Guggenheim Unveils Exhibit On the First Frank Lloyd Wright Building in New York — And It’s Not The One You Thought
Tomorrow, the Guggenheim Museum will kick off a “long-awaited tribute” to the first Frank Lloyd Wright building to grace New York. No, the museum is not caressing its swirling, white, Wright-designed rotunda once more. Rather, the upcoming exhibit at the institute’s Sackler Center for Arts Education will reconstruct the memory of Wright’s Usonian House and Pavilion, two prefab constructions that were built to adjoin the museum in 1953, when the collection resided in a townhouse on Fifth Avenue and East 88th Street and awaited the construction of its iconic locale one block uptown.
The two oft-forgotten structures were designed explicitly for a traveling exhibit that landed in New York that year entitled “Sixty Years of Living Architecture: The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright.” One was a rather miraculous full-scale model of Wright’s Usonian House, and the other a 10,000 square-foot pavilion made of glass, fiberboard, and pipe columns. The structures were open to the public from October 22 to December 13, 1953, and they were disassembled shortly after in early 1954. Five years later, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened its doors, finally conferring Wright a forceful presence in New York City.
In classic Wright form, the architect was acutely aware of the lack of recognition for his preceding temporary constructions, and he himself thought his Usonian house and pavilion were representative of “a long-awaited tribute: the first Wright building[s] erected in New York City.” Now, Francine Snyder, curator and Director of Library and Archives at the Guggenheim Museum, has laid out over 30 archival documents surrounding the two buildings that Wright himself thought deserved a little more spotlight. Learn more about the exhibition on the Guggenheim Museum website.
- Kelly Chan
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