Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking The Archive

In 2012, the Museum of Modern Art in New York – with the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library of Columbia University – acquired the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation archive. Now it is holding a major retrospective to commemorate the great American architect’s birth 150 years ago. We asked Kenneth Frampton to talk about the exhibition.

- Kenneth Frampton

This is the eleventh occasion that the work of Frank Lloyd Wright has been represented at the Museum of Modern Art since his inclusion in the International Style exhibition of 1932, although it is about 23 years since MoMA last recognised the full scope of his achievement. In this regard, it is impressive with respect to the long haul of history that one of the first exhibits to have been dredged from the archive is the barely legible elevation of the Queen Anne House that Wright, at the age of 20 in 1887, submitted to the prestigious office of Adler and Sullivan by way of obtaining employment as a pencil in the hand of a master.

What is unique about this exhibition – curated by Barry Bergdoll of the Museum of Modern Art with Jennifer Gray, in association with the Avery Library, Columbia University, directed by Carole Ann Fabian – is that it is a scholarly celebration of the transfer of the entire Frank Lloyd Wright archive to New York, from the repositories of the two Taliesins, that is from Spring Green Wisconsin and Scottsdale Arizona; in the first instance, in terms of paper, to the Avery Library, Columbia University, and in the second instance, with regard to the models, etc. to the MoMA architectural collection. The paper, needless to say, carries the day, not only with regard to the sum total of the archive comprising 50,000 drawings, 125,000 photos, 300,000 sheets of correspondence and 2,700 manuscripts, not to mention 285 films. As befits the occasion, this is an unusual exhibition of scholarship in action, representing the works of a wide range of contemporary scholars already engaged with Wrightian material, who have been specifically selected by Bergdoll to work on certain aspects of what amounts to a daunting archival legacy.