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Wright's Baghdad opera house and Gammage Auditorium: in search of regional modernity

Art Bulletin, The, June, 2005 by Joseph M. Siry

The Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium for Arizona State University in Tempe was the last major nonresidential building that Frank Lloyd Wright began to design before his death in April 1959 (Fig. 1). The structure has an uncertain position in the historiography and criticism of Wright's architecture. First, there have been alternative accounts of how much Wright himself contributed to the ultimate design. Built from 1962 to 1964, the auditorium was developed after his death by his successor firm, Taliesin Associated Architects, led by William Wesley Peters (1912-1991) and John Rattenbury (b. 1928), who worked with consultants Vern O. Knudsen (1893-1974) for acoustics and George C. Izenour (b. 1912) for stage equipment. Second, the design that Wright made before his death was an adaptation of his unbuilt project of 1957-58 for an opera house in Baghdad, Iraq. The resemblance between the Baghdad and Tempe designs runs counter to Wright's repeated claim that his organic modern architecture was created for specific clients and sites. This ideal of individuality was to distinguish his work from what he saw as the generic solutions of much modernist architecture. Third, the form of the Gammage Auditorium, with its multiple circular geometries, its exterior colonnade, and the pedestrian ramps that connected to the surrounding parking, has been criticized as awkward and not worthy of inclusion in the Wrightian canon. Given these historical, theoretical, and aesthetic doubts about the building, it is not surprising that it remains little known and its relation to the Baghdad project not fully explored. (1)

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This article offers a detailed account of the Gammage Auditorium's origins as a means of reevaluating the building in the history of Wright's work and its relation to his earlier project for Baghdad. Groundbreaking studies of Wright's designs for Baghdad have been published by Neil Levine (1996) and Mina Marefat (1999). That project's political context and architectural sources are here considered further as essential to an account of Gammage. Looked at together, the Baghdad and Gammage designs in turn clarify Wright's approach to modern public architecture in the postwar era. This was an issue that he had addressed earlier in his unbuilt design for the Arizona state capitol of February 1957, which is also considered here as a study in regional modernity. Since working as Louis Sullivan's younger colleague in the 1890s, Wright had been committed to the ideal of a modern American architecture in opposition to historic styles derived from Europe. From the early 1930s on, he had been an outspoken critic of European modernist architecture, or what became known in the United States as the International Style. Wright's critique of modernism operated on several levels. Rhetorically, he often proposed that modern architecture be regionally specific rather than globally uniform. Architecturally, he sought to realize this aim of regional character in his later public buildings in different parts of the United States and abroad. At the same time, his resistance to the modern movement focused on the glass box as its ubiquitous convention. In contrast, in his later public works Wright developed a wide range of forms for buildings serving different functions. From this perspective, the individual specificity of his architectural designs varied more with use than with place, even though Wright consistently presented a rhetoric of regionality.

In the Baghdad Opera House and Gammage Auditorium, Wright's regional ideal might have implied a greater difference between these buildings for Iraq and Arizona. Yet in adapting his Baghdad hall to Arizona State University, Wright demonstrated his belief that an architectural scheme could fit a client and site different from those for which it was first intended. The two buildings' formal similarities derive from their similar functions and desert landscapes. This process of revising a carefully developed design for a modern functional type was one that Wright repeated throughout his seventy-plus-year career, but in his lifelong oeuvre, Gammage Auditorium is among the closest approximations of an earlier unbuilt project in a built public structure. On one level, these large halls for music in the desert marked a culmination of Wright's fascination with the geometric forms of the circle and the arc. On another level, both his clients saw their auditoriums as the defining symbols of their institutional aims. The Iraqi government and the leadership of Arizona State University both sought to define their cultural identity in an era of postwar change. (2)

Wright and Ideas of Regional Modern Architecture

Wright designed for Arizona and Baghdad in the context of a broad debate in the later 1950s on an appropriate modern architecture for recently independent countries in the developing world, itself one phase of a longer ongoing discussion of regional character in modern architecture from the 1930s. Although the rise of critical regionalism and postcolonial theory in architectural culture did not begin until the early 1980s, this recent body of theory provides a helpful frame of reference for a retrospective understanding of the earlier postwar debates. Since the 1980s, as William Curtis and Alan Colquhoun have written, in regionalist theory, an authentic modern architecture in different parts of the world must be firmly based on specific local practices rooted in climate, geography, materials, and cultural traditions. In their view, architects who either do not carefully consider these factors or who apply superficial stylistic motifs in order to recall a region's earlier architecture are not producing culturally valuable new work. Colquhoun especially stresses that regionalist theory tends to assume that there is an essential type of architecture appropriate to a place and its lifestyle, and architecture that fulfills this ideal is an object of desire. Such an architecture is the representation or mental image of a region's characteristics, which may or may not correspond to that region's earlier histories or may selectively identify with certain aspects of the region's natural or human past. The choice of which attributes of a region to identify with is an ideologically motivated one for clients and architects. In premodern times, a region's architecture is often assumed to have had an unself-conscious, or what Wright would term an organic, relation to material and social conditions. Yet modern architects often do not so much express the essence of regions as they use local architectural or natural features as motifs in a compositional process in order to produce original, unique, and contextually relevant work--an artistic process that is culturally most self-conscious. It is such a process that Wright was engaged in for Baghdad, and even earlier for Arizona. (3)

Wright's Baghdad opera house and Gammage Auditorium: in search of regional modernity

Art Bulletin, The, June, 2005 by Joseph M. Siry

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