Exhuming Wright Professor Wasiuta Arch A4032 December 14 2013

Exhuming Wright Professor Wasiuta Arch A4032 December 14 2013 1 Figure 1. Reburial Article in Chicago Tribune. Exhuming In 1985, a group of Taliesin Fellows exhumed Frank Lloyd Wright’s bodily remains from his former residence at Taliesin, Wisconsin (Fig. 1.). They transferred them to Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, to be buried along with those of his recently deceased widow, Olgivanna. Taliesin West serves as headquarters for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, whose mission is to “transform people’s lives through the living experience of Frank Lloyd Wright’s body of work.”1 To the Foundation, the body of work could only be preserved through the physical co-existence of Wright’s bodily and documentary remains and the institution itself. The transfer of a substantial portion of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archive from Taliesin West to the Museum of Modern Art and Columbia University in New York in 2012 amounts to a split of the body. The MoMA has received the architect´s physical models whereas architecture’s most prestigious architectural library, Columbia University’s Avery Library, preserves his drawings and correspondence. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, so explicitly reunited with the architects’ physical body 30 years ago, has now lost a fundamental claim to body of work instead. Left with 1 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. “Our Vision.” http://www.franklloydwright.org/about/Vision.html. 1 “historic furnishings, memorabilia and artifacts”, it is reduced to a supportive role, to “help guide development of the archives and provide interpretive insights on Wright’s work and life.”2 In his statement in the official press release, Barry Bergdoll, formerly Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design MoMA and now Meyer Shapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, offers the following: At MoMA, Frank Lloyd Wright’s work will be in conversation with great modern artists and architects such as Picasso, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.…This collaboration provides opportunities to reposition Wright as a key figure in the larger development of modern art and architecture, after decades of scholarship that have often emphasized his lone genius and his unique Americanness. A new chapter in appreciating Wright is opened by this new setting for his legacy.3 In order to test Bergdoll’s claim, I will show how Frank Lloyd Wright’s body of work appears to us as a unity of empirical bodies, documents and institutional values and how this unity is structured and maintained by the archive. The 2012 archival split enables the repositioning Bergdoll talks about. Through split, the unity of Wright’s body is put into confrontation, the same unity the Foundation was trying to keep intact. 2 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Columbia University, Museum of Modern Art. Official Press Release, September 4, 2012. http://www.franklloydwright.org/binary-data/OfficialPressRelease.pdf. 3 Ibid. 1 Archive The archive is the coming together of empirical bodies and documentary remains within the institutional confines of a physical space. They come together through what I call archival cuts: changes in positions between bodies and documents, not gradually through time but through institutional ruptures after which the archive redefines what can and cannot be said. Our dusty archive becomes eerily similar to Foucault’s archive, the system which governs the appearance of statements. But does Foucault not warn us of comparing these two archives when he writes: By this term I do not mean the sum of all the texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past, or as evidence of a continuing identity; nor do I mean the institutions, which, in a given society, make it possible to record and preserve those discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circulation.? 4 Foucault’s archive, unlike ours, is non-physical. It is neither the documents themselves nor the institutions. His model has a wider range and can be applied to any regime of statements. This does not keep us from adapting his model as ours, as long as we resist the simplified view Foucault guards against, the view that conflates the archive with the institution or the documents. This is consistent with what we said in the beginning, which could be thus rephrased: The archive is a latent, autonomous structure that governs the discourse of empirical bodies, documents and institutions. The Architect’s Body Beatriz Colomina writes about how Mies van der Rohe’s body is used as a signifier in order to explain aspects of his architecture. According to her, scholars associate his ample stature and his elegant suits with the solidity, austerity and lack of ornament in his architecture.5 Le Corbusier 4 Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, 128-9. 5 Colomina, “The Presence of Mies,” 170-1. 1 is another modern architect whose body is frequently invoked in relation to his architecture, most blatantly in the story of his last swim in the Mediterranean, a poetic reverberation of his Mediterranianism.6 Wright’s body figures at least as prominently in his myths as the aforementioned architects in theirs. One of the most enduring such myths is supplied by Wright: Taking a human being for my scale, I brought the whole house down in height to fit a normal one—ergo, 5’ 8 ½” tall, say. This is my own height. Believing in no other scale than the human being I broadened the mass out all I possibly could to bring it down into spaciousness. It has been said that were I three inches taller than 5’ 8 1/2“ all my houses would have been quite different in proportion. Probably.7 This is as often repeated in the writings of his clients8 and his apprentices9 as it is “out in the world”, in the Fallingwater audio tour or the casual talk with a non-architect acquaintance. Meryle Secrest, Wright’s most recent biographer, moves beyond this myth only to adopt another one when she claims that he favored low ceilings in order to compress the space and to emphasize its horizontality, thus associating it with democracy.10 Secrest takes for granted that Wright’s body is mediated through the archive, constructed from documentary and bodily remains. Regardless, Wright saw the human body as being built into his architecture. Wright’s dress is another example for how he constructed his body, as Jeffrey T. Schnapp explains when he writes that “Wright donned his trademark capes, tailored three-piece suits, flat- top hats, ascots, and cuff-link shirts in an affirmation of spirit and a gesture of protest against mobocracy.11 Secrest goes further when she tells us how Wright’s dressing mannerisms reached 6 Gardiner, Le Corbusier, 126. 7 Wright, Natural House, 32-33. 8 Jacobs, Building with Wright, 42. 9 Tafel, Apprentice to Genius, 50. 10 Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright, 152. 11 Schnapp, “The Face of the Modern Architect.” 18. 1 new heights while he was working on the Imperial Hotel in Japan, establishing a connection between Wright’s dress and the ornamentality and singularity of his architecture.12 These two ideas, that his body constructs his buildings as much as his buildings construct his body, come together neatly in a photograph from the 1941 MoMA exhibition, In the Nature of Materials. The only remaining photographs are of Wright himself, true to form in his tie and cape, looking solemnly through and at the models.13 In these photographs, especially one of him looking through the Robie house, Wright seems to be acting out his suggestion to John McAndrew, the curator of the Department of Architecture at the MoMA at the time, in a letter he wrote to him while they were completing the exhibition: Since the models are all placed low so the plan of the building is evident and all the roofs come off to show the interiors and this is not one of those exhibitions (I hope) where people walk through as though driven to the W.C. by a cathartic – to enable them to view and study I suggest you have made (for me) 50 small plywood seats to be nested under the models so anyone so minded can sit down to the lower perspectives which are invariable enchanting.14 Wright implies that, rather than the models representing the houses as simply erected from the plans, they should be used as instruments of viewing, allowed for by vantage point of the low plywood seat. 12 Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright. 260-1 13 Reed, Show to End All Shows, 50 14 Ibid, 89. 1 Figure 2. Wright and Robie house model at the 1941 MoMA exhibition. The photograph of Wright is not that straightforward (Fig. 2). He is not quite looking through the Robie House. His face is rotated slightly so that it is on the oblique to it. Perhaps he is looking along the eve of the house, out towards the landscape of the exhibition, but this reading may be too generous. We are instead offered a relationship between the building as it should be experienced, literally enacted by him, and him as he liked to be portrayed. What keeps this relationship together is Wright’s own body. His appearance after his death seems to have been similarly well constructed: Wright’s body lay in state in the living room of Taliesin as dozens of people in the Taliesin Fellowship, along with old friends from Spring Green and Madison filed past the casket. He was dressed in a light tan suit, white shirt, with a loosely knotted string tie, and his trademark flowing cape and pork pie hat. His casket was draped in a Cherokee red pall.

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