Week 8

This week, my studies ranged from simple shelters to modernistic museums. These homages to Wright all share a common denominator: Nature. Nature informed and inspired each structure, dictating both form and function. In fact, sensitivity to and awe of Nature is arguably the most salient signature of Wright’s work. Yes, the geometry, the engineering, the American democratic ideal all greatly molded his abstract architecture, but Nature inevitability dictated its concrete design—from the Prairie local materials and site placement, to the Usonian hemispherical and honeycomb floor plans to finally the Guggenheim’s snail shell. In this way, I saw the trajectory of Wright’s influence linking the past to the present to the future. Hiking through the desert to visit the desert shelters built by Wright’s apprentices past and present, I witnessed Wright’s powerful influence on succeeding generations as they adapted building to environment. Researching his eighth UNESCO-nominated work—the Guggenheim Museum—I discerned Wright’s personal stylistic evolution, interjecting natural forms to suit the urban environment of New York City. Instead of grounding his design in landscape, Wright designed the art museum to turn in toward itself in a radical overhaul of museum traditions spanning back to the Roman Empire.

                             Guggenheim Museum; Source: aviewoncities.com

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DESERT SHELTERS TOUR

Besides realizing how grateful I am to have air conditioning, I began to truly comprehend Wright’s living legacy as I explored the desert shelters constructed by apprentices at Taliesin West. Rudimentary tent to pagoda to underground fortress to modernist cube: these self-designed dormitories seamlessly meld Wright’s hallmark accents—such as triangular shafts and blue and orange coloring—with the student’s personal stylistic interpretation.  

 Distinctive innovations—such as placing the fireplace under the cantilevered bed to warm the mattress during cold winter nights in the Brittlebush shelter—reveal the students’ modelling of Wright’s practical aesthetic sense—such as his innovative radiant floor heating systems.

Sometimes, students reside in previously-built shelters, often altering or completely revamping the shelter to fit their personal needs. Therefore, many shelters are constructed of biodegradable materials, allowing a new student to use the same foundation to develop their own structure once the old one has decayed.

Since many of the shelters are partially or totally open to the surrounding desert (some incredibly lacked doors—the ultimate open door policy), students truly experience Wright’s desire to unite building and nature. However, I think some shelters are a bit too harmonious with nature—I’m not sure how well I would cope with javelinas ambling through my room or a rattlesnake nesting in my fireplace!

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THE SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

In a city dominated by towering skyscrapers and rectilinear buildings, the Guggenheim Museum certainly stands out, marching to the beat of its own drummer—Frank Lloyd Wright. Constructed on the east side of Fifth Avenue in New York City from 1956 to 1959, the Guggenheim’s dramatic spiral breaks the rectangular mold imposed on its neighboring buildings, which ranged from Beaux-Arts style townhouses to massive modern apartment buildings (“Key Works of Modern Architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright”).

Source: WWTW Chicago 

Wright’s Guggenheim Museum not only bucked against contemporary urban architecture, but also overturned the design of art museums stretching all the way back to ancient Rome. While ancient Rome was an incubator of architectural innovations, including the dome, vault, and arch, Roman engineering genius draped itself in Greek ornamentation and filled their museums with Greek-inspired art, robbing Rome of its cultural identity. Without taking into consideration the scale of their buildings or the arranged display of the art inside, Roman museums were reduced to “nothing more than vast inventories” (Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, “Global Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum”).

Wright took Sullivan’s “form follows function” to the next step: form is function. Wright thought that classical architecture was a hindrance rather than an aspiration, causing countless architects to copy classical forms without regard to their suitability to the site, culture, or function. One particular pet peeve was the habit of designing every American town’s bank to resemble a columned Greek temple, despite the fact that the Midwest was nothing like the Mediterranean.

Yet ancient Rome was not the only culprit. Victorian era “Picture Galleries” covered walls in paintings and crammed statues into corners without concern for the most visually-enticing method of display. Instead of forging its own culturally appropriate museum architecture style, America mindlessly copied European museum architecture. Thus, Wright’s Guggenheim design marked the first time that a museum was designed to reflect the art that it housed (Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, “Global Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum”).

Source: kudago.com

Housing modernist pieces by Mondrian and Weiss, Cezanne and Braque, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s defiance of architectural norms renders it a fitting home for the many pieces of modern art that likewise strove to change people’s preconceptions of what art is (Guggenheim.org).

Solomon R. Guggenheim’s art advisor, Hilla Rebay, encouraged Guggenheim to commission a museum for “non-objective art”—abstract art. Hoping for the museum to be “a temple of spirit, a monument,” Rebay immediately turned to Wright, who had constructed many temples throughout his career, whether for the worship of God or Nature. Wright derived his open, flowing design for the museum from some of his earlies works, particularly Unity Temple with its spacious communal room. If you recall my discussion of Unity Temple in Week 1, seats line three of the four sides of the cubical room ensuring that visitors’ eyes would not only fix upon the pulpit, but on those across the room, strengthening the sense of religious community (Arthur Lubow, “Smithsonian Magazine”).

However, the Guggenheim had a rough start: experiencing delays for sixteen years on account of the patron’s death, post-World War II increased cost of construction materials, and Wright’s myriad design changes.

Source: Pinterest

Even after finally breaking ground on construction, the Guggenheim Museum had not cleared the last of its obstacles: the critics. Colorful insults express the critics’ condemnation of Wright’s rebellious curved edges and lack of stratified floors, terming it an “inverted oatmeal dish,” “hot cross bun,” or “washing machine.” A stubborn man, Wright refused to give in to the critics and continued according to plan (Edward Lifson, NPR).

Source: haberarts.com

Yet even those who accepted Wright’s innovations had a concern: the magnificence of the building actually detracts from the artwork on display. While a typical museum’s lack of ornamentation or innovation forces visitors to focus solely on the art displays, the Guggenheim’s architectural grandeur shifts attention from art to building. The building itself was a modernist sculpture. Then-Museum Director James Sweeney elaborated, “This is the most spectacular museum interior architecturally in this country. But my job is to show off a magnificent collection to its fullest” (Perez, Architecture Daily).

Source: Earthrangers.com

Source: Andrewprokos.com

Surprisingly, even some of the avant-garde artists opposed to the museum’s design, hesitant about hanging their paintings on sloping walls. Indeed, the paintings do rest awkwardly inclined on the walls, tilted slightly backwards. This triggered a backlash by the artist community, with 21 artists signing a letter protesting the unflattering display of their work (Perez, Architecture Daily).

Despite the odds stacked against it, the Guggenheim Museum was finally opened to the public on October 21, 1959—six months after Wright’s death. Unfortunately, Wright would never realize the chance to see visitors enjoying his contested masterpiece of modern architecture (Guggenheim.org).

The Guggenheim, constructed from concrete reinforced with steel rods, is divided into three main parts: the main spiral dome, the small circular monitor, and the horizontal cantilevers that connect the other parts. Like always, Wright’s design for the Guggenheim was based on simple geometric shapes: circles, triangles, and lozenges. These shapes connect and interlock throughout the building: the spiral rotunda encloses the triangular staircase and elevator shaft; the circular monitor looks over the lozenge-shaped staircase (“Key Works of Modern Architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright”).

Source: Andrewprokos.com

The most innovative aspect of the Guggenheim Museum is the massive spiral rotunda, wrapping around five times to peak at the skylight dome 29 meters above the floor. This spiral draws the eye outward, making viewing art a collective experience. When exploring the Guggenheim, visitors not only view the piece they stand before, but their peripherals catch a glimpse of the art and the visitors beyond on the other side of the museum, encouraging them to contemplate juxtapositions and each other (“Key Works of Modern Architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright”).

Rather than being a static imposition of rigid floor upon rigid floor, the Guggenheim exudes a sense of motion—its wrap-around staircase and circular floors flow into one another like water, as if the viewer is “at the edge of the shore watching an unbreaking wave,” in Wright’s own words (Wright, In the Realm of Ideas).

Wright strove for simplicity and harmony with his design for the Guggenheim, creating a private world looking in upon itself, removed from the bustle of Fifth Avenue. Wright elaborated on his concept: “The atmosphere of great harmonious simplicity wherein human proportions are maintained in relation to the picture is characteristic of the building” (Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, “Global Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum”).

In fact, this private world almost feels like an alternate reality. The lack of vertical or horizontal lines—or any straight lines at all, for that matter—creates a borderline surreal sensation in juxtaposition to the hard lines of the outside reality. This altered state of mind entices viewers to engage more deeply with the abstract art on display, seeing from new perspectives. Wright intended for visitors to first ride the elevator to the top of the building and then continue down the ramps to view the art after relaxing in the garden under the skylit dome. This sequence of activity would prime and relax visitors, maximizing the experience by letting “the elevator do the lifting so the visitor could do the drifting,” in the words of Wright (Edward Lifson, NPR).

Source: Guggenheim.org

Always a trailblazer, Wright’s daring innovation created a new standard for museum architecture; his reinvention dismantled the past and ushered in the future—most prominently, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain picked up Wright’s deconstructing-the-box baton and continued the trajectory of architectural innovation with his Deconstructivist style.

Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao; Source: rubenpb.com

Currently, biomimetic design is becoming an increasingly popular school of architecture. Here is an example of a project currently under construction in China using parametric design to construct the fish-shaped building, complete with light-reflective and shade-producing scales, using twelve two-dimensional curves (dezeen.com). 

Source: dezeen.com (top and bottom)

One of the biggest insights I gained from my surveys was that creative design--not physics--was the factor underlining most of the interest in architecture. Coupled with the added insight that biology was a favorite subject of many, I thought that biomimetic architectural design would be a great way to attract students to the current direction of architecture. 

My lesson plan for the Guggenheim Museum builds upon last week's project on passive sustainability by introducing biomimetic design, which uses designs and systems found in nature as a basis for sustainable architecture and materials. The Guggenheim Museum’s central spiral—an abstracted interpretation of a nautilus shell—stands as a precursor to the biomimetic movement. The lesson calls upon students to develop their own building inspired by an environmentally-fit adaptation of a plant or animal, for example, the scales of a fish, shell of a nut, radial symmetry of a sand dollar, petals of a flower, feathers of a bird, pine cones, and pea pods. 

Source: exploration-architecture.com

Week 7

This week, it was finally time to research Taliesin West—the site of my internship and the seventh nominated work of Frank Lloyd Wright. At first, I was eager to share all the information that I had accumulated about the site most familiar to me—and then I realized I already had been doing just that, through explicit and implicit comparison to his other works. However, my research this week and tour of his personal art collections in the Archives proved that Wright always defies expectations. I learned to appreciate the desert anew through his eyes and gain a deeper understanding of the singular authenticity of his organic architecture. I also recognized how his imperative for harmony between architecture and its surroundings unwittingly sowed the seeds of sustainability.

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SPECIAL COLLECTIONS TOUR

Traveling through Taliesin West’s archives, I caught a better glimpse of the man behind the buildings. Not only a prolific architect whose designs revolutionized modern American architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright was an avid collector of Japanese prints (especially those of Hiroshige) and textiles, as well as various sculptures and books. Indeed, Wright made more money by collecting Japanese prints than by designing architecture. Here are some of his personal favorites:

Here are my personal favorites from his collection: kiri-e. Persimmon juice-soaked Japanese rice paper cutouts held together by almost microscopic strands of silk. 

         

The pencils Wright had on his desk, preserved from the day that he died, seem a fitting monument to his memory.

A supporter of the Transcendentalist philosophy, Wright felt an affinity for the odes to nature penned by Thoreau and Emerson. Wright even annotated a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, scribbling “build beautiful buildings” under the line “speak beautiful words." 

But perhaps the most amusing story that the tour guide told us was that of Wright’s cane. Although Wright did not actually need a cane to walk, he almost always carried one around to use as a pointer. However, one such cane had a secret. After Wright’s death, Taliesin West apprentice and Wright author Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer decided to bring the cane to a ceremony to honor Frank Lloyd Wright. However, the cane caused an uproar at airport security. It turns out that there was actually a sword hidden inside the cane! Of course, the cane was immediately confiscated, but other Taliesin West apprentices managed to eventually retrieve it and place it back where it belongs: in Wright’s home.

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TALIESIN WEST

Wright lived out his final days at Taliesin West; the walls of his winter home seem to still resonate with the spirit of his creative impulse, outlasting his death at 91 years of age and living on in its resident apprentices today. The site simplifies, crystallizes, and sublimates his life’s work—over a thousand buildings designed and almost 700 erected. Unlike other architects who reiterate their signature style over and over in varying locales, Wright’s organic architecture philosophy always spoke in the vernacular of the site—Prairie houses for the Midwest, textile block construction for California—with materials and floor plans inflecting the local landscape. A master of architecture that is both useful and authentic, Wright explained to his Taliesin West apprentices “something that will take you a long term of years to be really sure of”: “you know exactly why the shape of a thing is that shape, and you know how far to go with it and how far not to go” (Frank Lloyd Wright: His Living Voice).

Wright first visited the Sonoran Desert in the late 1920s when designing the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix. Stunned by the intense beauty of the desert, Wright immediately fell in love with the desert and knew that he wanted to build here (“Key Works of Modern Architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright”). Wright rhapsodized, “The desert with its rim of arid mountains spotted like the leopard’s skin or tattooed with amazing patterns of creation, is a grand garden the like of which in sheer beauty of reach, space, and pattern does not exist, I think, in the world” (Taliesin West: An Interpretive Guide”).

Commissioned to build both the Arizona Biltmore and the San Marcos-in-the-Desert resort, Wright constructed his own Arizonan camp near Chandler in 1929. Awed by Arizona’s distinctive flora and fauna, Wright named this temporary residence “Ocatilla Camp.” In this camp, Wright experimented with materials and designs he had never before used in his Prairie, Usonian, or urban styles. It was at Ocatilla Camp that Wright first discovered the art of the triangle and canvas. The triangle motif was inspired not only by the towering mountains but also the blooming ocotillo flowers. With canvas roofs billowing in the dusty wind, Frank Lloyd Wright thought the camp looked like a fleet of ships plowing through the sand (Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly Vol 16. No.1).

Ocatilla Camp; Source: The Wright Library

After Wright recovered from a serious case of pneumonia in 1936, Wright’s doctor advised Wright to spend winters in a warmer climate instead of frigid Wisconsin. And what warmer winter spot than Arizona? Thus, at age 70, Wright set out to build his permanent desert residence during 1938. This rudimentary camp in a dusty town would eventually become a national landmark in one of America’s most fastest growing cities (“Key Works of Modern Architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright”).

Taliesin West was completely different from anything Wright had designed before; yet it was based on his same principles of organic architecture. Six principles dominated Wright’s architectural philosophy: simplicity, individuality, reflection of nature, landscape-based colors, expression of materials, and spirituality. Thus, Taliesin West was a laboratory for new ideas and experiences, both for Wright and his apprentices, who experimented first-hand with Wright’s organic architecture philosophy (“Taliesin West: An Interpretive Guide”).

The McDowell Mountains created by “vast, quiet, ponderable masses made so by fire and laid by water—both are architects—now comes the sculptor, wind,” provoked Wright to translate the desert into design. As always, the landscape spoke to Wright geometrically: “the straight line and flat plane must come here…but they should become the dotted line, the broad, low, extended plane textured, because in all this astounding desert, there is not one hard undotted line to be seen” (Frank Lloyd Wright, In the Realm of Ideas).

Wright himself claimed, “I was struck by the beauty of the desert, by the dry, clear sun-drenched air, by the stark geometry of the mountains, the entire region was an inspiration in strong contrast to the lush, pastoral landscape of my native Wisconsin. And out of that experience, a revelation is what I guess you might call it, came the design for these buildings. The design sprang out of itself, with no precedent and nothing following it” (“Taliesin West: An Interpretive Guide”). Indeed, the mountains spoke to Wright, inspiring him to design Taliesin West on a triangular floor plan, repeated in the shapes from the pool to the upturned redwood beams. His traditional Taliesin Cherokee red was slightly darkened to suit the desert siennas and browns.

View of the McDowells from my mentor's office

Capitalizing upon Arizona’s almost constant sun, Wright sought to capture the breathtaking play of light in the buildings of Taliesin West. Tilting the site slightly off the direct compass points lets the sun and shade dance throughout the buildings (“Taliesin West: An Interpretive Guide”). The angular indents in the desert masonry walls created deep shadows, mimicking the outline of boulders cutting across the mountains. Wright also used the sun to his advantage when designing the drafting studio. Toplighting allows soft natural light to permeate the studio from all sides, annihilating shadows to create the perfect drawing environment (“Taliesin West: An Interpretive Guide”). Continuing with the triangle motif, the Taliesin West drafting studio inverted and pushed outward the “abstract forest” of triangular posts pointing down in Taliesin’s drafting studio in Wisconsin, sensitive to the different geometric shapes of the exterior landscapes at each site (Maddex, 50 Favorite Rooms by Frank Lloyd Wright).

Taliesin West Drafting Room; Source: MIT Libraries

Taliesin drafting room in Wisconsin; Source: Architectural Digest

Ever-sensitive to the properties of light, Wright often admonished young architects to “Never design houses where people have to sit facing the light. If you’re sideways, you can turn your head and see. And that’s the best way.” To avoid the glare of the intense southwestern sun, Wright designed Taliesin West using the repertoire of triangles, once again deconstructing the box: “Unfortunately, every building has four sides. That’s the beauty of the triangle. With a triangle you can manage it so that nobody has to sit facing the light” (Frank Lloyd Wright: His Living Voice). 

Although Wright did make small changes to Taliesin West almost every winter, substituting glass for canvas was perhaps the most disputed—and the most rewarding. In 1941, Wright claimed that “Not one inch of glass is going into Taliesin West. This is a tent-like building, and glass has no place here at all.” However, once swayed by his wife’s request for glass, Wright reversed his opinion, contending that “The camp, when thus converted from canvas overhead to glass, will not only be a bewilderingly beautiful thing, of which we may all be justly proud, but glass will have invaded the desert spaces in a way and on a scale not seen before” (“Taliesin West: An Interpretive Guide”). Like the stained glass of Wright’s previous years, the glass windows at Taliesin West marry exterior and interior, increasing the intimacy between occupants and nature.

Sitting in my mentor’s office, I directly experience Wright’s vision: walls of desert rubble anchor me to the earth as I gaze out across the saguaro-studded and cholla-dotted mesa melding into the violet mountains.

Entrance to my mentor's office

My lesson plan based on Taliesin West focuses on sustainability through passive design, which uses natural energy sources in lieu of purchased energy. As Wright intuited long ago, passive design allows the building to capitalize upon natural ventilation, wind patterns, and the position of the sun. Orientation of the building, position and size of the windows, and color of the materials all affect energy usage. 

Tomorrow, I am looking forward to touring the desert shelters created by M.Arch students over the years in homage to Wright’s original canvas-topped tents that were Taliesin West. Next week, I will fill you in on these unique—to say the least—dorms.