Tastemaker by Monica Penick

Author:Monica Penick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

98. Exhibition Pavilion for Sixty Years of Living Architecture, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1953.

99. Interior, The Usonian House, at Sixty Years of Living Architecture, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1953.

The Guggenheim show was a great triumph, and print promotions and media coverage helped Wright’s acclaim soar. The Guggenheim Museum and House Beautiful each played significant roles. Wright may have intended the exhibition primarily as a retrospective of his work and as a prelude to his designs for the new Guggenheim building (completed in 1959), but his secondary motivation was surely to generate publicity for his still-vital architecture practice. He made his intentions clear in two publications produced by the Guggenheim Museum: an exhibition catalogue, Sixty Years of Living Architecture: The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright, and a souvenir booklet, The Usonian House. The Guggenheim Sixty Years catalogue was analogous to the publications that had accompanied Wright’s European installments of the Sixty Years exhibition: the catalogue featured a statement by Wright, key photographs, and an exhibition checklist. The souvenir booklet had the same format, but focused on the Usonian House; this afforded Wright yet another opportunity to showcase and advance his postwar residential practice (see fig. 97).

In the booklet, Wright introduced the Usonian Exhibition House with a bold statement that linked him to the current debate in which he and Gordon were participating: his Usonian House type, in development since the early 1930s, was the “first truly democratic expression of Architecture.” He had built numerous examples across the United States—including his first and most famous Usonian, the Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin (1936)—but Wright designed the Usonian Exhibition House in New York so that visitors could explore, at full scale and in person, the “real meaning of the term Organic Architecture.”45 For Wright, the Exhibition House proved that his design principles could be successfully applied to “democratic,” cost-conscious housing—or what he thought was such: he estimated the price of the as-built Exhibition House at $35,000 in 1953.46 The same house, he wrote, would have cost $15,000 in the 1930s. He noted, with apparent sincerity, that “times have changed.”47 He failed to acknowledge that both budgets were far above the contemporary average.

Wright used the Usonian Exhibition House to update his prewar domestic experiments, but he also wanted to prove his continued viability as a modern architect sensitive to the average “individual homester” who sought “a home . . . in the spirit in which our Democracy was conceived.”48 He emphasized a familiar theme, one that echoed Gordon’s: the American home should be designed for the “individual . . . appropriate to his circumstances—a life beautiful as he can make it—with her of course.”49 The “her” in Wright’s description was the “housewife,” whom he described in his introduction as a “planned for” and “central figure” in his Usonian House.50 This dream of the life beautiful, so he argued, was “within the reach of many.”51

Wright was determined to have the “many” tour his Usonian Exhibition House, but recognized the limited reach of the Guggenheim’s publicity

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