'FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AND THE CITY' Exhibition Set for the MoMA, Now thru 6/1

The Museum of Modern Art presents Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal, which celebrates the recent joint acquisition of Frank Lloyd Wright's extensive archive by MoMA and Columbia University's Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, on view from today, February 1 to June 1, 2014.

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)-perhaps the most influential American architect of the 20th century-was deeply ambivalent about cities. For decades, Wright was seen as the prophet of America's post-World War II suburban sprawl, yet the dispersed cities that he envisaged were also carefully planned-quite distinct from the disorganized landscapes that often developed instead. Paradoxically, Wright was also a lifelong prophet of the race for height that has played out around the world.

Through an initial selection of drawings, films, and large-scale architectural models, the exhibition examines the tension in Wright's thinking about the growing American city from the 1920s to the 1950s, when he worked simultaneously on radical new forms for the skyscraper and on a comprehensive plan for the urbanization of the American landscape titled "Broadacre City."

The exhibition is organized by Barry Bergdoll, Acting Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, MoMA, and Carole Ann Fabian, Director, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, with Janet Parks, Curator of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, and Phoebe Springstubb, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA.

On view is Wright's 1934-35 manifesto project, for what he called "Broadacre City," which embodied his quest for a city of private houses set in nature and spread across the countryside. He believed that advances in technology had rendered obsolete the dense cities created by industry and immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Distributed along a rectilinear grid, these one-acre homesteads were to be combined with small-scale manufacturing, community centers, and local farming, and interspersed with parklands to form a carpet-like pattern of urbanization. Visitors encounter the spectacular 12-foot-by-12-foot model of this plan, which merges one of the earliest schemes for a highway flyover with an expansive, agrarian domain. Promoted and updated throughout Wright's life, the model toured the country for several years in the 1930s, beginning with a display at New York City's Rockefeller Center. It is juxtaposed with the monumental models and drawings produced of his skyscraper visions: the six-foot tall model of his 1913 San Francisco Call Building; the model of his only built residential tower, the Price Tower, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma of 1952-56; and the eight-foot drawings of the Mile High tower project.