Content area
Full Text
Frank Lloyd Wright and the Living City Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove
Showing Frank Lloyd Wright in Glasgow is a risk. The country boy from Wisconsin brings a challenge to his contemporary architect- designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh on his own home ground, where the once derided Mackintosh is central to the cultural economy.
No one can rival Mackintosh for poetic intensity. His ladder-back chairs are more willowy than Wright's, his decorative patterns are suppler, his interiors more coherent and more magical. But he soon petered out. Wright knocks him out completely with sheer creative stamina, the power and audacity of architectural vision that lasted till his death in 1959.
Frank Lloyd Wright and the Living City (to 11 April) is the first of three modern masters exhibitions in the programme for `Glasgow 1999: UK City of Architecture and Design'. Mies van der Rohe and Alvar Aalto follow. Previous Wright exhibitions in Britain have shown only his alluring decorative side. The Glasgow show is a much more serious and ambitious enterprise, less of an object show, more of a concept one. It uses drawings, photographs and models to convey the hugeness of Wright's futuristic vision.The mile high building. The million seater church.
Wright was the child of 1860s anarchy, imbibing Emerson and Thoreau's ideals of individual liberty. He was born at a time when Walt Whitman was still pounding out his poetry of open-road America and sexual splendour. As a young architect, Wright invented a new way of living based on his belief in the transcendence of nature. His low-lying prairie houses literally returned the people to the land. The free-flowing internal architecture of these buildings was an early...