Architect 2014-03.pdf

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Aerial perspective of the unbuilt St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Towers in New York (1927–31).
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Circle no. 37 or http://architect.hotims.com
and triangular rooms and awkward acute and
oblique angles, the Price Tower plan is more a
fugue on diamonds and triangles, radiating like
the stamens and petals of a flower, than it is a
design for life. As with Johnson Wax and the Mile
High tower, the Price design insists on a poetic
but not especially efficient “taproot” structural
system in which a single central foundation
pier anchors successive floors that are purely
cantilevered from center to perimeter. Draft
construction documents for Bartlesville show
the intricate extremes to which Wright’s office
went, embedding steel-mesh reinforcements
at carefully calibrated angles, to finesse those
concrete floor plates down to a palatable
thinness at their edge. It’s an exercise in
ingenuity that is the opposite of the organically
integrated architecture whose image it serves.
Wright’s work is so familiar that it is easy
to miss how strange it is. Grandiose solipsism,
as modeled by Wright, is so much the manner
of contemporary architects that it goes largely
unexamined. To contemplate the elaborate
frontispiece to the Mile High tower, with its
stentorian Memorial Dedications to the likes of
Elisha Otis (“Inventor of the Upended Street”),
THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK. JEFFREY P. KLEIN PURCHASE FUND,
BARBARA PINE PURCHASE FUND, AND FREDERIEKE TAYLOR PURCHASE FUND