Saturday Near The Park With Frank

Today we had the opportunity, daughter away at camp, to go to New York and see the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit at The newly expanded and renovated Guggenheim Museum.  FLW was sort of our entry point into modern architechure and we were fans of him before we'd ever heard of Eliot Noyes et al.

To be able to see his drawings and sketches in one of his most iconic structures was an amazing experience.

To some modernists Wright's seemingly endless need for ornamentation makes it possible to dismiss him as a modern architect. Indeed Philip Johnson, who Wright ofetn referred to as "Little Philip" once famously referred to him as "the greatest architect of the 19th century. However the way Wright defined space, the melding of inside and out along with his belief that form does indeed follow function makes him, one of the people who made modernism possible.

You can see, interestingly enough to us anyway, direct correlation between Wright's Solar Hemicyle House (Jacob's House II) and Johnson's Glass House. When I looked at the drawings for Jacobs you can clearly see a house with a lot of glass and a circular brick area housing "private" areas that protrudes through the roof.  Sound familiar? Wright's house was built in 1944 and Johnson began schematic diagrams for the Glass House in 1945.

You can see many such connections throughout the exhibit. To help us understand how Wright's designs worked, The Guggenheim has added animations and models, six done by SITU Studios on New York, and they are fantastic. We plan on going at least one more time you should too.

www.guggenheim.org

Now, some random pictures of the museum taken today. Did FLW like circles? You decide.