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Review: Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward Review by: Jack Quinan Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 69, No. 2 (June 2010), pp. 291-293 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jsah.2010.69.2.291 . Accessed: 31/01/2012 20:16 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of California Press and Society of Architectural Historians are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. http://www.jstor.org Exhibitions Frank Lloyd Wright: team elected to feature Wright’s large-scale were attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright From Within Outward non-domestic buildings and projects within because the designs were conceived and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the great rotunda while relegating his sketched by Wright, while subsequent New York houses (The American Home) and city stages of development, including prelimi- 15 May–23 August 2009 planning projects (The American City) to nary studies, presentation drawings, and two separate floors of the annex, a decision construction documents, were executed by Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain that foregrounded the more boldly imagi- assistants under Wright’s supervision. 23 October 2009–14 February 2010 native Wright, the Wright of the Pittsburgh As a result, the more than two hundred Point Park projects, San Marcos-in-the- drawings in the Guggenheim exhibition “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Out- Desert, and the Steel Cathedral for One represented many hands, styles of render- ward,” a collaborative effort of the Solo- Million People, over the more familiar ing, and media over the course of Wright’s mon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Wright of the Prairie, Textile Block, and seventy-two years of practice (Figures 1, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, was Usonian houses. A consequence of this 2). Because Wright’s domestic architec- organized to celebrate the fiftieth anniver- decision was that the chronological ture was de-emphasized in favor of the sary of the completion of Wright’s building sequence of large-scale designs that unfolds large-scale buildings and projects, the in 1959, an event of heightened signifi- along the ramp of the rotunda does so with- elegant hand of Marion Mahoney in cance owing to Wright’s sixteen-year strug- out being informed by the stream of domes- Wright’s Prairie period was scarcely visi- gle to build the building and his death at tic commissions that provided continuity ble, while Jack Howe’s large-scale color- age ninety-one, six months prior to its and sustenance to the architect’s career. pencil presentation drawings from the opening. Over two hundred drawings, Thus the exhibition sought to redefine 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s abounded in the supplemented by models, wall-projected Frank Lloyd Wright in terms of a series of upper reaches of the rotunda. Whereas photographs, computer animations, and a larger designs that began with the block- Mahoney usually worked at an intimate few artifacts and period publications (lent like geometries of the Larkin Administra- scale in pencil or ink and framed her sub- primarily from the Archives of the Frank tion Building and Unity Temple but jects with richly detailed trees and other Lloyd Wright Foundation) were arranged erupted in the 1940s and ’50s into the flora whose flattened and abstracted con- along the ramps of the rotunda, in the flamboyant forms of the spiraling Pitts- tours merge effortlessly into the framing, High Gallery, and on two floors of the burgh Point Park projects, the Hartford Howe worked in color pencil at a substan- Gwathmey-Siegel–designed annex. The Resort, the buildings for Baghdad, and tially larger scale. He, too, employed an exhibition spanned Wright’s entire career many other unrealized projects that reso- enframing rectangle, open at the bottom, and was organized chronologically from nate with certain curvilinear strains of from which the building being repre- bottom to top, an inversion of Wright’s contemporary architecture. Among these, sented and its foreground landscape fea- intended pattern of use that has become the Guggenheim Museum stands as the tures advance forward into the viewer’s the norm at the Guggenheim. principal realized work. space. Where Mahoney created finely Pre-empted to a certain degree by the While this was not an exhibition of crafted window-like settings for Wright’s much larger and more comprehensive 1994 Frank Lloyd Wright drawings such as the buildings, Howe was able to capture the exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect at one that Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, director of soaring expansiveness of Wright’s mature the Museum of Modern Art, the curatorial archives at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foun- imagination although his frequent reliance dation, mounted at the Phoenix Art upon tightly drawn horizontal blue lines to Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 69, no. 2 Museum in 1990, drawings did form the represent sky and green lines for grass (June 2010), 291–98. ISSN 0037-9808, electronic ISSN 2150-5926. © 2010 by the Society of Architectural Histori- matrix of the exhibition and constituted its sometimes approaches the formulaic. ans. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for principal interest to scholars, especially In contrast to the numerousness of permission to photocopy or reproduce article content since some of these drawings have not Howe’s presentation drawings, there were through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/ been previously exhibited. As was the case too few drawings from Wright’s own hand reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jsah.2010.69.2.291. in the Phoenix exhibition, all drawings in the exhibition, and none specifically 291 JSAH6902_08.indd 291 4/21/10 3:11 PM toric photographs, and small-screen anima- tions served to make each building and project more comprehensible to the view- ing public. Of the twelve models exhibited, five—Unity Temple, the first Jacobs house, the S.C. Johnson & Son Company admin- istration building, Beth Sholom Syna- gogue, and the Guggenheim—represented built works; six depicted unrealized proj- ects, and one model titled “The Lloyd- Jones Valley and Taliesin,” represented southern Wisconsin’s Helena Valley upon which a sequence of landscape reports, land acquisition documents, a building use anal- ysis, and aerial photographs were projected from overhead. While conceptually inter- Figure 1 Frank Lloyd Wright, Huntington Hartford Sports Club / Play Resort (project), Hollywood, esting and cleverly executed, the depth of 1947. Plan and elevation; graphite pencil, colored pencil, and ink on paper (photo courtesy of the documentation it provided was out of pro- Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona; copyright © 2009 the Frank Lloyd Wright portion to the rest of the exhibition. A Foundation, FLLW Foundation #4731.001) similar effort might have been better expended on the Guggenheim Museum at identified as such. Yet two drawings by the shaft that would support the lenslike the climax of the exhibition. Wright, the plans and elevations of the cantilevered spaces of the resort. The sur- On the whole the models, derived from 1947 Huntington Hartford Sports Club / face of the plan is alive with traces of five different sources, were uneven in Play Resort and an elevation and partial Wright’s rapid creative process—penciled quality, type, and time period, and ranged plan of Taliesin III of 1925, were worth the hatchings, scribbled indications of foliage, from an exploded model of the first Jacobs visit to the museum by themselves. figures, notations, and inked-over draw- house in which each wooden stratum of the The Hartford Resort plan and eleva- ing. Just above the plan an elevation of the building, from the floor slab to the roof, tion occupy one-half of a four-by-six-foot resort is rendered in such a way that it was suspended on wires as a ten-foot-high sheet of drawing paper and are superim- emerges effortlessly and convincingly as a “sculpture,” to an original model of the posed upon a diagonal meander of topo- three-dimensional rendering from the Guggenheim from Wright’s studio, the graphic lines that convey the precipitous two-dimensional surface of the plan. aura of authenticity of which contrasted nature of the site (see Figure 1). The plan Such distinctions are not for everyone, sharply with the bright white models consists of six circles of various diameters however. Throughout the exhibition the newly created for this exhibition. Among clustered around a triangle that represents models, five-by-five-foot projections of his- the latter, a model of Beth Sholom showed only the exterior, like a cut gemstone. The Johnson administration building was dis- played fully, including its 1948 research tower, but the great workroom—the building’s principal feature—was only par- tially visible from above through the inter- stices of the dendriform cylixes. An attempt was made to situate both the Gor- don Strong Automobile Objective and Planetarium and the Huntington Hart- ford Sports Club / Play Resort on simula- tions of their dramatic elevated sites, but with mixed results: Sugarloaf Mountain, the setting for the Gordon Strong project, seemed more a full skirt than a geologic feature. In both cases a wedge-shaped sec- Figure 2 Frank Lloyd Wright, William Tracy house, Normandy Park, Washington, 1954.

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