Inside the grand designs
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday August 15, 2009
In town and country, Glenn Mulcaster examines the bold architectural visions of Frank Lloyd Wright. It is 88 degrees fahrenheit (31 degrees) in New York City as I round the corner at East 88th Street, off Madison Avenue.Amid this synchronicity of auspicious Chinese numerals I walk towards Fifth Avenue and Central Park through a city streetscape that is almost straight-laced Victorian: upright columns; awnings over doorways; sharp, clean, sober grey stonework at ground level.As I near Central Park, I glimpse the clean, white, spiralling exterior of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum leaning out over the street, a remarkable and distinctive public building, spruced up for its 50th anniversary.I am here to study the work of the flamboyant architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who died only a short time before the opening of this museum, perhaps the best known civic building he designed. Wright's work is the focus of a 50th-anniversary exhibition. Visitors equipped with headphones to listen to the audio tour and look at the exhibits will have an unsettling experience, as I do. They are rarely able to examine the models, or watch the videos or study the drawings, with their feet planted truly flat. Wright did this to museum visitors, making us a little on edge, tilting our perspective, ensuring we are always on our toes and awake.I notice many of Wright's designs are marked "unbuilt". Some were deemed too adventurous, or perhaps too expensive, by those who had commissioned him. One project was a planetarium conceived as a tourist attraction in the state of Maryland, on Sugarloaf Mountain. The walls were ringed by a spiralling ramp so motorists could drive to the top and park their vehicles and venture inside to look at the stars and learn about the solar system. He revisited the spiral theme with the Guggenheim many years later, turning it inside out and siting it in the middle of a bustling city rather than on a mountaintop.Visitors at the New York museum can examine the Guggenheim art holdings, a formidable collection that spills out into four museums worldwide, soon to be five.Wright was the first architect to emerge from his profession as a celebrity in the early-20th century. Many of his projects are well documented. You don't need to visit the exhibition to appreciate the scale of his work and the ambition of his designs. There are libraries of hagiographical and critical works devoted to his art and his contribution to American life; even a Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly. But to visit a building of Wright's can be instructive. Many of them are open to the public and guides at any number of sites will quote from the architect's own writings, those of his followers, his critics or from commentators who have made a living talking about his work.A week before walking through the Guggenheim New York, I visit Fallingwater, one of Wright's acclaimed residential projects, built in the 1930s in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Before the project, Wright had been exiled in Europe for a period after a scandal. He ran away with a client's wife and children, leaving his own family behind. It was largely believed that Wright, then in his late 60s, was in retirement by the time he first visited the site of Fallingwater.Here he built a spectacular summer house for a wealthy retailing family from Pittsburgh, the large industrial city to the north-west.The house was built over a creek, with a stairway lowered from the main living area so guests could walk down to a pool of water. The sound of the water is loud not only because the house is cantilevered over the top of a waterfall but because the house is open to the elements.I had seen photographs of this but nothing can prepare you for a walk through the building and the grounds: to experience its dark, narrow corridors laid with sandstone quarried nearby; its low ceilings; the Japanese influence in his woodwork; the craftsmanship and design of its built-in furniture; to see how the boulders on the creek banks were left in place inside and outside the building and incorporated into the layout of the rooms; to marvel at the fireplaces and chimney, which serves as a central spine, with flues drawing the smoke from the hearths from rooms on different levels.The building has been reinforced in recent years to prevent it from falling off the cliff. It would have collapsed much earlier had the client, Edgar J. Kaufmann, not engaged a team of engineers independently of Wright to gauge its strength and durability and to recommend some extra steel mesh in the heavy concrete wafers. He bullied Wright to make some changes to his original design. He also reportedly encouraged Wright to enlarge the size of a writing desk and, when rebuked, told the architect it was too small when it came to writing out cheques. Of course, the architect blew the budget.Frank Lloyd Wright is an industry, even five decades after his death, involving tourism, education, publishing and design. The Frank Lloyd Wright archives in Arizona, where Taliesin West was built as his main studio, remains central to his legacy. This retreat was two time zones away from where much of Wright's early work was completed in the eastern and mid-western states.Fallingwater has been open to the public since the 1960s, longer than it was used as a private residence. Our guide is an architecture student who confesses that in between tours, many of the guides feel lulled to sleep by the constant sound of water trickling in the creek. Some of those on the tour venture it would make them want to visit the toilet.Last year, a record 152,827 people visited the house. The day I visit, in early spring, it feels as though there have been about 152,000 that day. The tours are full; we can eavesdrop on the guides before and after us to check whether we missed something. Even the patter in the corridor is the same on every tour. I heard some anecdotes three times. On display are the Kaufmann family's furniture and artworks, some of which are priceless.Though the building was constructed 70 years ago, it looks like it could have been done recently, though few people could afford it. Fallingwater was created during the Great Depression years, when craftsmen were eager to work and the best were recruited cheaply.So if you cannot afford to emulate the Kaufmanns by hiring a star architect, visit the Fallingwater gift shop to browse the expensive literature and memorabilia, not all derived from the Wright oeuvre. Thumb through How to Work with an Architect, by Gerald Morosco, as I did, and in a chapter titled "The Agreement and The Architect's Fee", work out how to dream about it, at least.Fast FactsThe exhibition, Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward is showing at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, until August 23. Entry $US18 ($21.50). The museum is closed on Thursdays. See guggenheim.com.Fallingwater, 1491 Mill Run Road (State Route 381), Mill Run, Pennsylvania, is about 90 minutes' drive from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and 90 minutes from Cumberland, Maryland. It is open daily for tours from March until November (except Wednesdays) and , December to March at weekends, weather permitting. Tour tickets must be pre-bought, adults $US20, includes online fee. See fallingwater.org. Children aged five-11 are permitted only on special family tours. Photography is not permitted on some tours.Another Frank Lloyd Wright house, Hagan House at Kentuck Knob, is less than 10 kilometres from Fallingwater and open for tours. Now owned by a British peer, it was built in the 1950s for the owners of a large dairy company and Hagan ice-cream is served after some tours. Regular tour tickets for adults are $US16, children aged six-12 $US10. Reservations at the Fallingwater ticket booth. See kentuckknob.com.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald
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