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
Of the six lectures that Frank Lloyd Wright delivered at Princeton in 1930, the penultimate, “The Tyranny of the Skyscraper,” was particularly acerbic. Wright decried the “screaming verticality” of the new technological wonder: “They are monotonous,” he wrote “They no longer startle or amuse. Verticality is already stale; vertigo has given way to nausea.” You wouldn’t know, listening to Wright, that he already had a lengthy past designing skyscrapers.
The way Wright negotiated this conflict between his designs for urban spaces and his disdain for the city is the subject of “Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal.” The exhibition explores ten of Wright’s city-related projects, combining sketches, blueprints, models, videos, and photographs from the architect’s archives, which were recently acquired by MOMA and the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University. What emerges through the course of the show is Wright’s attempt to correct the skyscraper as a structure through a unique attention to space and movement, the use of novel design and engineering techniques, and, on a more ambitious scale, by reimagining the city as a whole.
Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867–1959). The San Francisco Call Building. Project,