared little about the effect interior spaces had on them, other than to see them fashionably decorated. He paired the word organic with architecture as early as 1908 and went so far as to proclaim form and function inseparable.
He experimented with solar heating properties and created buildings that blended with the landscape. As late as 1957, at the age of 90, Wright was still campaigning for organic architecture, stating in an interview with broadcast journalist Mike Wallace that if he had 15 more years, he could change the nation.
Wright’s advanced notions did not generate the kind of social epidemic he would have liked. With exceptions, architects and builders continued offering a limited inventory of environments, stated Margot Stipe, curator of collections at the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, the primary source of loan exhibitions. The Guggenheim Museum, which took 700 sketches, 200 sets of working drawings and 15 years to complete, drew criticism and nicknames before it matured into the landmark it is today.
The organizers of “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward” view this 50th anniversary exhibition as an opportunity to project Wright’s relevance to a world faced with unique architectural challenges.
“Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward,” on view through August 23, is a joint project of the Guggenheim Museum and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, the only organization established by the architect as the repository of his life’s work.
It is not intended to be a retrospective. Rather, it is positioned as a collection of 64 projects that offer fresh perspective on Wright’s driving principles and innovations. In the introduction to the exhibition catalog, Stipe characterizes Wright as having had the ability to “unite human beings, buildings and nature in physical and spiritual harmony.” This union was realized through carefully composed plans and elevations based on consistent, geometric grammars.
Ultimately, the Guggenheim Museum is arguably the epitome of form and function united. Within the dramatic white exterior, there is a sense of both repose and purpose. Looking at the space from the top down, as was the architect’s intent, the design crystallizes. (Ironically, most people start at the bottom and walk up the ramps, and the exhibition has been organized that way.) “From Within Outward” is mounted on the ascents in more or less chronological order. The earliest work in the show is Oak Park, 1895.
Although more than 200 of Wright’s drawings are on view for anyone with an architectural bent to study, the exhibit’s real impact is delivered via multimedia installations. New three-dimensional scale models reveal the spatial language of functional spaces. According to David van der Leer, assistant curator of architecture and design at the Guggenheim, the models make clear the way in which Wright’s interiors form the exteriors.
There is an exploded version of the 1944 hemicycle house designed for Herbert Jacobs in Madison, Wis. Tucked behind an earth berm to protect it from the fierce northerly winds, the southern side of the house is open to the sun †a Twentieth Century solution to a Twenty-First Century challenge.
There is a model of Unity Temple (Oak Park, Ill., 1905) in which Wright rejected the boxlike environments of European contemporaries, opened up corners and enclosed tranquil interior spaces within screens. The screens would become a hallmark of his style.
There are also large-scale models of unrealized urban projects. One of these, Wright’s plan for Greater Baghdad, 1957, leaves one pondering its hypothetical fate given today’s situation. Another is his vision for Washington, D.C.’s Crystal City.
Additionally, nine animations play continuously, allowing viewers to experience Wright’s own Taliesin and Taliesin West. They also bring to life seven unrealized or demolished projects.
In the High Gallery, visitors are treated to a curtain that depicts Wright’s native Wisconsin landscape. Formerly in the 1952 Hillside Theater of Taliesin, it is the backdrop for an audio installation of oral histories from the collection of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.
Wright stated repeatedly that architecture was the “background or framework for the human life within.” This philosophy was born of his own connections with the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the transcendentalists †a perspective that informed his belief in the inherent order of the world.
Growing up into a time of roiling change (he was born just two years after the Civil War), Wright embraced the new technologies of the industrial revolution as heartily as he embraced the precepts of American democracy.
Frank Lloyd Wright often credited his mother with steering him toward a career in architecture, but his own strong will led him to leave the University of Wisconsin after several semesters. He landed in the prestigious firm of Adler & Sullivan.
At the time, Americans were smitten with the Japanese aesthetic. Although there are no records of it, Stipe says that it is quite likely that Wright attended the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893. If so, he would have come face-to-face with the wonders of the Japanese Pavilion. Clearly, Japanese art and architecture had a strong influence on his work. His passion for collecting Japanese art is a matter of record, and perhaps not as well known is that it sustained him in difficult times.
By the time Wright made his first trip to Japan in 1905, he had revolutionized the American concept of a home. The low-silhouette buildings he designed around open interior spaces and a central hearth were called Prairie Houses.
Among the most famous of these is the Frederick Robie House in Chicago. Dramatic, with a soaring, cantilevered roof supported by a 110-foot-long channel of steel, its living and dining spaces are virtually one uninterrupted space. The Robie House had a profound influence on European designers after World War I and is often regarded as “the cornerstone of Modernism.”
In 1911, Wright began work on his own home, Taliesin I, in Spring Green, Wis. Nestled low to the ground, it suffered two fires and an axe murder between 1914 and 1925 and was rebuilt several times.
In the 1920s, Wright designed Graycliff, a precursor to Fallingwater, one of his most inventive residences. Graycliff was a complex of three buildings and extensive grounds. Its cantilevered balconies, terraces and expanses of windows were the very definition of organic style. At dusk on the summer solstice, Graycliff aligns with the setting sun on Lake Erie.
Fallingwater, near Pittsburgh, Penn., placed its occupants close to their natural surroundings with a stream and waterfall running under part of the building.
On a grander scale, the simplicity of his earlier works gave way to the ornamentation he used in Chicago’s Midway Gardens and Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, both of which have been razed.
And then came years of personal and financial challenge, which Wright worked his way out of with the California textile block houses of 1923′4. By combining new technologies with geometrics, he evolved low-cost technical innovations.
In the 1930s, he created the Usonian house, a design that met the contracted incomes of the times. Smallish affairs, the Usonian houses combined kitchens and living rooms and were heated by radiant floor heating, a Tokyo-inspired advance. Carports took the place of expensive glass expanses.
Of Usonian houses, Wright said, “We can never make the living room big enough, the fireplace important enough or the sense of relationship between exterior, interior and environment close enough, or get enough of these good things I’ve just mentioned. A Usonian house is always hungry for the ground, lives by it, becoming an integral feature of it.” The first Jacobs House, in Westmoreland, Wis., is perhaps the purest of the Usonian designs.
When Wright turned his eye to public housing, the result was Broadacre City, which was originally proposed in a 1932 article titled “The Disappearing City.” Unfortunately, Broadacre City was never realized.
As the years rolled by, Wright met the challenges of each new era with designs for and of the times. Today, as new waves of thought must impact the built-environment to bring it into harmony with the green movement, Wright’s designs can inform the blueprint for change.
Two excellent books have been compiled for the Guggenheim’s 50th Anniversary celebration. The exhibition catalog, Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward , contains essays on the diversity of Wright’s approaches to design. Joseph M. Sirey looks at the way Wright’s communal building engages audiences. Neil Levine examines the Prairie House from the perspective of community planning. Richard Cleary delves into the community of builders Wright employed to bring his visions to life intact. Mina Marafat discusses Wright’s visions of cityscape and designs for Baghdad. Bruce Brooks Pheiffer provides background on some of the projects featured in the exhibition.
The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of a Modern Museum is the first book to explore the building’s 16-year construction process. It is fully illustrated with preliminary drawings, models and photographs. It contains essays by Hillary Ballon, Neil Levine and Joseph M. Siry.
Following the presentation in New York, “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward” will travel to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, where it will be on view in the Frank Gehry-designed building from October 6 through February 2010.
The Guggenheim is at 1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street. For information, 212-423-3840 or www.guggenheim.org .
