For an architect born in the 19th century, Frank Lloyd Wright was modern in ways that still seem surprising. That’s the big takeaway from the new show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, celebrating the architect’s birth in 1867, Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive. Drawing on the tens of thousands of documents, drawings, and models in the archive that MoMA and Columbia University’s Avery Library acquired together five years ago, this exhibition focuses on the lesser-known Wright—as the architect of an innovative, though never built, school for black children; a low-cost, do-it-yourself system for building affordable houses; a futuristic urban plan for dealing with automobile traffic at grade, while pedestrians strolled on skywalks. And of course, there was his elegantly tapering scheme for the Mile-High skyscraper—an outlandish notion while he was alive but on its way to reality today: Kingdom Tower, by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, under construction in Jeddah, is more than half a mile high, designed to a height of 1 kilometer, and its form owes more than a nod to that earlier fantasy.
Wright was working overtime to be up-to-the-minute—appearing on the new medium of television in his twilight years and repackaging his legacy, according to Kathryn Smith in her book Wright On Exhibit: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architectural Exhibitions. With the advent of modernism in the U.S., he wanted to be perceived as ahead of the pack. He even had early polychrome renderings, which had an old-fashioned look, redrawn as black-and-white perspectives for a 1930 exhibition to show “he had anticipated the radical forms of European modernism by decades,” says Smith.
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