A Frank Lloyd Wright retrospective - 'Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect,' Museum of Modern Art, New York City - Current And Coming

Magazine Antiques, March, 1994 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

THE CONTROVERSIAL and contradictory Frank Lloyd Wright is arguably America's greatest architect. A proflific builder, voluminous writer, and outspoken commentator, he is difficult to compartmentalize. The legacy of this enigmatic and complex genius is admirably explored in a retrospective exhibition entitled Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect, on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City until May 10. It focuses on 190 buildings and projects and includes drawings, scale models, architectural fragments, and photographs. The excellent exhibition catalogue (particularly the essay by William Cronon) situates Wright between the late nineteenth century, still a time of tradition, and the more revolutionary rise of modernism in our century.

Anna Lloyd Jones Wright reared her son as if he were destined to do great things. She studied the theories of the German educator Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), the originator of kindergarten instruction, and incorporated his principles into her child-rearing philosophy, including his advocacy of wooden building blocks. As a teenager Wright changed his middle name from Lincoln to Lloyd in honor of his mother. He also adopted the Unitarian religion that was espoused by his mother and by the reigning intellectual idealogue, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Indeed, Wright's romantic ideal of uniting humanity and nature was deeply rooted in his religion and was projected into his architecture, which he imbued with a universal spirit.

Wright stated that Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc's Dictinnaire raisonne de l'architecture francaise... (1854-1868) was the most sensible book about architecture. From it he learned the importance of using new materials in his buildings, although he sometimes pushed them beyond their limits. From Owen Jones's Grammar of Ornament (London, 1856) he discovered the almost infinite range of decorative patterns.

Wright's native state of Wisconsin was critical to the evolution of his architecture. There, limestone cliffs form the magnificent backdrop for the farmhouses nestled at their base. Limestone softens as it weathers and provides an enormous variety of textures, a characteristic that is apparent in many of Wright's buildings. Significantly, Wright chose to build Taliesin, his studio and school in Spring Green, Wisconsin, to evoke a giant limestone outcropping.

The great Chicago architect Louis Henry Sullivan (1856-1924) trained Wright in the basic rules of managing an architectural firm, providing him with the architectural grounding necessary for Wright to successfully establish his own practice. His first commissions--the pronouncedly horizontal Prairie houses in Chicago's suburbs--sit squarely on their sites and appear to grow from the ground.

The arts and crafts style in England and later in America also attracted Wright. Although he did not agree with its practitioners' disdain for the machine, he did endorse their success at uniting the decorative arts with architecture and their high regard for the nature of their materials. In his publications, Wright expressed a strong predilection for arts and crafts design.

It is generally held that Wright first encountered Japanese art in 1893 at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. There, the Japanese had contributed a reconstruction of a temple, and from this Wright probably took inspiration for his later use of the open floor plan, moveable screens, abundant use of windows, overhanging eaves, and light-colored wall paneling with darker accents. In his writings, however, Wright claims it was Japanese prints that directly influenced his architectural and decorative arts designs.

For all their beauty, Wright's buildings have many problems--construction bills that far exceeded estimates (often because of design changes in mid-project), leaky roofs, poor insulation, and rooms that lend themselves only to Wright-designed furniture. (Wright admitted that his early furniture ws painfully uncomfortable.) The architect was simply unwilling to compromise with his clients, whom he usually managed to win over to his point of view.

The catalogue of the exhibition contains essays by Anthony Alofsin, Kenneth Frampton, Terence Riley, and Gwendolyn Wright in addition to Cronon. It has 344 pages, 183 color plates, and 301 black-and-white illustrations and may be obtained for $29.95 (paper covers) and $60 (hard covers) from the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, New York 10019-5498.