Art: Naughty Nautilus

Build thee more stately mansions, O my

soul,

As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the

last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome

more vast . . .

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Chambered Nautilus

For the better part of his 84 years, Frank Lloyd Wright, the grand, infuriating and tireless old nautilus of U.S. architecture, has built ever more amazing mansions, put ever vaster domes over such projects as a mortuary in San Francisco, a chapel for Florida Southern College, a laboratory tower for Johnson’s Wax. When the Guggenheim Foundation asked him in 1945 to build an art museum for Manhattan’s upper Fifth Avenue, he designed what might be taken as a monument to himself. It would be shaped, he said, “like the chambered nautilus.” The picture gallery would consist of a quarter-mile ramp, slowly rising in a spiral to a height of 72 ft. where it would culminate in a huge dome.

The Guggenheim Foundation accepted his design (cost: $2,000,000), but New York City authorities prosaically declared that the museum would violate building laws; among other things, the building’s 6-ft. overhang was against regulations.* Last week Wright, who has described the building code as being “for fools,” showed up at a hearing in Manhattan. He grandly agreed to eliminate the overhang, made plans to appeal the other objections.

Later, he explained his position: “Herei s one floor for one building, going indefinitely up. There is no building just like this.” It is “democratic” in design, unlike the “fascist” pattern of the usual skyscrapers, said he. “This building is neither Communist nor Socialist, but characteristic of the new aristocracy born of freedom to maintain it. The reactionary . . . will not really like it.”

*By Manhattan’s building code, there must be no overhang beyond the building line, save for 18 inches of ornamentation. One notable exception: a bare-breasted Venus (by Sculptor Wheeler Williams) on the facade of the Parke-Bernet Galleries. Yearly rent to city for the protruding anatomy: $25.