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ARCHITECTURE MONOGRAPHS

PUBLISHER
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 9.5 x 12 in. / 256 pgs / 300 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Out of stock indefinitely

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2017 p. 2   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781633450264 TRADE
List Price: $65.00 CDN $87.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

TERRITORY
NA ONLY

Bergdoll and Gray are showing us surprising sides of the architect, demonstrating that the arrival of the archive in New York makes possible a fresh age in Wright scholarship.
— Paul Goldberger

  

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking the Archive

Edited by Barry Bergdoll, Jennifer Gray. Text by John Michael Desmond, Carole Ann Fabian, Elizabeth S. Hawley, Juliet Kinchin, Neil Levine, Ellen Moody, Therese O’Malley, Ken Tadashi Oshima, Michael Osman, Spyros Papapetros, Janet Parks, Matthew Skjonsberg, David Smiley, Mabel O. Wilson.

Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking the Archive

Unpacking Wright’s archive of more than two million objects, on the 150th anniversary of the master architect’s birth

Published for a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this catalog reveals new perspectives on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, a designer so prolific and familiar as to nearly preclude critical reexamination. Structured as a series of inquiries into the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives at Taliesin West, Arizona (recently acquired by MoMA and Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University), the book is a collection of scholarly explorations rather than an attempt to construct a master narrative. Each chapter centers on a key object from the archive that an invited author has “unpacked”— tracing its meanings and connections, and juxtaposing it with other works from the archive, from MoMA, or from outside collections. Wright’s quest to build a mile-high skyscraper reveals him to be one of the earliest celebrity architects, using television, press relations and other forms of mass media to advance his own self-crafted image. A little-known project for a Rosenwald School for African-American children, together with other projects that engage Japanese and Native American culture, ask provocative questions about Wright’s positions on race and cultural identity. Still other investigations engage the architect’s lifelong dedication to affordable and do-it-yourself housing, as well as the ecological systems, both social and environmental, that informed his approach to cities, landscapes and even ornament. The publication aims to open up Wright’s work to questions, interrogations and debates, and to highlight interpretations by contemporary scholars, both established Wright experts and others considering this iconic figure from new and illuminating perspectives.


Carole Ann Fabian is Director of Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University.

Barry Bergdoll is Curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art and Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology in the Department of Art History, Columbia University.

Matthew Skjonsberg is a Ph.D. Researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Michael Osman is Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and Design at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Neil Levine is Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of History of Art and Modern Architecture at Harvard University.

Jennifer Gray is Project Research Assistant in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Therese O’Malley is Associate Dean in the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

Juliet Kinchin is Curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Ken Tadashi Oshima is Professor in Department of Architecture at the University of Washington.

Elizabeth S. Hawley is a Ph.D. Candidate at The Graduate Center, City University of New York and Museum Research Consortium Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art.

Mabel O. Wilson is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University.

John Michael Desmond is Professor in the College of Art and Design at Louisiana State University.

Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Architecture in the School of Architecture, Princeton University.

Janet Parks is Curator of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University.

Ellen Moody is Assistant Projects Conservator at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

David Smiley is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University.

Perspective drawing of Fallingwater (Kaufmann House), Mill Run, Pennsylvania, 1934, is reproduced from 'Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking the Archive.'

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

Apollo

Will Wiles

The words ‘American architect’ feel a little bare when applied to Wright—convention pushes for the addition of a superlative, such as ‘greatest’ or ‘best loved.'

Vanity Fair

Paul Goldberger

It is always the year of Frank Lloyd Wright, so monumentally does he loom over American architecture.

The Art Newspaper

Jonathan Glancey

an ambitious catalogue featuring wide-ranging essays

Artsy

Alexandra Alexa

Frank Lloyd Wright is synonymous with American architecture.

Time

Olivia B. Waxman

He was the man called ‘the Michelangelo of the 20th century’ by the architect Eero Saarinen, so it's no surprise that 150 years after his birth, the work of renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright still provides plenty to unpack.

The Globe and Mail

Kristina Ljubanovic

Positions the architect as a consummate innovator -- not outside of history, but very much of his time, with ideas that resonate still.

Curbed

Alexandra Lange

a fascinating window into America’s cultural past... read the short, sharp essays in the catalog

Bloomberg Business Week

Paul Goldberger

remarkable... a fresh age in Wright scholarship… shows that Wright’s long career, as multidimensional and accomplished as that of almost any architect in history, was richer and more complex than even admiring critics knew.

National Trust for Historic Preservation

Lauren Walser

Frank Lloyd Wright was a radical architect, designer, thinker, and intellectual.

New York Journal of Books

Marilyn Gates

Clearly written and tightly focused... this hefty volume would be a nice library addition for general readers curious about American urban history.

Bookforum

Julian Rose

Buildings are dynamic things, not static objects. A look through Wright's archive reminds us that some will exist only in our imaginations, some will be lived in exactly as they were first designed, and others will be destroyed or altered beyond recognition.

Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking the Archive

STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely.

FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/12/2017

Extending the possibility of ornament: Frank Lloyd Wright's design universe

Extending the possibility of ornament: Frank Lloyd Wright's design universe

The architecture blockbuster of 2017, Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking the Archive, opens to the public Monday at The Museum of Modern Art, and with it comes a renewed interest in the work of the most quintessentially American of all American architects. Reproduced from the stellar exhibition catalog, “March Balloons” is a 1955 drawing based on one of Wright’s 1926 cover designs for Liberty—all of which were rejected by the magazine. A variation on this design was also used for a custom rug, which was detailed in a 1950-51 plan for the living room of Wright’s son, David, and daughter-in-law, Gladys. It is fascinating to see through projects large and small how Wright was able to create his own design universe. "While turning from the three-dimensionality of artifacts to the flatness of the printed page, Wright's colorful designs for the cover of the magazine Liberty (1927-28) offered him the opportunity to extend possibilities of ornament's transference across materials and scales," Spyros Papapetros writes. continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/9/2017

Place as Spectacle in 'Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking the Archive'

Place as Spectacle in 'Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking the Archive'

Neither a mid-century rendering of a one-day space settlement, nor a sci-fi city on the future Planet Earth, this shimmering night perspective was produced in 1955 by Frank Lloyd Wright to depict his vision for the Madison Civic Center (Monona Terrace) in Madison, Wisconsin, which he began work on in 1938 and continued to revise until his death in 1959. Realized posthumously in much-altered form, the original plan called for a mega-structure partially cantilevered over Lake Monona. “By placing the main programmatic elements, including automobile access and parking, under a semicircular street-level terrace echoing the auditorium shape within, the civic center became a public forum,” Neil Levine writes in Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking the Archive. “With the lake as backdrop and the city as foreground, Wright pictured the theaterlike outdoor space as a place of spectacle.” continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/10/2017

From the prairie to the planets: the visionary architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright

From the prairie to the planets: the visionary architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright

When Frank Lloyd Wright completed his first independently commissioned building, the William Winslow house, in 1893, the Prairie Style was born—and American architecture changed forever. Over the next six decades, Wright would design more than 1,000 architectural works, realizing just over 500. In addition to seminal residential and public buildings like Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum, he designed chapels, apartment buildings, stables, clubs, schools, monuments, offices, factories, libraries and much more. Pictured here is an unbuilt project, the Gordon Strong Automobile Objective and Planetarium, Sugarloaf Mountain, Maryland, 1924–25. continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/11/2017

The audacity of Frank Lloyd Wright's unbuilt mile-high skyscraper

The audacity of Frank Lloyd Wright's unbuilt mile-high skyscraper

"Full of vigor and plans for the future, as usual, the octogenarian architect whose activities have heightened with advancing years, said he has a mile high building on his drawings boards, conceiving it as a 510 story structure to provide office space for 100,000 employees of the state of Illinois, Cook county, and the city of Chicago.… ‘The Empire State Building would be a mouse by comparison,’ Wright said.… Long noted as a foe of skyscrapers, which he once described as weeds growing one upon another, Wright described his projected Goliath of skyscrapers as the ultimate in centralization. ‘If we’re going to have centralization, why not quit fooling around and have it, because it looks like it will take a century to decentralize as it is.’” – Chicago Sunday Tribune, August 26, 1926, reproduced from Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking the Archive. continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/8/2017

Celebrating Frank LLoyd Wright at 150

Celebrating Frank LLoyd Wright at 150

Today, we honor the 150th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright's birth, and next week the Museum of Modern Art opens Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking the Archive, the summer blockbuster organized around the prolific American architect's archive of more than two million objects. Pictured here is a lithograph promoting Wright’s affordable American System-Built Houses project, 1915-1917, commissioned by the Milwaukee-based real estate developer, Richards Company. “I believe that the architecture in America that fails to take into account the machine and modern organization tendencies is going to be of no great benefit to the people,” Wright wrote. “I do not want any mistake made about this new ‘System.’ These buildings are not in any sense the ready cut buildings we have all heard of where a little package of material is sold to be stuck together in any fashion. The American System-Built House is not a ready cut house, but a house… systematized in such a way that the result is guaranteed… I want to deliver beautiful houses to people at a certain price, key in packet.” continue to blog


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