Architecture is often considered the highest of the fine art forms. It is the only fine art we are allowed and encouraged to touch: it is the only fine art form designed and built specifically for our living, working and playing in. Of all the many museums devoted to the various art forms it is only recently that museums have been opened devoted exclusively to architecture. The only one I’ve seen is that at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia which is also the repository for the work of Louis Kahn.
The concept of an architectural museum has inherent problems. Other than touring the actual architecture, there is very limited material that can illustrate architecture: there are plans, elevations, renderings (sketches), models, and photographs of built works. The drawings are in a somewhat universal language: most plans and elevations follow a specific discipline and can be read by engineers throughout the world. Each architectural office selects a specific style for the renderings that represent that office. Thus there is the Cesar Pelli and Associates sketch, the Louis Kahn and Associates sketch, and the Frank Lloyd Wright and Associates sketch. These are almost always the same regardless of which architect in the firm designed the project or which staff artist executed the sketch.
While that material might have a very strong appeal to those in the field, for the average museumgoer, those who cannot read plans, and most people cannot, and who might be perplexed by renderings, and most clients need them explained, most laymen will find little of sustainable interest in architectural museums.
The Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition at the Guggenheim is a good illustration of those problems not addressed. It is an exhibition with a wealth of material rarely seen by either the lay public or the professionals in the industry. I would think that this is an extraordinary experience for the professions and I am certain, having walked amongst them, that it is utterly perplexing to the general public. Despite the rarity of the material presented, the museum has done little to make it more understandable or interesting. The full range of Wright’s career is at hand …from his own home in Oak Park and the houses he designed there up to and including the Guggenheim museum. It is a vast record of over sixty years work. But the presentation, due to the limited variation of the professional work, is unrelieved. There are hundreds of plans, elevations, sections, isometric drawings and sketches. There are some photographs. There are six or seven models built specifically for this exhibition. But it is repeated seemingly ad infinitum up and down the spiraling ramp and in one long side gallery and without naming the more important works.
No mention is made that UNESCO has ten of these buildings under consideration for designation as World Heritage Sites for their architectural importance. No mention is made that many of these buildings have Interior Department Landmark Status. No mention is made that the American Association of Architects has declared a number of these buildings irreplaceable national treasures for their architectural excellence.
As presented this sameness all becomes exceedingly tedious. That tedium is the fault of the curators. It is almost as if the exhibition had been designed to insure that the well meaning but unenlightened visitors would drift by the art works at a pace sufficiently rapid to insure that the maximum number of visitors could be accommodated. Little about the work is explained in detail or from Wright’s aesthetic perspective. Much comment is made regarding the fact that Wright reconceptualized architectural space, but absolutely nothing has been done to “show” how he went about that. When I considered how many examples could have been used here, I was saddened to think that this first great retrospective of the work of America’s greatest artist is so woefully inadequate.
The most obvious example at hand is the museum building itself. Wright understood architecture as the perimeter between the external world and the space defined through the use of scale, proportion and geometry. From the outside that perimeter should inform viewers what they are likely to find on the inside. On the inside there must be an integral unity as foreshadowed by the exterior appearance. Wright called this organic architecture; it was American in that it was democratic. Wright understood the desire for democracy as originating in the heart and expressing itself in an outward flow. So he reconceptualized architectural space through the process of allowing the function of the structure to dictate the design and look of the whole. This museum is a brilliant articulation of that concept: no one seeing this form from the street would expect to find standard rectangular museum galleries on the inside.
Once the building function was determined and the plan created for the flow within the structure, Wright then determined the inherent organic design. For instance the Robie House in Chicago is composed, in plan, of two offset rectangles. An interplay of those two forms became the motif for the design elements throughout the house in the stained glass windows, the covers over the radiators, and in the light soffits. A contrasting form, the sliced section of a sphere, appears on the outside as urns for flowers on the low parapets and on the inside as lighting fixtures. In the Guggenheim Museum the circle of the plan of the building was repeated in the circles made in the terrazzo floors and on the sidewalks outside. Wright’s buildings always began outside the buildings with elements that formed a transition from the outside to the inside. (This exhibition does not tell us that either.)
Nor did the museum explain, although it did mention, his concept of compression and expansion whereby an entry space leads one into the building where one encounters that initial small space repeated on a greater scale. With the circles in the sidewalk, the canopy leading to the entry door, a revolving door, and a few steps veering to the right, one then enters into the open rotunda: a perfect example of this concept. I did not see any mention of this at all in the exhibition literature.
Most architects are known now not only for designing buildings but various of the components within the buildings. Sullivan, Wright’s “meister”, is as well known now for the ornamental pieces he designed for his buildings as he is for the buildings themselves. It is a rare architect in this day and age who is not known for also having designed a chair… the Eames chair, the Breuer chair, the Meis chair, and the Gehry chair. Had the dining table and chairs Wright designed for the Robie House been included (they are in the Smart Museum in Chicago), the public would have had the opportunity to see and study a Wright design first hand and they would have better understood the claim that he reconceptualized architectural space by pointing out that the high backs of the chairs created the sense of a living space within a living space in an otherwise open floor plan. (He created an intimate, small space within an open large space.) None of his furniture is presented nor was the space concept in any way elaborated.
Lacking that table and chairs, or any others of his chairs or furniture, or cast cement blocks used in his California houses, examples of his stained glass windows, or perhaps full scale models of his various architectural pieces…doors, windows, etc, etc, etc….Wright’s architecture is presented here in full two dimensional flatness. How odd that a museum would mount an exhibition of architecture, the most three dimensional and sculptural of the fine arts, and present it only as a repetition in flatness …and unrelievedly on tracing paper.
Other than the models the only three dimensional object is the curtain Wright designed for the theatre at the Wright Fellowship Theatre. Yet no mention is made that this abstract design referencing the Jones Valley farm country is very similar to the art produced at Germany’s Bauhaus; it almost seems Mondrian inspired whereas the reverse is true. (An early book of Wright’s work published in Germany in 1911 influenced Walter Gropius and lead to the creation of the Bauhaus.) In fact, no mention is made regarding Wright’s influence on subsequent world architecture at all…and it was and continues to be tremendous.
But what intrigued me more than anything else is that very little was said about Frank Lloyd Wright the person. Here it is all work and little about the man behind the work. I was curious if this was an effort to create a new perspective for the study of his work. There is a great literature of fact and fiction about him and it is believed that most of that fiction was a fiction, a legend, a mythology that he himself created. It is so sad to see his work and to find him missing: it is as if someone had chopped him off with an axe. I felt his absence very strongly.
Just inside the entry door to the museum there is a medallion placed in the floor which states that this building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is a gift from Solomon Guggenheim. There is a motto on the circumference and at the bottom Greek letters that when pronounced reveal the author as Aristophanes. That medallion, giving top billing to Mr. Wright, symbolizes the character of this venue: it is known primarily as Wright’s great, last masterpiece. It is a fine art museum but little of the art here is very interesting on its own and certainly not as interesting as the building, one of the greatest artistic achievements of the twentieth century.
This 50th anniversary Wright exhibition is a first and has been mounted perhaps under the assumption that it might have been a very long wait but that very, very late is better than never at all. As I have said earlier, there is a wealth of material here but I walked away from it thinking that something better could have been done: we have been given recipes but not the banquet. Over and over again I was sorry they had not asked me to curate it. I have never thought of myself as a museum curator but this left me with the confidence that I could have done better. Certainly Mr. Wright deserves better.
The link below will access the Guggenheim web site. There is a brief video about the making of the models for the exhibition. The model of the Jacobs House is excellent: it is made in layers, hanging on wires, representing the order in which the building was erected. Otherwise note in the voice-over commentary that many of the Wright buzz words are uttered: reconceptualized space, landscape and the relationship of architecture to landscape, form follows functions, etc. The astute listener will notice that while these buzz words are voiced, no effort is made to explain them. I would think the layman would walk away from this exhibition having learned nothing more about this work than he knew coming in. This exhibition could have been the impetus for a revival of interest in Wright’s work and a source for greater understanding on the part of the layman as to why Wright is held in such high esteem by his professional peers. Instead, for the layman, and for our cultural enlightenment in general, it is a real missed opportunity.
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view-now/frank-lloyd-wright
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