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Frank Lloyd Wright's posthumous architecture
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Frank Lloyd Wright's posthumous architecture

Ashley Paine and Amy Clarke
Architectural Research Quarterly, Vol.22(1), pp.69-80
2018
url
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1359135518000325View
Published Version

Abstract

In June 2017, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York marked the sesquicentenary of Frank Lloyd Wright's birth with the opening of a major new exhibition, 'Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive'. Drawing extensively upon the holdings of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, acquired by MoMA in partnership with the Avery Library at Columbia University in 2012, the exhibition was announced by its host institution as an occasion to 'open up Wright's work to critical inquiry and debate'. Given its promise to assay the archive for new interpretations and insights, it is curious that MoMA said nothing of the kind of questions needing to be asked of Wright's work-nothing of the proverbial stones that remain unturned. After all, what needs to be said about an oeuvre that has been so exhaustively researched, so extensively published, and so widely celebrated that Frank Lloyd Wright was already a household name in his own lifetime? MoMA ultimately addressed this question by delving deep into the archive to present a small number of works - many largely unknown - in rich detail. But what was surprising for an exhibition drawn from, and ostensibly about, one of the world's most coveted architectural archives, was how little it had to say about the archive itself, and its silence on the archive's present-day relationship to the more than 400 extant buildings, and many hundreds of unbuilt designs, that are identified with Wright.

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