Art: A City for the Future

Nobody hates cities more than patriarchal U. S. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright. To him Manhattan is a “great huddle” whose skyscrapers are “one of the most infernal inventions.” Nevertheless it was in Manhattan’s great huddle last week that the Museum of Modern Art put on a huge exhibition of the life work of Frank Lloyd Wright. The 71-year-old architect went to Manhattan himself to install the exhibition.

As an exhibition, Wright’s show was no masterpiece. Its lack of explanations and jumble of diagrams left non-technical gallerygoers wondering what most of it meant. But for those who could tell a cantilever from a truss, it recorded as exciting a body of architectural thinking as has come from the brain of anyone since Michelangelo. Regarded by many as the greatest architect of the 20th Century, Frank Lloyd Wright is conceded even by skeptics to have one of the most restless and imaginative minds the art of architecture has ever known. Architect Wright began designing functional buildings in 1893, fathered the whole international modern architecture movement. In his 48 years of architecture, Wright has designed and built about 270 buildings, “every one an experiment.” Though conservatives have shuddered at the strangeness of his materials, the emphasis on horizontal line and the fancy-free boldness of his designs, no Frank Lloyd Wright house has ever cracked or buckled through faulty engineering.

Much of Architect Wright’s early work looked familiar to last week’s visitors, because nearly every apartment-house designer today uses ideas that Wright thought up more than a generation ago. More startling were designs of buildings erected in the past ten years like the Johnson Wax factory at Racine, Wis., whose flimsy-looking mushroom pillars (broad at the top and narrow at the base) involved a brand-new contribution to engineering.

Most ambitious exhibit was a twelve-foot-square model of a mythical community called “Broadacres.” “A new housing for civilization,” Broadacres is Wright’s answer to the problem of the crowded machine-age city. In Broadacres, homes, factories, office and municipal buildings are separated by wide park spaces planted with lawns and trees. Its farms rub elbows with its town hall. Its warehouses are part of its underground railway system.

City-Planner Wright, like many another architect, thinks that the bombing of Europe’s cities is likely to be a blessing in disguise. “After all,” says he, “what is St. Paul’s? An imitation of St. Peter’s in Rome. I don’t think anyone will miss Wren’s work much. Broadacres is going to England as soon as there is a chance for it to be shown there. This will be immensely beneficial to England.”