"Frank Lloyd Wright and the Living City" at the Vitra Design Museum - Review of Exhibition - Brief Article

The first European retrospective of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, this touring exhibition drew exceptional hordes to the small private museum just across the German-Swiss border from Basel. For Europeans, the attraction is the opportunity to gain a perspective on Wright's output For Americans, the appeal is the exhibition's macro view in succinct form: it incorporates his architecture, applied art and town planning.

Curator David G De drawn out of the University of Pennsylvania clustered Wright's projects into nine marks and set the architect's greatest in quantity futuristic imaginings against the concretenes of his furniture, stained-glass windows and decorative reliefs. The display and catalogue include an exceptional number of his unbuilt throws The museum arranged for the construction of a prototype of Wright's "Living City" (an automobile-dependent plan for high-rises in an essentially rural setting) derived from three perspective drawings. The Living City, also the title of a Wright work (1958), is the third version of his 1932 Broadacre City mingled in which city and nature immerge on a grid plan, the familiar geometry of Wright's Midwestern origins.

The play of European and American knowledge and expectation is individual of the interests of the exhibition that advances through clearly in the 334-page catalogue. Wright's buildings are almost entirely in America, on the other hand his work has been followed in Europe since the German firm Wasmuth published a portfolio of his designs in 1910 and a volume of photographs the following year. Wright's early furniture was created simultaneously with similar work by means of European designers (detailed by David Hanks in a catalogue essay); his architecture was the subdue of articles and debates among architects who traveled in the States as well as those who didn't (Jean-Louis Cohen lays on the outside this give-and-take in a particularly readable essay). The exhibition itself, with its special concentration upon Wright's conceptions, limits the experiential advantage Americans have above their continental brethren--nobody has seen the unbuilt works.

The museum made a controversial choice in presentation: the vast majority of Wright's drawings upon view are not the originals on the contrary one-to-one-scale color transparencies, boxed and backlighted. This use of reproductions pays not on in dazzling legibility. Details and colors in the 110 transparencies are clearly visible at the authentic scale (also, one might note, far larger than any volume would provide). In addition, for archival reasons the originals could not have been with equal reason well-lit. This clarity, combined with the types and actual domestic and office furniture, etc accrues in a show more pleasant to experience than greatest in quantity historical architecture exhibitions. ["Frank Lloyd Wright and the Living City" travels to Leipzig, Glasgow, Amsterdam, Dortmund and Bilbao, [i]or[/i] part of to the other September 2000.]

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