Exhibition dates: 1st February – 1st June 2014
A change of pace now… some exquisite drawings in this posting about the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s a pity they can’t build a skyscraper such as the beautiful Mile High in Melbourne, instead of all the non-descript towers that are going up all over the place. At least we would then have a masterpiece on our hands.
Marcus
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Many thankx to MoMA for allowing me to publish the art work and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Grouped Towers, Chicago Project
1930
Perspective
Pencil on tracing paper
19 x 28 1/4” (48.3 x 71.8 cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Grouped Towers, Chicago Project
1930
Plan of the five towers and shared pedestal
Pencil on tracing paper
13 3/4 x 35 3/8” (34.9 x 89.9 cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Broadacre City Project
1934-35
Study for a plan of a highway interchange
Pencil and colored pencil on tracing paper
22 x 35” (55.9 x 88.9 cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Installation views of the exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal at The Museum of Modern Art, New York
February 1 – June 1, 2014
© 2014 The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Photos: Thomas Griesel
“Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal celebrates the recent joint acquisition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s extensive archive by MoMA and Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. Through an initial selection of drawings, films, and large-scale architectural models, the exhibition examines the tension in Wright’s thinking about the growing American city in the 1920s and 1930s, when he worked simultaneously on radical new forms for the skyscraper and on a comprehensive plan for the urbanization of the American landscape titled “Broadacre City.” Visitors encounter the spectacular 12-foot-by-12-foot model of this plan, which merges one of the earliest schemes for a highway flyover with an expansive, agrarian domain.
Promoted and updated throughout Wright’s life, the model toured the country for several years in the 1930s, beginning with a display at Rockefeller Center. This dispersed vision is paired with Wright’s innovative structural experiments for building the vertical city. Projects, from the early San Francisco Call Building (1912), to Manhattan’s St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Towers (1927-31), to a polemical mile-high skyscraper, engage questions of urban density and seek to bring light and landscape to the tall building. Highlighting Wright’s complex relationship to the city, the material reveals Wright as a compelling theorist of both its horizontal and vertical aspects. His work, in this way, is not only of historic importance but of remarkable relevance to current debates on urban concentration.”
Text from the MoMA website
Frank Lloyd Wright and his assistant Eugene Masselink installing the exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright: American Architect at The Museum of Modern Art, November 13, 1940-January 5, 1941. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York
Photo: Soichi Sunami
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Broadacre City Project
1934-35
Model under construction in Chandler, Arizona, 1935
Gelatin silver print on paper
4 1/4 x 6 5/8″ (10.8 x 16.8 cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Photo: Roy E. Peterson
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Broadacre City Project
1934-35
Taliesin fellows working on the model. Chandler, Arizona, 1935
Gelatin silver print on paper
9 9/16 x 7” (24.3 x 17.8 cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Broadacre City Project
1934-35
Model in four sections
painted wood, cardboard, and paper
152 x 152” (386.1 x 386.1 cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
H. C. Price Company Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma
1952-56
Apprentices working on the model in the Taliesin drafting room. Spring Green, Wisconsin, c. 1952
Gelatin silver print on paper
7 3/4 x 9 1/2” (19.7 x 24.1 cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
“The Museum of Modern Art presents Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal, which celebrates the recent joint acquisition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s extensive archive by MoMA and Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, on view from February 1 to June 1, 2014. Frank Lloyd Wright (1867- 1959) – perhaps the most influential American architect of the 20th century – was deeply ambivalent about cities. For decades, Wright was seen as the prophet of America’s post–World War II suburban sprawl, yet the dispersed cities that he envisaged were also carefully planned – quite distinct from the disorganized landscapes that often developed instead. Paradoxically, Wright was also a lifelong prophet of the race for height that has played out around the world. Through an initial selection of drawings, films, and large-scale architectural models, the exhibition examines the tension in Wright’s thinking about the growing American city from the 1920s to the 1950s, when he worked simultaneously on radical new forms for the skyscraper and on a comprehensive plan for the urbanization of the American landscape titled “Broadacre City.” The exhibition is organized by Barry Bergdoll, Acting Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, MoMA, and Carole Ann Fabian, Director, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, with Janet Parks, Curator of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, and Phoebe Springstubb, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA.
On view is Wright’s 1934-35 manifesto project, for what he called “Broadacre City,” which embodied his quest for a city of private houses set in nature and spread across the countryside. He believed that advances in technology had rendered obsolete the dense cities created by industry and immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Distributed along a rectilinear grid, these one-acre homesteads were to be combined with small-scale manufacturing, community centers, and local farming, and interspersed with parklands to form a carpet-like pattern of urbanization. Visitors encounter the spectacular 12-foot-by-12-foot model of this plan, which merges one of the earliest schemes for a highway flyover with an expansive, agrarian domain. Promoted and updated throughout Wright’s life, the model toured the country for several years in the 1930s, beginning with a display at New York City’s Rockefeller Center. It is juxtaposed with the monumental models and drawings produced of his skyscraper visions: the six-foot tall model of his 1913 San Francisco Call Building; the model of his only built residential tower, the Price Tower, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma of 1952-56; and the eight-foot drawings of the Mile High tower project.
This dispersed vision is paired with Wright’s innovative structural experiments for building the vertical city, which engaged questions of urban density and sought to bring light and landscape settings to tall buildings. His ambitions grew from a 24-story design for the offices of the San Francisco Call newspaper (1913) to the 548-story, mile-high tower he envisioned in Chicago (1956) – a building large enough to house the entire population of Broadacre City. Wright’s proposal for the San Francisco Call Building celebrates verticality: repeated piers emphasize the height, drawing the eye up to a startlingly cantilevered cornice pierced with slots that frame the sky and allow daylight to wash the facades for dramatic effect. His design for the National Life Insurance Company Building (1924-5) features a tower clad entirely in glass, setting aside the load-bearing frame of the Call Building to experiment with the curtain wall and other new building technologies. The project reveals Wright as a key participant in international debates on the possibility of cladding a tall building with a transparent glass facade, rather than cladding it in ornamental masonry for decorative effect.
An unregulated building boom in the 1920s in New York and Chicago resulted in an unprecedented urban density that Wright described as “congestion.” In response, he devised the Skyscraper Regulation – a set of design rules governing the lateral and vertical growth of American cities. By regulating the location and height of tall buildings, Wright sought to optimize light and views and to minimize the effects of closely spaced tall buildings that were turning urban streets into shadowy canyons. Wright’s Skyscraper Regulation was his last attempt to address the inherited city. He would turn instead to devising a set of regulations for an entirely new and dispersed urban fabric (Broadacre City), in which the unit of the city block was exchanged for the farmed acre.
In 1927, Wright’s design for the financially troubled Church of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery dramatically transformed the building by having the floors project outward from a single central core plunged deep into the ground. The concrete floors tapered toward the periphery, which he compared to the structural concept of the “taproot” of a tree. This “taproot” structure was finally tested in built form in the S.C. Johnson & Son Research Laboratory Tower (1943-50) in Racine, Wisconsin. In 1956, Wright unveiled a 26-foot-tall rendering of a gleaming, vertiginously tapered skyscraper – which he said would house 100,000 employees of the state of Illinois. The mile-high tower adopts the “taproot” structure he had articulated 30 years before, in which a skyscraper’s vertical ascent is stabilized by a foundation plunged deep into the ground. Both a polemic and a rationalized proposal for the future of tall buildings, the Mile High marks the definitive return of Wright’s tower to the city. The Mile High embodies Wright’s paradoxical attitude toward the American city: meant to condense the experience of urban life and work within a single telescoping form, freeing the ground for the realization of Broadacre, holding in tension two idealized images of the city – its extraordinary vertical reach and its extreme horizontal extension.”
Press release from the MoMA website
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
National Life Insurance Company Building, Chicago Project
1924-25
Axonometric view
Colored pencil on tracing paper
40 x 24” (101.6 x 61 cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
S.C. Johnson & Son Inc. Research Laboratory Tower, Racine, Wisconsin
1943-50
Section
Pencil, colored pencil, and ink on tracing paper
35 1/8 x 20” (89.2 x 50.8 cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Towers, New York Project
1927-31
Aerial perspective
Pencil and colored pencil on tracing paper
23 3/4 x 15” (60.3 x 38.1 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Jeffrey P. Klein Purchase Fund, Barbara Pine Purchase Fund, and Frederieke Taylor Purchase Fund
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Tower, New York Project
1927-31
Perspective, 1928
Pencil and colored pencil on tracing paper
28 1/4 x 10 1/8” (71.8 x 25.7 cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Tower, New York Project
1927-31
Section and perspective cutaway of a duplex apartment with balcony and living-room floor plans, 1929
Ink, pencil, and colored pencil on linen window shade
47 x 35” (119.4 x 88.9 cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
The San Francisco Call Building Project
1913
Preliminary perspective
Pencil, colored pencil, and cut-and-pasted tracing paper on paper
47 3/4 x 23 7/8” (121.3 x 60.6 cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
The Mile High Illinois, Chicago Project
1956
Perspective with Wright’s Golden Beacon Apartment Building project (1956-57)
Pencil, colored pencil, ink, and gold ink on tracing paper
105 x 30” (266.7 x 76.2 cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
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Filed under: American, architecture, black and white photography, designer, documentary photography, drawing, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, New York, photography, sculpture, space, time, works on paper Tagged: American architect, American architecture, american artist, Apprentices working on the model in the Taliesin drafting room, architecture, Broadacre City, Broadacre City Project, design of the city, Eugene Masselink, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright and his assistant Eugene Masselink, Frank Lloyd Wright and the City, Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal, Frank Lloyd Wright Apprentices working on the model, Frank Lloyd Wright Broadacre City, Frank Lloyd Wright Broadacre City Project, Frank Lloyd Wright Grouped Towers Chicago Project, Frank Lloyd Wright H. C. Price Company Tower, Frank Lloyd Wright Mile High, Frank Lloyd Wright Model in four sections, Frank Lloyd Wright National Life Insurance Company Building Project, Frank Lloyd Wright Plan of the five towers and shared pedestal, Frank Lloyd Wright Price Tower, Frank Lloyd Wright S.C. Johnson & Son Inc. Research Laboratory Tower, Frank Lloyd Wright Skyscraper Regulation, Frank Lloyd Wright St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery, Frank Lloyd Wright St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Towers, Frank Lloyd Wright Study for a plan of a highway interchange, Frank Lloyd Wright Taliesin fellows working on the model, Frank Lloyd Wright The San Francisco Call Building Project, Frank Lloyd Wright: American Architect, Golden Beacon Apartment Building project, Grouped Towers Chicago Project, H. C. Price Company Tower, Mile High, Model under construction in Chandler Arizona, National Life Insurance Company Building, National Life Insurance Company Building Project, Perspective with Wright's Golden Beacon Apartment Building project, Plan of the five towers and shared pedestal, Price Tower, S.C. Johnson & Son Inc. Research Laboratory Tower, S.C. Johnson & Son Research Laboratory Tower, San Francisco Call Building, skyscraper, Soichi Sunami, Soichi Sunami Frank Lloyd Wright and his assistant Eugene Masselink, St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery, St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Towers, Study for a plan of a highway interchange, Taliesin fellows working on the model, the American city, the city, The Mile High Illinois, The Mile High Illinois Chicago Project, The Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Call Building Project, urbanscape
