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THIS IS PRECISELY the right moment for a Frank Lloyd Wright retrospective. Architecture is in even more of a shambles than the American family, not to mention America's schools, suburbs and streets. And the middle class that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for is in a pincers squeeze between the proliferating poor and the increasingly rich.
Wright was just about the only great architect in America who designed for the middle class. This is the moment to remember what he believed, with almost religious fervor: that architecture could, in its variety and its integrity, make life better, not just for effete eastern snobs, but for the middle classes, who for so long were at the center of the American dream. He interpreted and redefined the American dream, even as that dream kept changing. In Wisconsin, where he was born on June 8, 1867, (although to the end of his long life he lied and said it was 1869), it was a bucolic dream of hard work, land of your own and communion with nature. By the time he died, just short of his 92nd birthday, in 1959, the dream revolved around a car in every carport, air-conditioned split-levels, strip shopping malls. Wright had pioneered them all, designed them all into houses and neighborhoods on land of their own, in communion with nature. Except that he'd envisioned the housing development as a paradise for the spirit, not as consumer hell. A great deal of the reality of the American landscape today is a bastardized, bottom-line builder's version of what Wright wrought in his 1,000 drawings and 484 buildings.
About 190 of Wright's buildings are represented in the "Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect" exhibition that begins previews at the Museum of Modern Art Wednesday and opens to the public next Sunday. On view through May 10 will be 350 drawings, 30 scale models both original and reconstructed, 126 photographs, architectural fragments, stained-glass windows and six building sections that demonstrate both his esthetic and his technical innovations.
As mounted by Terence Riley, chief curator, and Peter Reed, assistant curator in the Modern's Department of Architecture and Design, it's a sprawling, brawny show, sufficiently dynamic to suggest Wright's complex, contradictory, larger-than-life accomplishment. It makes as good a case for Wright:...