Wright on Exhibit: Frank Lloyd Wright's Architectural Exhibitions

by Kathryn Smith

Overview

The first history of Frank Lloyd Wright's exhibitions of his own work—a practice central to his career

More than one hundred exhibitions of Frank Lloyd Wright's work were mounted between 1894 and his death in 1959. Wright organized the majority of these exhibitions himself and viewed them as crucial to his self-presentation as his extensive writings. He used them to promote his designs, appeal to new viewers, and persuade his detractors. Wright on Exhibit presents the first history of this neglected aspect of the architect’s influential career.


Drawing extensively from Wright’s unpublished correspondence, Kathryn Smith challenges the preconceived notion of Wright as a self-promoter who displayed his work in search of money, clients, and fame. She shows how he was an artist-architect projecting an avant-garde program, an innovator who expanded the palette of installation design as technology evolved, and a social activist driven to revolutionize society through design. While Wright’s earliest exhibitions were largely for other architects, by the 1930s he was creating public installations intended to inspire debate and change public perceptions about architecture. The nature of his exhibitions expanded with the times beyond models, drawings, and photographs to include more immersive tools such as slides, film, and even a full-scale structure built especially for his 1953 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. Placing Wright’s exhibitions side by side with his writings, Smith shows how integral these exhibitions were to his vision and sheds light on the broader discourse concerning architecture and modernism during the first half of the twentieth century.


Wright on Exhibit features color renderings, photos, and plans, as well as a checklist of exhibitions and an illustrated catalog of extant and lost models made under Wright’s supervision.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691167220
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/25/2017
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	9.80(w) x 10.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Kathryn Smith is an architectural historian who specializes in Frank Lloyd Wright. Her books include Frank Lloyd Wright: American Master; Frank Lloyd Wright, Hollyhock House, and Olive Hill: Buildings and Projects for Aline Barnsdall; and Schindler House. She lives in Santa Monica, California.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments viii

1 Chicago Architectural Club, 1894–1914 1

2 The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright, 1893–1930 and Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, 1932 41

3 Broadacre City, 1935 87

4 Museum of Modern Art, 1933–53 109

5 The Italian Exhibition and Sixty Years of Living Architecture, 1948–56 169

6 Coda: 1957–59 211

7 Conclusion 222

APPENDIX A Frank Lloyd Wright Exhibitions, 1894–1959 231

APPENDIX B Frank Lloyd Wright Models, 1894–1959 240

Notes 248

Index 267

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This invaluable book fills a huge lacuna in our understanding of Wright and his work. In Smith's hands, each exhibition presented here becomes a self-contained story that contributes to the larger narrative of Wright's relentless determination to advance his ideas."—Jack Quinan, author of Frank Lloyd Wright's Martin House: Architecture as Portraiture

"Meticulously researched and well written. This book will be a foundation for future scholarship."—Richard Cleary, author of Merchant Prince and Master Builder: Edgar J. Kaufmann and Frank Lloyd Wright

Editorial Reviews

"The care, audacity, and originality with which Wright orchestrated the public presentation of his revolutionary architecture from start to finish . . . is laid out with exceptional thoroughness in Kathryn Smith's Wright on Exhibit. . . . An intriguing treatise on career development, and [it] is so illuminatingly detailed that it gives a richer portrait of Wright than many full-length biographies."—-Martin Filler, New York Review of Books

From the Publisher

"Smith refutes the public and historical notion of Wright as a self-promoter by drawing on evidence of his being an innovator and a social activist who sought divergent routes to publicizing his work for the sake of artistic progress and social improvements. Smith illuminates the multimedia component of Wright's work . . . to shed light on the broader discourse of architecture and design as it approaches a new age of modernity."

Metropolis