Architect 2014-03.pdf

74
CENTER
ARCHITECT THE AIA MAGAZINE MARCH 2014 WWW.ARCHITECTMAGAZINE.COM
CRITIQUE
OUTSIDER
ARCHITECT
MOMA’S EXHIBIT ON THE HIGH-RISES
AND CITYSCAPES OF FRANK LLOYD
WRIGHT REVEALS BOTH HIS TOWERING
AMBITION AND THE SURPRISING
AMBIVALENCE THAT ARCHITECTS
HAVE ABOUT PUBLICIZING THEIR
PRIVATE WORLDS.
Text by Thomas de Monchaux
“MY WAY HAS been too long and too lonely,”
Frank Lloyd Wright telegraphed Philip Johnson
shortly before the 1932 opening of the Museum
of Modern Art’s (MoMA) epochal International
Style exhibit, 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 only
two years after the assassination of President
Abraham Lincoln and dying only four years
before the assassination of President John
F. Kennedy—from the Age 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 another way, consider
that H.H. Richardson was 30 years old when
Wright was born, and Frank Gehry, FAIA, was 30
years old when Wright died.
And Wright’s 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
and so mutable that, unlike 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 most 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—but the profound
absence of whatever it was that animated those
tropes into enduring art. The enthusiasm of
civilians for this sort of thing generally horrifies
contemporary architects only slightly less
The 1956 Mile High
Illinois tower in Chicago.
COURTESY THE FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT FOUNDATION ARCHIVES (THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART |
AVERY ARCHITECTURAL & FINE ARTS LIBRARY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK)