Review: Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward

Abstract

Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward ; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; 15 May––23 August 2009; Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; 23 October 2009––14 February 2010 Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, a collaborative effort of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, was organized to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the completion of Wright's building in 1959, an event of heightened significance owing to Wright's sixteen-year struggle to build the building and his death at age ninety-one, six months prior to its opening. Over two hundred drawings, supplemented by models, wall-projected photographs, computer animations, and a few artifacts and period publications (lent primarily from the Archives of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation) were arranged along the ramps of the rotunda, in the High Gallery, and on two floors of the Gwathmey-Siegel––designed annex. The exhibition spanned Wright's entire career and was organized chronologically from bottom to top, an inversion of Wright's intended pattern of use that has become the norm at the Guggenheim. Pre-empted to a certain degree by the much larger and more comprehensive 1994 exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect at the Museum of Modern Art, the curatorial team elected to feature Wright's large-scale non-domestic buildings and projects within the great rotunda while relegating his houses (The American Home) and city planning projects (The American City) to two separate floors of the annex, a decision that foregrounded the more boldly imaginative Wright, the Wright of the Pittsburgh Point Park projects, San Marcos-in-the-Desert, and the Steel Cathedral for One Million People, over the more familiar Wright of the Prairie, Textile Block, and Usonian houses. A consequence of this decision was that the chronological sequence of large-scale designs that unfolds along the ramp of the rotunda does so without being informed by the stream of domestic commissions that provided continuity and sustenance to the architect's career. Thus the exhibition sought to redefine Frank Lloyd Wright in terms of a series of larger designs …