A preeminent 20th century designer, Wright pioneered the Prairie School style of architecture and built such iconic structures as Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. To mark the 150th anniversary of his birth this month, Columbia's Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library and the Museum of Modern Art, the joint stewards of Wright’s archives, are presenting Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive.



“What more is there to say about Wright, this protean figure who had a 70-year career and designed more than 1,000 buildings, about half of which were built?” said Barry Bergdoll, the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia and a curator in the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture and Design, who organized the exhibition with Jennifer Gray, a 2011 alumna of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation who now works at MoMA.

Bergdoll realized that the best way to showcase the monumental scale of the archive—55,000 drawings, 300,000 sheets of correspondence, 125,000 photographs, 2,700 manuscripts and other materials—was not through a retrospective of Wright’s masterpieces, but an exhibition that was designed as more of an anthology. He invited a group of scholars to explore the collection, asking each to select and study an object or cluster of objects. The resulting exhibition consists of 12 sections, each curated by one or more of the scholars.

Related: CU People: Janet Parks, Curator and Archivist, Columbia News, June 21, 2017

“We arrived at the concept or trope of unpacking the archive, which represents both the literal unpacking of Wright’s archive after it arrived at Avery Library in 2013 and the metaphor of intellectually unpacking all of the richness that we found,” said Avery Director Carole Ann Fabian, who worked with Bergdoll on the exhibition.

The show features about 450 works dating from the 1890s through the 1950s, including everything from drawings, models, building fragments and furniture to film, textiles, photographs and scrapbooks. Some items have rarely or never been publicly displayed.

“You don’t think of scholarship as an action sport, with people running around and making connections, but, in fact, it is,” said Bergdoll, who structured Frank Lloyd Wright at 150 around a space that functions as a chronological spine to highlight many of the architect’s major projects. Rooms for each section branch off this central gallery, and each section is introduced by a short film in which the guest curators—many of whom are not Wright specialists—discuss the objects they chose and why. The films illuminate the period in which Wright lived, touching on issues of race, class, media, politics, education and the environment that still resonate today.



Video by Columbia News Video Team