- SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
(Note, due to the fact that the internet is constantly changing, and items that
are posted change, I have copied excerpts of the text, but give all the credits available.)
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 'IN THE REALM OF IDEAS' PUTS BELLEVUE ART MUSEUM IN THE REALM OF MAJOR ART EXHIBITIONS
By Regina Hackett
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 5, 1989
http://www.seattlepi.com/archives/1989/8901260844.asp
What is living architecture? Betty Boop knew. When she sang, buildings swayed and danced.
Frank Lloyd Wright knew, too. The quintessential American architect coined the term early in the century to describe his own exalted aspirations.
Seeing little distinction between the built and the natural environment, Wright's idea of an architect's role wasn't too far from God's, the only builder to whom he regularly deferred. He once told a group of architects in Santa Barbara that the only good architecture in the entire city was the trees.
"Frank Lloyd Wright: In the Realm of Ideas" opens Monday at the Bellevue Art Museum. Getting it was a coup for Bellevue, a giddy, great leap forward. The small museum-in-a-mall isn't exactly in-the-loop for major traveling shows and this is one. Since opening last January at the Dallas Museum of Art, it has toured the country to great enthusiasm from critics and crowds alike.
"We have hordes of volunteers for the show," said director LaMar Harrington, "all kinds of guards. We have to be prepared for crowds, but maybe no one will come."
Not likely. Wright is the Paul Bunyan of the American architecture, the closest thing to a home-grown, architectural cult figure.
Included in the show are a full-scale, 1,800-square-foot Usonian automatic house, seven large-scale models, 15 freehand drawings, huge back-lit photo murals, and clusters of Wright-designed chairs, china, stain glass and eating utensils.
"In the Realm of Ideas" is designed as a piece of pedagogy, to drum into the heads of viewers four Wright principles: the box had to go, materials have to be respected, nature is great and people should feel free in their houses.
Unfortunately, the drawings weren't ready for viewing during the preview. They illuminate Wright's dreamy side, what he saw in his mind's eye and covered with a flush of foliage, before what he viewed as ignorant engineers and even more ignorant planning bureaucracies made compromise necessary.
Aside from the drawings, the Usonian house (Usonian being Wright's private name for things American) is the exhibit's high point. It was designed in 1955 to satisfy the needs of low-income clients or, more precisely, those of modest means whom Wright always wanted to be his clients.
Just south of the museum across the street from Bellevue Square, the house is fabricated to be lightweight enough to travel with the show yet resemble Wright's precast concrete blocks. The furniture in it, made of plywood, is all his.
Wright's style was as singular as his fingerprint, and this house, slung low and wide on the land, couldn't be anyone else's.
Wright has received his share of credit as an inventor, responsible for, among other things, the wall-hung toilet, steel office furniture, flexible joints for earthquake protection, indirect lighting and plate glass commercial doors. He's famous for breaking faith with the box, loving materials both high and low and wanting to harmonize with, not dominate, the landscape.
Yet he's clearly the unsung hero of roller rinks, to which his Usonian house seems related. Roller rinks use his kind of space: low and lean, good for sprints and figure 8's, bad for high jumps.
His style changed remarkably little over the course of his long career, except that the exterior angles softened. He was acutely aware that the new century would call for new styles, and he wanted his to be a trump.
It was. After five years working as a draftsman in Louis Sullivan's Chicago office, Wright set out on his own in 1893, having absorbed crucial lessons from architects such as H.H. Richardson and Sullivan, who were modernist pioneers advocating rational principle amid the welter of late 19th century decoration. His pool of sources was the widest of his generation. It included Japanese teahouses and summer palaces, Hopi rock dwellings and Venetian row houses on the water.
One can only imagine the surprise of those who came upon his early houses. They jut out. They were new and still look oddly new, a statement of faith in a rosy future of unlimited resources and scientific breakthroughs.
As Narciso Menocal's excellent catalog essay points out, Wright was deeply impressed by Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward," a novel published in 1888 that imagined American cities of complete harmony by the year 2000.
Bellamy brought a top hat to socialism. He assumed that everyone wanted understated elegance and good table manners, and all people would participate in a collective, white Protestant male ideal, if they only could.
Wright agreed and wanted to be the white Protestant male in charge. If he built a house for you, he wanted you to be free all right, free to live life completely bound by his style. He chose or designed all the furniture and its placement, the plants, both indoor and out, the rugs, the lighting and heating system. God help anyone who even thought of adding any non-Wright touches to "his" living quarters.
The original scale model for New York's Guggenheim Museum is the best looking one in the show. Its puttylike, white surface has softened with age and now looks like Claes Oldenburg made it.
In person, however, the Guggenheim is absolute Wright, the most distinctive museum in the world and the least admired by painters and sculptors. Wright's great rampways coil down through interior space and make the art in it an afterthought.
Someday there will be regular tours of Frank Lloyd Wright houses across the country. Till then, seeing this exhibit is the easiest way to appreciate both the master's range and his foibles.
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