Frank Lloyd Wright @ Guggenheim

Today I checked out the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit at the Guggenheim. I learned a couple of things about the “father of american architecture.” 

1. He describes his work as “organic architecture.” While the modern interpretation of “organic” has very different connotations, for Wright, it meant a set of principles relating to a unified vision of a building/structure and its relationship outward  (with the natural surroundings) and inward  (design elements that permeate floors, walls, windows, beams etc.). The most widely cited example of this architectural gestalt is Fallingwater, the house he designed for the Kaufman family.

2. He hated cities. For him cities were overdeveloped, overbuilt and lacked any real architecural merit. He attempted to re-conceptualize the modern metropolis in his plan for “Broadacre City.”  Broadacre City  felt like the apotheosis of New York City. In his vision of the modern city, each family had a one acre plot of land and was heavily dependent on the automobile for transportation. To me this idea seemed more dystopian than utopian. 

3. He loved Japanese art and spent a fair bit of time in Japan. The Imperial Hotel in Japan was built by him. Apparently it was the one of the few buildings that remained intact after the 1923 earthquake which propelled him into fame in Japan.

4. He was commissioned to submit a plan for an opera house in the city of Baghdad and ended up building a model for a whole new city . In this current political climate we hear of so many competing visions of how to rebuild Iraq both physically and politically. Interesting to hark back to Lloyd’ s ambitious plan to build a whole city  on a plane between the Tigris and the Euphrates. While his plans were eventually deemed too grandiose and might seem anachranistic in today’s context, we might be able to learn a thing or two from his approach which was characterized by a deep respect and appreciation for Iraqi culture (his opera house had ziggurats) without detracting from the practical considerations of “modern” design.

At the end of the exhibit I was struck by three mildly contradictory themes: his houses are designed to promote family life yet he was chronically philandering; he hated the city but his most well known work, The Guggenheim is in the heart of New York; he talked about “organic architecture” and the symbioses between a house/structure and its environs yet he displays a well articulated predilection for building “from within outward.”