Exhuming Wright

Professor Wasiuta

Arch A4032

December 14 2013 1

Figure 1. Reburial Article in Tribune.

Exhuming

In 1985, a group of Fellows exhumed Frank ’s bodily remains from

his former residence at Taliesin, (Fig. 1.). They transferred them to in

Scottsdale, Arizona, to be buried along with those of his recently deceased widow, Olgivanna.

Taliesin West serves as headquarters for the 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 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 , 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.

…“His face was pale but seemed composed, and every familiar line of

the features known throughout the world seemed sharply etched against the

orange-red background of the drapery.15

15 John Sime , "The Funeral of Frank Lloyd Wright," John Sime Funeral Home (blog) November 11, 2007, http://simefuneralforum.com/library.php 1

The transfer of Wright’s bodily remains can be read as an occult operation, one that goes hand in hand with the other horror stories of his life (the complex family history, the fires, axe- murders, etc.). But it can also be read as an archival cut. Through the cut, the Foundation governs the discourse about Wright’s body of work by keeping everything under one roof- the institutional body of the Foundation, buttressed by his documentary and bodily remains.

This shifts the discourse from East to West. We associate Taliesin East with the old world because it is the original settlement of his Welsh ancestry. We also associate it with the Prairie style houses of the pre-1910 period, a period that Wright had a complicated relationship with, especially when he was in his insurgent period in the 1930’s and maintained that his best days were ahead. The Foundation combatted this myth to firmly situate Wright in the West, an

American space, unburdened by the remote successes of the first decade of the 20th century and the stories of his troubled personal life.

The transfer of 2012 is another cut, one where Wright’s bodily remains are made irrelevant.

This time, Wright’s gravesite in Taliesin West will be able to rest in peace at night without agents of Avery Library or the MOMA sneaking around. As the archive changes hands, the discourse about Wright’s body of work changes too and the archive supplies the evidence to support it. Freed from having to contain the bodily remains, Avery Library and MOMA are able to separate the documents from the mythological landscapes of both Taliesin West and Taliesin East.

1

Figure 3. Wright drafting. Figure 4. Archival drawing table.

The Interpreters’ Body

In the 1930’s, Wright founded the Taliesin Fellowship. A Taliesin Fellow was referred to

as an apprentice. Apprentices were not only students, they were both Wright’s draftsmen and his

laborers, utilized as much for sharpening pencils as fixing leaking Taliesin roofs.16 The apprentice name, however, suggests a more symbiotic relationship with the master. Wright wished to

reincarnate himself in the apprentice (Fig.).

Soon after Wright’s death in 1958, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation absorbed the

Fellowship and the Bruce Pfeiffer consolidated Wright’s archive under one roof at Taliesin West.

The apprentice-turned-archivist now solicited archival interpreters from the outside. A link was formed by Wright´s body and his work and the interpreter´s body and the documents. This was the first archival cut. The archivist, working inside of Wright’s building, was subjected to the conditions inflicted on him by the Foundation.

The architectural archive recreates the conditions in which an architectural drawing was produced. The interpreter assumes an ergonomic relationship with the draftsman who produced the drawing. The drawing on the table is the hinge in this relationship. The whole archival drawing

16 Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright, 398-9. 1 room begins to play a part. The interpreter’s chair becomes the drafting stool, the archive’s table the drafting table (Fig. 4).

The archived architectural drawing is a document of a drawing that is no longer used. It is a monument, because like Adolf Loos’ monument it excludes human interaction.17 Instead of being a utilitarian object that has no value, it is valued like a work of art. This is emphasized by a series ergonomic, acoustical and communicative restraints the archive imposes on the interpreter’s body.

The ergonomic restraints counteract the interpreter’s impulse to associate his body with that of the draftsman. The interpreter disciplines himself. He refrains from touching his face, scratching his head, fidgeting restlessly, etc. The archive is disciplinary, but the disciplinary action is not performed by the archivist, but by restraints that the interpreter imposes on himself. This self-discipline, overseen but never enforced by the archivist, is the condition by which the interpreter can remain within the archive.

Contrary to the silence of the common library, which is a courteous, social silence, the silence of the archive is more authoritarian. It is not one of mutual respect of one interpreter to another, but that of the respect of the interpreter to the archive, mediated by the archivist. In the archival drawing room, every sound that breaks this silence announces itself as an anomaly, a potential act of digression toward the rules of the archive, anticipating an apology.

Within the archive, communication is conditioned. The interpreter cannot transgress his authority, which lies at all times with the archivist. Because most of the rules of the archive are unwritten, the interpreter must, beyond interpreting his objects, interpret the space of the archive on one hand and the archivist on the other. The interpreter must also balance his interpretation of the object without disturbing the institution’s values.

17 Loos, “Architecture,” 108 1

This fluctuation, between drawing as drawing and drawing as monument, between

familiarity and restraint, exerts an intense physical presence on the interpreter. He feels a

heightened sense of corporeality. He cannot ignore his own body.

Figure 5. Wright sketch on Baghdad plan. Figure 6. Wright sketch on Baghdad plan.

Documents

The Wright archive is broken down into the following categories: Architectural drawings,

architectural models, correspondences and memorabilia. In the following pages, I will focus on

the architectural drawings, as these are the only documents that I have successfully accessed at

Avery Library. We touched upon the documentary nature of the archived architectural drawing

above. It documents a building that presumably exists in the world. It is monumentalized by its

incorporation into the archive, literally by its separation from the only purpose it existed to serve-

to facilitate for the existence of the building.

The architectural drawings are broken down by project (Herbert Jacobs House 1, Kaufman

house, etc.), or a phase of a project (Taliesin 1, Taliesin 2). Some very few projects are broken down into wholes and parts of a whole (Such as and its respective parts, Usonian

House, Gas Station, Little Factory, etc.) The projects are the unities to which all drawings are

subservient. However, the drawings are not arranged in any particular order by the archive itself.

The interpreter must break the drawings down himself into the following categories, roughly 1 corresponding with the actual process of designing a building: Internal sketches, external sketches, working drawings, final presentation drawings and construction drawings. I will now look at the first category in order to extrapolate some general ideas about the archive’s documents.

The internal sketches were, as the term suggests, intended for internal purposes only.

Wright often drew them himself (Fig. 5 & 6). They only exist if they are perceived to have a critical relationship to the final design. Therefore, their relationship to the building is genealogical. I have been unable to find sketches within a folder that are radically different from the final building.

From our own experience, we know that this is not how a building is conceived. It is rather the product of multiple projections of different ideas and concepts in the search for one that sticks.

The archive organizes itself. By comparing the unity of the building to its documents, the archive erases everything that is irreconcilable. This process of purging is curatorial: other relationships exist between sketches and building apart from the genealogical one. One can easily imagine how a rigorous debate within an architectural practice, about the original, defining premises of a project, could be crystalized in a series of internally heterogeneous sketches, representing a multitude of possible trajectories. But this is not how the Wright archive presents the work. Wright presented himself as someone who got one original idea and carried it forward until the end, conforming to a well know cliché. This cliché is formed through a curatorial act.

But why are the internal sketches retained in the first place, if they are neither intended for external circulation, that is, to sell the project to clients, nor necessary for the development of the building? On the one hand, they are purely sentimental, and belong to a nostalgic impulse of the architect, reminding him of a critical point in the development of a project to be revisited in a later project. On the other, preserving an internal sketch always carries forward the hope that the 1

building will not only be built, but will become a part of a body of work, for which everything is

essential, from internal sketch to building.

The other categories of documents have survived to be archived for different reasons,

ranging in descending order from sentimental to practical. Some drawings, such as the internal

sketches, justify their survival through the archive itself. Others, such as the construction drawings

and blueprints, survive for much more practical purposes. They are preserved because they

represent months or even years of intellectual investment and are also a literal deliverable, just like

the actual built work. They are preserved so the client can add to the house, change the house, etc.,

but also so the studio can reuse elements of this intellectual investment, such as novel techniques

and details. Therefore it is all the more interesting to experience all of these drawings together in

one folder, in a nonhierarchical sequence. In these folders, the incongruity of the body startling.

The Body of Work

We will now look at how these documents form a body of work along with Wright’s

buildings. It is impossible to locate where the body of work ends. The work is, as Foucault has pointed out, as problematic a unity as the author himself.18 But the archive, by separating the monumentalized document on the inside from the building on the outside, preserves some documents and not others, and these preserved relationships between documents and buildings structure the body of work.

The body of work is passed through time, this passing is what Bergdoll calls legacy. There are few architects whose legacies are as contested as Wright’s. Le Corbusier and Mies van der

Rohe alone equal his level of contestation. While Le Corbusier is generally held in high esteem within academia and neo avant-garde professional circles, his legacy amongst the general public

18 “The word oeuvre and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author's individuality” (Foucault, What is an Author, 379). 1 is challenged by its associations with the failures of postwar urbanism. Wright is the opposite. He has a long history of being recognized as a major figure within modernism, but his latest projects,

Broadacre City being a perfect example, diminish his claim to major importance in academic and progressive professional circles. His popular image, on the contrary, is of almost mythological proportions, one which appears to us mainly through what is commonly referred to as the Frank

Lloyd Wright cottage industry.

Figure 7. Matthew Barney, Cremaster 3. Film still.

Scholars and practitioners construct Wright’s legacy in two ways: On the one hand his legacy is inexcusable because of his incompatibility with international modernism and its social mission. On the other, it is excusable for his eccentricity and relevant for architects as objet trouvée, of which the Guggenheim is a perfect example (Fig. 7), an aberration of modern perfection amongst a sea of suspect late career buildings. In 2012 the Wright archive was divided between three institutions who had a big part in establishing the abovementioned constructions. 1

Institutions: Foundation

The first construction is Wright’s lone Americanism. Wright established the Foundation in

1940 by deeding to it all of his personal and intellectual property19. When he died, his apprentice

survivors consolidated his documents in Taliesin West. It transformed from an institution formed

around the production of architectural documentation into an institution dedicated to the

preservation of documents as much as a set of values, to which those who interact with the

institution must adhere. In A Testament, his last book, written a year before his death, Wright

portrays many of the values commonly identified with his body of work- Americanism, de-

centralization of cities, etc., exactly those which Bergdoll hopes to challenge with Wright’s

repositioning. Wright writes:

Resemblances are mistaken for influences. Comparisons

have been made odious where comparison should, except as an

insult, hardly exist. Minds imbued by the necessity of truth, uttering

truths independently of each other and capable of learning by

analysis instead of comparison are still few.20

Testament is Wright’s last attempt at keeping his body together before he dies. For Wright,

the most critical role of the book is to efface all traces of influence. Through this, he demarcates

the body against that which it is not:

To cut ambiguity short: there never was exterior influence

upon my work, either foreign or native, other than that of Lieber

Meister, Dankmar Adler and John Reobling, Whitman and

19 “Historic Legacy.” Taliesin: Frank Lloyd School of Architecture, accessed December 13. 2013, http://taliesin.edu/history.html. 20 Wright, Testament, 204. 1

Emerson, and the great poets worldwide. My work is original not

only in fact but in spiritual fiber. No practice by any European

architect to this day has influenced mine in the least.21

Through denouncing all European influences, while allowing only for American influences

which precede him historically, Wright does all he can do burn the bridges of influence, thinking

that, with his work sitting firmly in his archive in the Foundation, his body will be safely

embalmed.

Institutions: MoMA

The second construction is Wright-as-objet-trouvée. In the catalog for international

modernism’s founding statement, the International Style at the MoMA, curated by Philip Johnson

and Henry Russell Hitchcock, Hitchcock praises Wright as an American lone genius past his

prime:

There is already no question that Wright is one of the greatest

architects of all time. As an American he completed the

development of a national art (…). As a modern architect he first

saw all the revision and replacement of traditional concepts which

alone could bring a new architecture generally into being.22

But Hitchcock ultimately concedes “The day of the lone pioneer is past.”23 Even so, Wright would be included in the exhibition, but only as a member of the American section, not as part of the “big four.”24 The inclusion of the Robie house of 1908 amongst Wright’s contemporary

projects in the exhibition is another good example of Wright constructed as objet trouvée, an

21 Ibid, 205. 22 Hitchcock, “Frank Lloyd Wright,” 30-31. 23 Ibid, 38. 24 The big four were Mies, Le Corbusier, Gropius and Oud. 1

attempt to read a modernism into Wright. The Robie house is often cast as a proto-modernist

building, a descendant from the pre-1910 years when Wright was “more Wright” than Wright.

Figure 8. Robie House, perspective.

Institutions: Columbia

The third construction is Wright as a non-modernist through his ignorance of modernism’s

social mission. In a 1938 essay written while he is assistant professor of Art History at Columbia,

Meyer Schapiro, an early and important proponent of Modern art, writes the following about

Wright’s Broadacre City (Fig.):

His indifference to property relations and the state, his admission

of private industry and second-hand Fords in this idyllic world of

amphibian labor, betray its reactionary character.25

According to Schapiro, Wright’s indifference to labor relations puts him at odds with modern art’s socially progressive nature. Shapiro targets a project which would remain controversial throughout Wright’s life, Broadacre City, first presented in 1935 at the Rockefeller

Center in New York. But as Anthony Alofsin points out,26 there are few of Wright’s projects that

25 Schapiro, “Architect’s Utopia,” 89. 26 Alofsin, “Reception of a Modernist Vision,” 5-43. 1

have been as thoroughly misunderstood and misconstrued. It is therefore not a coincidence that

Broadacre should be the first project that the MoMA is confronting in the first exhibition of

Wright’s work after the archival split.

Figure 9. Broadacre City

Repositioning

If Wright’s body of work neither belongs to the modernism because of his architecture’s

lone Americanness, nor to the academy because of its reactionary implications, then then why is

his archive being split between the Foundation, the MoMA and Columbia? How are these three

institution’s values compatible with each other?

The 2012 split of the archive is a two-fold institutional exchange, symbolic and practical.

Symbolically, MoMA, Avery Library and the Foundation receive mutual affirmation- MoMA and

Avery Library in the prestige of housing the body of work of America’s greatest architect and the

Foundation through Wright’s body of work being acknowledged as such. Practically, the structural

relationship to the architecture itself non-existent. MoMA and Avery Library are the most powerful and well financed institutions of their kind and they offer the Foundation two things- 1

guaranteed first-rate conservation for the unforeseeable future and immediate financial gains. The

practical exchange is in direct contradiction to the institution’s foundational statements. Wright is conspicuously absent in all of this.

We have seen how the archive exerts its autonomy through “archival cuts.” The cuts present documentary remains as a body of work, reflective of an institution’s values, to empirical bodies. An archival cut challengers the stability of the body of work, allowing for new statements.

Between two cuts, only a finite number of statements is possible. As we have seen, Wright’s death

was a cut, where the Foundation gathered all of Wright’s documents in Taliesin West. Olgivanna’s death in 1985 was another cut, when the foundation unified the documents with the physical body.

The transfer of the Frank Lloyd Wright archive to the joint institutions is the latest cut, allowing

for new bodies and new institutions to interact with old documents. Because the new institutions

are founded upon new values, the interpreter, presented with the same documentary remains, is

able to piece together a new body of work, compatible with the new institutional values. Even

though some of this is what Bergdoll talks about, I still believe there is more at stake.

Because is not the interpreter, even within a relatively confined set of institutional

restraints, now able to piece a body together so different that it no longer becomes compatible with

the institutional values that fostered it? This is where the interpreter changes the institution itself.

Within this contradictory space of a muted Wright, a new voice is born. If not a voice of redemption

of some of Wrights qualities or the allowance of autonomous derivation of concepts, then perhaps

a reckoning with a contradiction, both within the neo-avant-garde’s excessive need to “like” the

object of their study and modernisms need to construct an impurity to distinguish itself from.

1

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