‘Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward,’ Celebrates Guggenheim’s 50th

Although more than 200 of Wright's drawings are on view for anyone with an architectural bent to study, the exhibit's real impact is delivered via multimedia installations. New three-dimensional scale models reveal the spatial language of functional spaces. According to David van der Leer, assistant curator of architecture and design at the Guggenheim, the models make clear the way in which Wright's interiors form the exteriors.

There is an exploded version of the 1944 hemicycle house designed for Herbert Jacobs in Madison, Wis. Tucked behind an earth berm to protect it from the fierce northerly winds, the southern side of the house is open to the sun — a Twentieth Century solution to a Twenty-First Century challenge.

There is a model of Unity Temple (Oak Park, Ill., 1905) in which Wright rejected the boxlike environments of European contemporaries, opened up corners and enclosed tranquil interior spaces within screens. The screens would become a hallmark of his style.

There are also large-scale models of unrealized urban projects. One of these, Wright's plan for Greater Baghdad, 1957, leaves one pondering its hypothetical fate given today's situation. Another is his vision for Washington, D.C.'s Crystal City.

Additionally, nine animations play continuously, allowing viewers to experience Wright's own Taliesin and Taliesin West. They also bring to life seven unrealized or demolished projects.

In the High Gallery, visitors are treated to a curtain that depicts Wright's native Wisconsin landscape. Formerly in the 1952 Hillside Theater of Taliesin, it is the backdrop for an audio installation of oral histories from the collection of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

Wright stated repeatedly that architecture was the "background or framework for the human life within." This philosophy was born of his own connections with the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the transcendentalists — a perspective that informed his belief in the inherent order of the world.

Growing up into a time of roiling change (he was born just two years after the Civil War), Wright embraced the new technologies of the industrial revolution as heartily as he embraced the precepts of American democracy.

Frank Lloyd Wright often credited his mother with steering him toward a career in architecture, but his own strong will led him to leave the University of Wisconsin after several semesters. He landed in the prestigious firm of Adler & Sullivan.

At the time, Americans were smitten with the Japanese aesthetic. Although there are no records of it, Stipe says that it is quite likely that Wright attended the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893. If so, he would have come face-to-face with the wonders of the Japanese Pavilion. Clearly, Japanese art and architecture had a strong influence on his work. His passion for collecting Japanese art is a matter of record, and perhaps not as well known is that it sustained him in difficult times.

By the time Wright made his first trip to Japan in 1905, he had revolutionized the American concept of a home. The low-silhouette buildings he designed around open interior spaces and a central hearth were called Prairie Houses.

Among the most famous of these is the Frederick Robie House in Chicago. Dramatic, with a soaring, cantilevered roof supported by a 110-foot-long channel of steel, its living and dining spaces are virtually one uninterrupted space. The Robie House had a profound influence on European designers after World War I and is often regarded as "the cornerstone of Modernism."

In 1911, Wright began work on his own home, Taliesin I, in Spring Green, Wis. Nestled low to the ground, it suffered two fires and an axe murder between 1914 and 1925 and was rebuilt several times.

In the 1920s, Wright designed Graycliff, a precursor to Fallingwater, one of his most inventive residences. Graycliff was a complex of three buildings and extensive grounds. Its cantilevered balconies, terraces and expanses of windows were the very definition of organic style. At dusk on the summer solstice, Graycliff aligns with the setting sun on Lake Erie.

Fallingwater, near Pittsburgh, Penn., placed its occupants close to their natural surroundings with a stream and waterfall running under part of the building.

On a grander scale, the simplicity of his earlier works gave way to the ornamentation he used in Chicago's Midway Gardens and Tokyo's Imperial Hotel, both of which have been razed.

And then came years of personal and financial challenge, which Wright worked his way out of with the California textile block houses of 1923–24. By combining new technologies with geometrics, he evolved low-cost technical innovations.

In the 1930s, he created the Usonian house, a design that met the contracted incomes of the times. Smallish affairs, the Usonian houses combined kitchens and living rooms and were heated by radiant floor heating, a Tokyo-inspired advance. Carports took the place of expensive glass expanses.

Of Usonian houses, Wright said, "We can never make the living room big enough, the fireplace important enough or the sense of relationship between exterior, interior and environment close enough, or get enough of these good things I've just mentioned. A Usonian house is always hungry for the ground, lives by it, becoming an integral feature of it." The first Jacobs House, in Westmoreland, Wis., is perhaps the purest of the Usonian designs.

When Wright turned his eye to public housing, the result was Broadacre City, which was originally proposed in a 1932 article titled "The Disappearing City." Unfortunately, Broadacre City was never realized.

As the years rolled by, Wright met the challenges of each new era with designs for and of the times. Today, as new waves of thought must impact the built-environment to bring it into harmony with the green movement, Wright's designs can inform the blueprint for change.

Two excellent books have been compiled for the Guggenheim's 50th Anniversary celebration. The exhibition catalog, Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward , contains essays on the diversity of Wright's approaches to design. Joseph M. Sirey looks at the way Wright's communal building engages audiences. Neil Levine examines the Prairie House from the perspective of community planning. Richard Cleary delves into the community of builders Wright employed to bring his visions to life intact. Mina Marafat discusses Wright's visions of cityscape and designs for Baghdad. Bruce Brooks Pheiffer provides background on some of the projects featured in the exhibition.

The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of a Modern Museum is the first book to explore the building's 16-year construction process. It is fully illustrated with preliminary drawings, models and photographs. It contains essays by Hillary Ballon, Neil Levine and Joseph M. Siry.

Following the presentation in New York, "Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward" will travel to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, where it will be on view in the Frank Gehry-designed building from October 6 through February 2010.

The Guggenheim is at 1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street. For information, 212-423-3840 or www.guggenheim.org .