Architect 2014-03.pdf

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ARCHITECT THE AIA MAGAZINE MARCH 2014 WWW.ARCHITECTMAGAZINE.COM
than a client’s expressed interest in, say, Louis
Comfort Tiffany or Christopher Alexander.
Yet in his long and lonely way, this
historical outlier and self-described contrarian
set the universal template for the contemporary
performance of architect as cultural figure: the
Randian secular prophet in the mode of Howard
Roark, the universal theorist in the mode of
Buckminster Fuller, the worldly artiste in the
mode of, well, Philip Johnson and everybody
else. The unpunctuated telegram Wright sent
Johnson in 1932 continued with the refusal to
make that belated bow, “in company with a
self advertising amateur and a high powered
salesman.” That was a dig at Raymond Hood
and one-time apprentice Richard Neutra,
respectively—however much Wright’s own
mastery of the American arts of serene
amateurism and sanguine salesmanship paved
the way for Hood, Neutra, and all the rest.
WRIGHT’S WORK, despite his telegrammed
demurral, was ultimately featured in MoMA’s
1932 show—albeit with visible ambivalence
in both architect and curator. He was the first
architect, in 1940, to receive a solo retrospective
at MoMA’s new midtown building, and now
he is back in “Frank Lloyd Wright and the
City: Density vs. Dispersal,” an exhibit on the
occasion of the recent joint acquisition of
Wright’s archives by the museum and Columbia
University’s Avery Architectural & Fine Arts
Library. On the rather slender premise of
Wright as a theorist of high-rise hyperdensity
in service of a landscape of pastoral sparsity
(call it “towers because gardens”), the exhibit
assembles exquisite original drawings and
models of Wright’s notable tall buildings, plus
the Broadacre City project he began in 1934.
The showpieces are towering 1956
elevations for the unbuilt Mile High Illinois
skyscraper that Wright proposed for Chicago,
plus three large-scale models that were part
of the archive acquisition. An 8-foot-tall,
7-foot-wide 1940 model of an unbuilt 24-story
Sullivanesque skyscraper, originally developed
for The San Francisco Call newspaper in 1913,
features low-relief, white-painted wood worthy
of Louise Nevelson. There’s also a 6-foot-tall
wood, plastic, and metal model of Price Tower,
the mixed-use residential and commercial
tower incongruously built in the low-lying town
of Bartlesville, Okla., in 1956; and a 12-foot-by-
12-foot wood-and-cardboard diorama from
1935 of Broadacre City, cinematic in detail
and as gorgeous as a Persian rug in its muted
jewel-like colors. Home movies show Taliesin
apprentices tinkering with the Broadacre model
in a scrubby Arizona field—a landscape within
a landscape—while an entertaining period film
illustrates, among other things, how easily a
Preliminary
perspective of
the unbuilt San
Francisco Call
building (1913).
COURTESY THE FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT FOUNDATION ARCHIVES (THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART |
AVERY ARCHITECTURAL & FINE ARTS LIBRARY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK)