Frank Lloyd Wright

This Week's New Yorker Cover and Frank Lloyd Wright

New Yorker Cover

(Image credit: The New Yorker)

This week’s New Yorker cover features a rendering of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, and I thought the occasion merited some meditation on what the museum means to us today. It’s an odd shaped building, and I can’t think of one that’s been built like it sense. Snøhetta’s Oslo Opera House, pictured below and opened in April 2008, is a great example of how contemporary architects are still designing buildings for the arts in brave new ways. (That fantastic structure mimics a Norwegian glacier melting into the sea, and many of its smart features work to invite all of Oslo, not just the operatic elite, to inhabit within and without.) But no structure for the arts built since 1960 has been as original as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. Opened on 21 October 1959, the Guggenheim Museum is Frank Lloyd Wright’s last masterpiece. It was (more or less) commissioned in 1943, but the project took Wright 15 years and over 700 sketches to complete. Such revision is unusual for a Wright project, of course – most of his designs were completed in a matter of hours. (I suspect he was always thinking about his projects, and thus when the time came to get his ideas down on paper for clients there wasn’t much work to do.) What’s so unique about the Guggenheim Museum is that it’s a descending spiral. This design has two benefits: visitors can effortlessly enjoy the museum’s exhibit as they casually descend a ramp and, more importantly, the changing diameter of the spiral always allows for natural lighting at the art. Form follows function.

Bel Geddes, Surprising Office Buildings of the Early Twentieth Century, and an American Work Ethic

Toledo Scale Factory Machine Shop

(Image credit: Harry Ransom Center)

The other day I was walking through the Harry Ransom Center and noticed some very cool designs for office buildings that Bel Geddes penned in the late 1920s (pictured above). I wasn’t surprised that he had come up with such things, of course – the ongoing Bel Geddes exhibition at the Center, “I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America,” features an exceptional range of content, from baseball stadiums to cruise ships to Worlds Fair exhibits. By I did stop for a second and wonder “Why an office building?” It’s Bel Geddes design for the Toledo Scale Factory Machine Shop. What’s so striking about the design is its focus on aesthetics. This isn’t surprising, of course, given that in most everything Bel Geddes ever designed, function follows form. But this notion is quite contrary to the Modernist architecture of the period, and I couldn’t help but think of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Building. Aesthetically the structures are similar, but Wright’s focus is on his building’s interior, which he made into a temple of work. The exterior of Wright’s building is completely in the service of its interior. But somehow Wright’s trademark consideration of lighting resulted in a building that looks like Bel Geddes’. Yet they are vastly different structures, despite appearances. Except for cost considerations. When Toledo Scale’s president presented Bel Geddes plans to the company’s board of directors, he warned that the building “would cost lots of money and be extremely different, even weird looking.” Wright’s plans inspired a similar response.

Some Notes on the Harry Ransom Center's Architecture

HRC interior #1

Image Credit: Jay Voss

Over the next few weeks viz. will be rolling out a series of blog posts related to the Harry Ransom Center’s upcoming King James Bible and Belle Geddes exhibitions, and in preparation I thought it’d be fun to take a moment and consider the architecture of the Ransom Center. The building stands out from its comrades on the University of Texas at Austin campus, many of which boast a discernibly Spanish feel. Gorgeous arabesques withstanding, it’s quite easy to compare most of UT-Austin’s buildings with the Alhambra in Granada, or the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Sahagún, for example. UT-Austin’s buildings tend to be clad in a white limestone (which can be blinding in the Texas sun), and feature gorgeous soffits clad in turquoise and burgundy. But the Ransom center is different. It’s a cube of gray concrete and might be the only building on campus that I can think of that doesn’t feature a single soffit. Despite the seeming simplicity, there’s much more going on here than what might seem obvious to the cynical. In my humble opinion, the architecture of the Ransom Center is emblematic of an important shift in architectural practice over the past thirty years.

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