FLW/H5
When I was a kid, my parents had a subscription to National Geographic, a glossy and gorgeous magazine that I’d eat up every month like it was warm chocolate cake. And of all the amazing photographs in the Geographic, what has remained with me all these years weren’t the fantastic towers of Angkor Wat or the empty eyes of the Terracotta Warriors of Qin Shi Huang, it was a picture of house.
Rising up from a small hill in a layered series of overlapping planes, the house was piebald with shadow and sun and a rushing creek roiling under the foundation gave this amazing place it’s name — Fallingwater.
Fallingwater was architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterstroke and ever since that photo, I’ve been hooked on the man’s work. Which is why, hearing that the Guggenheim (another of his buildings) was doing a massive retrospective on his work (Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward), I had to go.
The exhibit opens with a Wright-designed theater curtain, a geometric reduction of the colors of the Wisconsin landscape. I couldn’t help but think that kicking off the exhibit with a theater curtain showed a flair of showmanship that Wright — ever the impresario of his own work — would have enjoyed.
From Within Outward is arrayed more-or-less chronologically and as a result, the evolutionary curve of Wright’s work is easily perceived, as is the single foundational concept that unified all his designs — that the static, unyielding shape of the Victorian home (and the concrete expression of the Victorian sensibility) had to be completely gutted. Rather than divide a home into boxes with pre-established functions, Wright tore down the walls and created a vast, open space, full of light and air, an inner space reflecting the outer space of the American prairie and offering a kind of “Big Sky Country” spaciousness.
From houses, Wright turned to office towers, hotels, civic centers and beyond, striving to create a unique American architecture that was indicative of the best of the country – egalitarianism, equanimity and democracy. But it’s only in Wright’s latter years and final works (many never realized) where you really understand the man. Wright was a utopian. He believed that with better architecture, that perfect society so long promised, could, in fact, be realized. Wright developed plans for entire cities, based on his bedrock principles of open space and bountiful light. The most dramatic (and the most surreal) of these large-scale projects was one Wright began in 1958. It’s the final exhibit, at the very top of the spiral and by the time I go there, I admit it, I was tired and there was a warm ache in the back of my calves. But Wright, in his design for the Guggenheim, anticipated museum-fatigue.
Climbing up that last ramp, the path constricts, the walls close in around you and the way becomes dark. But then. Passing through the shadow-draped hallway, you emerge into an open space, suffused with a soft light that pours down from the museum’s atrium. Crossing up into the top of the Guggenheim is a radical transformation of the space around you — it’s more than architecture, it’s performance art. It revitalizes you, pushing aside your museum-fatigue. And laid out in front of you (exactly in the right spot for maximum impact) is a scale model of Wright’s last and most wild experiment. A complete re-imaging of the city of Baghdad, a heady melding of East and West where the myths of Mesopotamia are married to the futurism of America — an extraordinary, final expression of one man’s all-encompassing vision.
~cpd
For tix to the Guggenheim, hit the H5 Event Calendar
