Spectacular Failure: Frank Lloyd Wright's Midway Gardens and Chicago Entertainment

Abstract

On September 1, 2000, Worksong, a play about Frank Lloyd Wright by Jeffrey Hatcher and Eric Simonson, opened at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre.1 Were he still alive, Wright would no doubt be pleased. The celebrated architect was convinced of his own importance as the greatest American architect in history; surely in his mind this place in history warranted the creation of numerous narratives on the topic. But more pragmatically, throughout his life, Wright attended and supported the arts, particularly theatre and music, and many architectural historians and critics have posited the theatrical nature of both his life and work. But his first chance to actually combine architecture and entertainment came eighty-six years before the opening of Worksong with the commission for Midway Gardens. In 1914, this most fanciful of Wright’s creations opened in Chicago, a cacophony of yellow brick, spires, sprites, trumpeting winged figures, and brightly colored murals (Figure 1). Wright designed this enormous “pleasure complex” after outdoor concert gardens in Europe (from where Wright had recently returned) to house concerts and other performances, a tavern, and restaurants. It was to be a union of architecture, the visual arts, and the performing arts—Wright’s gesamtkunstwerk. Wright believed that it was in architecture that the arts could truly be unified, and conversely, that only through the unification of architecture and the arts that one could truly be an architect.