Fallingwater Rising by Franklin Toker
Author:Franklin Toker
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307425843
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00
The exposure of Fallingwater in the magazines was important and unprecedented, but an even greater tsunami of publicity came in the newspapers. The New York Times could not even wait for MoMA’s official opening for it to run a positive review by its normally antimodern critic, Edward Alden Jewell. Even more surprising was the first lavishly illustrated story on the house, in the magazine section of the New York Herald Tribune of February 6. This must have come over the furious objections of the Trib’s art critic Royal Cortissoz, the cranky old stegosaurus who, privately, was an “irate critic” of the house.
We have no idea how many hundreds—thousands?—of newspapers carried the boilerplate articles on Fallingwater that were offered up by the various news services, but a sampling of three dozen newspaper and magazine articles on the MoMA exhibition is preserved in that museum’s archive. Feature stories appeared in publications as diverse as the ChristianScience Monitor; the Springfield (Massachusetts) Morning Union; the Des Moines Register and Tribune (with an elaborate rotogravure feature); the Albuquerque News; and the Dallas Times-Herald. A long article appeared in We the People: Pennsylvania in Review for February 1, 1938. Other papers, from Los Angeles to Alaska and Colonial Williamsburg, ran the MoMA press release on the New York exhibition or reported on local showings of the Fallingwater traveling exhibit in the years following. Bill Hedrich’s famous photo was plastered over newspapers by the hundreds. Was ever a private home so widely publicized?
What did the correspondents write about Fallingwater? Pretty much what their successors are still writing today. First came the fascination with the daring structure; second, admiration for Wright’s achievement in harmonizing the house with its natural setting; third, the interior glamour and the labor-saving devices inside the house—devices that are naturally less remarkable today. A few newspapers and magazines alluded to Wright’s resurgence as a creative designer, but only Max Putzel in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch bothered to say, in effect, “Welcome back, Frank Lloyd Wright.” Neither Architectural Forum nor Time mentioned Wright’s years-long famine before Fallingwater, perhaps because they themselves had once joined the orgy of praise for the European modernists.
It is peculiar, too, that none of the writers remarked how different Fallingwater was from Wright’s ornamented and historicist work of the 1920s. Nor did they split hairs over his various disagreements with the Europeans. The few articles that tangled with the “European question” echoed MoMA’s publicity release and talked about modernism returning to the United States “in the guise of a European influence.” This theme is rarely found in popular articles on Fallingwater today, since the topic became a nonissue long ago.
Appropriately for a design that was itself so international, Fallingwater’s publicity went international at warp speed. Beginning in February, Fallingwater was splashed in architectural magazines in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, and Finnish. While their source was usually the Architectural Forum issue, the foreign architectural press generally dropped Johnson’s Wax and Wright’s other new buildings, and glorified Fallingwater alone.
A second wave
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