Exhibit of the week: Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward

Guggenheim Museum

New York

Though Aug. 23

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The Guggenheim is one of the world’s most famous buildings, said Paul Goldberger in The New Yorker. Frank Lloyd Wright’s final masterpiece opened for business in 1959, “which makes it odd that the Guggenheim hasn’t had a major exhibition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work until now.” The current exhibition, which also coincides with the 50th anniversary of the architect’s death, traces his stylistic development from “the strong horizontals” and projecting roofs of his early, Prairie-style homes to the “hexagons, hemicycles, triangles, and spirals” that pervade his soaring later works. Scale models and “virtual reality” exhibits offer perspectives on his most important projects, while Wright’s original “soft pencil renderings and lavish watercolors” put us close to the moment of their creation. The crowning exhibit, though, is “the beguiling object” all around you.

Wright’s sweeping architectural vision provides “a bracing tonic to today’s narrow horizons and diminished ambitions,” said Justin Davidson in New York. “He transformed virtually every type of building he ever touched: the hilltop house, the desert ranch, the office tower, the factory, the residential skyscraper, the parking garage.” Some unfinished projects represented here have to be seen to be believed, such as his “grandiloquent but endearingly optimistic” plan to reshape downtown Baghdad. Wright had a “fearless vigor”—a trait that this exhibition, unfortunately, lacks. The museum’s curved galleries, famously ill-suited to the display of artworks, do their creator’s own works no favors. The 200-or-so drawings and renderings fade to a blur “like quiet billboards” that you briefly glance at while making a pilgrimage up the Guggenheim’s trademark ramp.

Dutifully arranged in chronological order, this “chaste” exhibition turns “one of the most daunting figures of the 20th century” into a sort of cardboard saint, said Nicolai Ouroussoff in The New York Times. Yet Wright’s powerful visions often caused controversy, as clients and communities felt the “megalomaniacal” genius was trampling on their own concerns. By trying “to make Wright fit for civilized company,” this exhibition understates his true ambitions—and achievements. Wright wasn’t just an architect. “His aim was to create a framework for an entire new way of life, one that completely redefined the relationships between individual, family, and community.” Whether they liked it or not.