There are many ways of approaching the new Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and perhaps the best is the roundabout route that has been opened up by the timely appearance of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Drawings for a Living Architecture” in a monumental volume published for the Bear Run Foundation and the Edgar J. Kaufmann Charitable Foundation by Horizon Press ($35). With its generous format and with reproductions of exquisite faithfulness, this is not merely a grand cross-section of Wright’s work but the most intimate means of coming in contact with his mind and genius. It is not unusual for an architect to be a man of talent in the kindred arts of painting and sculpture; that, indeed, was almost the classic preparation for an architect in the early Renaissance, and architects like Le Corbusier have probably spent as much of their time at the easel as at the drawing board. What is unusual about Wright is that the sketches and the finished presentation drawings of his buildings are works of art in their own right, carrying his unmistakable signature. Both his crayon sketches and his plans express in the most sensitive way the exhilarating and positively liberating effect of his genius. The drawings show—sometimes more clearly even than the actual buildings—the combination of formal discipline and effulgent feeling, the union of the mechanical and the romantic, the union of the audacious engineer, enthralled by the possibilities of technology, and the highly individualized artist, that were the man himself. The color reproductions are particularly good. Wright used one of the most difficult of media, the colored crayon, as well as water color, in renderings whose handling of landscape and foliage sometimes reminds one of Dürer’s sketches, yet the drawings have a kind of architectural firmness because of the use of fine straight lines, seemingly ruled, to convey an underlying sense of geometric structure, in sky or background as well as in building. But the color, even when used to embellish the plans, remains delicately lyrical, with an early-morning freshness.
Here, before his plans and elevations were transformed into buildings, are examples of Wright’s creative intentions at their purest. If not a single one of these projects had been carried out, one would still know him for the original artist that he was, the inexhaustible creator, whose formal structures and images, far from shrinking into a convention, were unfolding until the very moment of his death and were far more rich and free in the last third of his life than in his early years. Who but Wright could have conceived the fabulous setting of his proposed Baghdad Opera House, placed in a large, circular garden, which in turn was to be walled in by a low, circular “ziggurat” with parking space for over fourteen hundred cars? There are many vital aspects of Wright’s architecture—above all, those produced by movement through space—that cannot be translated into perspective drawings, so one must not think of these renditions, however evocative, as an equivalent for the experience of the buildings themselves. But these imagined forms are unique for their immediate revelation of Wright’s personality, with his fingertip sensitiveness, his expansive response to nature, his delight in the intricate play of natural and fabricated forms, his immense, unflagging vitality—the vitality that enabled him, like his Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, to sustain earthquake blows that would have shattered another personality. Wright’s architectural work was just such a defiant break with the past, just such an attempt to establish a firm American core as Whitman had conceived half a century earlier, and his whole accomplishment could be described, from first to last, as a “Song of Myself.” In these plans and renderings, one has Wright the poet without any disturbing afterthoughts about the relation of his architectural fantasies to the needs and functions they served, or the conditions of climate and weather they had to meet, or their responsibility to the neighborhood or the community, or the precedent that they helped establish—or failed to establish—for other buildings. Here, in fact, in terms of an old definition of architecture, is pure “Delight,” dwarfing all considerations of “Commodity” and “Firmness.” Wright’s drawings live in their own world, self-begotten, self-enclosed, often breathtaking in their originality and endearing in their loveliness. When his designs fail aesthetically—as I feel that his designs for the Rogers Lacy Hotel in Dallas, the garish Golden Beacon skyscraper in Chicago, and the Marin County public buildings all deplorably fail—it is usually because the artist was led astray by his sheer technical exuberance, which tempted him to ignore his own sense of fitness and to flout other human responses.
Just because of its direct, unembarrassed presentation of Wright’s personality with a minimum of textual explication, his “Drawings” is, I think, the most satisfactory monograph that has been published on his architecture, though I would not belittle the pioneer studies of Wasmuth and Wijdeveld. Any building of Wright’s must be viewed within the frame of his life’s work that this book provides, and any failure must be viewed within the perspective of his long series of triumphs in a career pursued without regard for historical convention or chic contemporary stereotypes. By the same token, when Wright failed, he failed with originality and decision—the inverted triumph of a great acrobat who so despises the safety nets that he would rather break his neck than rely on them. Wright dared greatly in all that he undertook, and above all he dared to be himself. Loving Emerson, he must have recognized a special personal blessing in Emerson’s statement that “whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” Wright lived to see the confident, self-reliant America of Emerson and Whitman, even the mugwump America of Howells, turn into that meek, tame, glossily corrupt totalitarian “democracy” which now lives—or half lives—in the shadow world of the television screen. To one who had the audacity to sin against the conventions of this society in almost every way except its love for exhibitionism and publicity, much may be forgiven. Wright was a chip off the old American block. In the sense in which the term still applied before the Civil War, he might be called one of the last Americans—a distinction he shared with such a profoundly different personality as Robert Frost. In his unique development, both the good and the bad qualities one associates with that role were exaggerated: on one hand his isolationism, his anti-Europeanism, his belligerence, his lightly triggered arrogance, his colossal self-admiration, but over against this his originality, his freshness, his gay generosity, his boundless affirmation of life, his belief that the world need not remain decayed and corrupt but might be made over anew in the morning.
These thoughts on his life and character temper all that I am bound, out of my respect for Wright’s greatness as an artist, to say about the Guggenheim Museum, the only example of his architecture in New York. If I have occasion to speak severely, remember that I am talking about a true artist, one of the most richly endowed geniuses this country has produced—an artist who has no need for the apologetic leniency one might accord to a lesser talent. For the most serious flaws in Wright’s work, it may be that our country fully shares reproof with the artist. Had we had the proud understanding, when he was in mid-career, to encourage him with great commissions, we would have earned the right to challenge his narcissism and his complacent egocentricity and to require a more sober perfection than he, in the sheer willfulness of his genius, was prepared to achieve. Wright was at his best with appreciative but self-reliant clients, and in an equally appreciative America he might have risen to more searching demands and thrown away the shallow showmanship that on too many occasions marred his architecture no less than his public relations.
The Guggenheim Museum is a formidable, ponderous, closed-in concrete structure of almost indescribable individuality; the main element, the art gallery, might be called an inverted ziggurat that tapers toward the bottom—not the Mesopotamian kind, which stood on a square base, but Bruegel’s round version in his “Tower of Babel.” Functionally, this museum, which occupies a whole block front on Fifth Avenue, from Eighty-eighth to Eighty-ninth Street, divides into two parts—at the south end a low, telescoped tower (the ziggurat) crowned by a wired-glass dome visible solely from the air, and at the north end an attached administration building only half its height, a combination of rectangular and circular forms, with portholes for windows, opening on viewless balconies with solid parapets. The ground floor of the tower is recessed under the overhanging second floor to create a deep shadow, so that the tower appears to be set on a strong horizontal base formed by the continuous concrete band of the second-floor wall, which seems, because of the shadow, to float in space. In many of Wright’s later designs, such as the unexecuted group of funeral chapels in San Francisco, such a broad horizontal base serves both to bring together separate elements and to set the building apart from the immediate landscape, as was done in such Renaissance designs as the villas in Frascati. In the Museum, the base seems wholly detached and aesthetic—not functional, as in the case of Wright’s early prairie houses, which rested, without the usual cellar and foundations, on a low pedestal. The main mass, the tower, is set back from the building lines at the southwest corner, where the second-story wall bulges out into a bay that emphasizes, in profile, the wider curve and sloping sides of the ziggurat.
Despite its dull color, a sort of evaporated-milk ochre, this great monolith stands out boldly from the flat, anonymous apartment houses in the neighborhood, the positiveness of the form offsetting the all too congenial mediocrity of tone. The building is so definitely a thing apart, so different from every other one on Fifth Avenue, that the sprawling, pale-green letters (along the lower edge of the second-story wall) that identify it may almost be forgiven for their feebleness because they are actually not needed at all. As an external symbol of contemporary abstract art, this building has a genuine fitness in its severe rationality of form. But Wright had, out of respect for the materials and constructive elements he chose, denied himself the more enlivening resources of which he was master. This building is non-traditional, non-representational, non-historical abstract art in its own right; indeed, it not merely coincides with the contents, it supersedes them. You may go to this building to see Kandinsky or Jackson Pollock; you remain to see Frank Lloyd Wright.
From the moment I examined the preliminary drawings I was disturbed and puzzled by its design, and I am still disturbed, though further reflection and observation have revealed a little of Wright’s intentions and decisions. At that, almost every part of this design leads to a critical question mark. Let us first consider the exterior, and, to begin with, the choice of monolithic concrete. Whether it is in the raw state imprinted by the mold, or whether it is smoothed and painted, concrete remains a sullen material. If left in the rough, as in Le Corbusier’s Maison d’Unité d’Habitation, in Marseille, or in Louis Kahn’s Yale Art Gallery, it is tolerable only at a distance; if it is smooth, no matter how carefully it is poured, cracks and splotches are bound to show from the beginning, and if the smoothness is covered with a cement paint, as in this case, it lacks texture and character. Worst of all, the flawed surface denies the solidity of the material, as if it were hastily done in plaster over canvas. Wright was a master of texture, in brickwork no less than in stone. Yet in this building, by its nature a showpiece, he was content to emphasize the sheer elephantine solidity of the heavy concrete walls. Is it possible that this structure, seemingly designed from the foundations up as if it were a fortification, was meant to be precisely that—as indestructible as he could make it? There would be at least a strong subjective justification behind this folly. Two of Wright’s early buildings, among the best of his first twenty-five years as an architect, were prematurely demolished—the Midway Gardens in Chicago and the Larkin office building in Buffalo—and now the Imperial Hotel seems doomed. Did he design the Guggenheim Museum as a super-pillbox that would resist vandalism or demolition as effectively as those surviving concrete bunkers Hitler’s minions built along the Channel coast? Wright is reported to have said that if a nuclear bomb destroyed New York, his building, on its cushioned foundation, would merely bounce with the shock and survive. Thus Wright would be left, in effect, surveying the ruins, ironically triumphing over the city that had waited till the end of his life to give him this one opportunity. He may have been consoled by the thought, but, apparently to insure that triumph, he sacrificed the purposes of the Museum and created an empty monument as the sole prospective occupant of an untenanted world. In his plan for the Baghdad Opera House garage, Wright turned an embarrassment—the need for motorcar parking—into a magnificent opportunity, but in the Guggenheim Museum he turned an opportunity into an obstacle. Even as a fortress, even as a bomb shelter, it falls short of perfection.
His seeming decision to leave behind an indestructible monument should perhaps enlist our sympathy, but the result does not merit our approval. From this error all the worst features of the exterior design spring. It is formidably impressive, but it is not expressive of anything except the desire for monumental solidity. Montgomery Schuyler, the nineteenth-century architectural critic, said that H. H. Richardson’s overponderous buildings were defensible solely in a military sense, and the gibe applies equally to Wright’s museum. Only in the intimate touches do the more lovable features of Wright’s imagination emerge, such as the banks of green foliage that provide a flare of living color and texture along the Fifth Avenue approach. There is nothing else in this exterior to reduce the sense of grim military self-sufficiency, and the office wing is just as massive and as sparing of windows as the main structure. Except for the wealth of greenery—particularly effective in the motor court, which is framed by the entrance—there is nothing of Wright’s specific imprint in the outward structure but the circular form. In using rounded forms, he shares honors with Eric Mendelsohn, who first suggested the special plastic quality of concrete in the imaginative architectural sketches he published after the end of the First World War. Ever since Wright designed the Ralph Jester house, in Palos Verdes, California, back in the thirties, he was fascinated by rounded forms, curving ground plans, and circular enclosures, and he continued, with increasing felicity, to explore these architectural resources. His circular houses, such as the one he designed for his son, David, are among the best examples of his later work. But in accenting the massiveness of monolithic concrete by replacing windows with mere narrow horizontal slots between the floors of the Museum tower, Wright introduced an inflexible element into his design, for he proposed to make the amount of natural illumination, as well as the inner space, unalterable.
Again one searches for some reason besides Wright’s assertion of his own ego. His circular tower creates an exhibition room whose dimensions in no way can be modified to suit the needs of a particular showing. This is an all-or-nothing building; one takes it on Wright’s terms or one does not take it at all. In planning it, what Wright did was to redesign his V. C. Morris shop building, in San Francisco, which has the same system of interior circulation, but he hollowed out the interior and replaced the flat Morris façade with an exterior that would properly correspond with the circular interior of the Museum. Unfortunately, his interior scheme, a brilliant one for a shop, because it increases the temptations to buy by spreading all the merchandise before the eye, is a ruinous one for a museum, in which the works of art, surely, should impose their needs on the building. But Wright never had a place for the painter in any of his buildings, and it was perhaps too much to hope that there would be a place for him even in an art museum.
For all that the exterior of the Museum is contemporary abstract art, in creating it Wright hid his light, so to speak, under a concrete funnel, and it is only in the interior that one may see it burning—in such a dazzling fashion, in fact, that it negates its function by obscuring all the other works of art that a museum supposedly exists to display. If the outside of the building says Power—power to defy blast, to resist change, to remain as immune to time as the Pyramids—the interior says Ego, an ego far deeper than the pool in which Narcissus too long gazed. On the outside, Wright’s composition puts this architecture under the wing of the New Brutalist school; on the inside, he is the old Romanticist, singing—as if he were alone in the wilderness—the Song of Myself, but without communicating the sense of speaking for all other men and inviting their contributions, and enhancing their personalities, too, that made Whitman’s swelling ego so lovable.
Thus, though the exterior of the Museum is far from negligible as “building,” it is a feat for which the contractors and workers deserve heartier congratulations than the architect. More than one builder shied away from this difficult task, and the architectural pleasure evoked by the massive concrete forms is unduly small when one considers the immense effort and expense involved. For while, as in all of Wright’s buildings, the interior and exterior are conceived as organically one, in this case the outer expression is mere “building” or “engineering,” while Wright’s special gifts—and his sometimes defiant weaknesses as an architect—do not come to life until one gains the interior. In lesser degree this is true of many other domed structures—like the Pantheon, in Rome, and Santa Sophia, in Istanbul—but this distinction particularly applies to the Guggenheim Museum.
Yet once you come close to the Guggenheim Museum, Wright has you in his hold. From the time you scrape your feet on the unmistakably Wright grating in the vestibule and grasp the bronze bar that, serving as handle, stretches from top to bottom of the glass door, you are under his enchantment. Entering, you are in a monumental hall of exalted proportions. The form is circular, and the spiralling ramp that ascends it—broken by a bulging bay on each floor—creates a rotating band of light and dark, of solid and void, that terminates in the opaque, almost flat wired-glass dome. This dome, a combination of broken-spider-web space divisions and strong supporting forms, is in Wright’s characteristic manner, though, uncharacteristically, it closes out the sky as completely as the concrete structure closes out the landscape. As for the strong curve of the bays, it not merely enhances the dynamism of the helical ramp, which widens with each floor, but makes it psychologically overpowering—indeed, physiologically almost unbearable. For the abrupter fall of the ramp on this sharp curve adds to the muscular tensions created by the form of the structure and its dizzy impact on the eye. This is not a tall building—only six stories—but it gives the effect of great height. Without ornament, without texture, without positive color, in a design as smoothly cylindrical as a figure by Fernand Léger—this is how Wright shows himself here a master of the abstract resources of modern form. Here is the freedom that Mendelsohn dreamed of and first brought into existence in the Einstein Tower, in Potsdam, but here, too, is the disciplined movement that the Baroque architects sometimes weakened in the exuberance of their ornament. In the very restraint of this composition, Wright, like a good disciple of Lao-tse, dramatizes its essential element—the central void, filled with light. It takes an effort to turn away from this striking composition, modelled with such boldness yet with such discipline and with such a vivid interplay of form between the curving ramp and the circular “utility stacks,” which house the closets and lavatories on each level, rising against the wall on either side of the elevator to visually tie all the floors together. As an object by itself, the Guggenheim Museum interior is, like the exterior, a remarkable example of abstract sculpture; indeed, it is a new kind of mobile sculpture, whose dynamic flow is accentuated by the silhouettes of the spectators, who form a moving frieze against the intermittent spots of painting on the walls. Thus Wright permitted the requirements of his composition to dominate both the works of art and the freedom of the viewer. They are needed to complete it, but apart from this they do not signify. Those who respond to the interior do proper homage to Wright’s genius. If the purpose of the Museum is solely to exhibit Wright, the interior has magnificent justification for its existence. And if the spectator forgets the other works of art it contains, the building is—for him if not for the neglected artists—a compensation and a unique reward. What other monumental interior in America produces such an overwhelming effect?
But architecture is not simply sculpture, and this building was meant also to serve as a museum. Wright has allotted the paintings and sculptures on view only as much space as would not infringe upon his abstract composition. It is an open secret that he paid no attention to the program set before him and overrode every attempt to make this great shell workable as a museum. The dominating conception would have needed complete revision if the building were to be anything but a display of Wright’s virtuosity. With all the willfulness of genius, he created the minimum amount of gallery space at the maximum cost and the all but complete sacrifice of the Museum’s essential requirements. This architect who stood for organic forms, who continually preached the lessons of life and growth and change, created a shell whose form had no relation to its function and offered no possibility of any future departure from his rigid preconceptions. Except for a single high-ceilinged, triangular side room opposite the main entrance, on the first floor, the sole exhibition space is that great circular wall within the tower. The continuous ribbon of promenade that winds along this wall has, for a museum, a low ceiling—nine feet eight inches—so only a picture well within the vertical boundaries thus created can be shown. The wall provided by Wright slanted outward, following the outward slant of the exterior wall, and paintings were not supposed to be hung vertically or shown in their true plane but were to be tilted back against it. The interior, under Wright’s direction, was painted the same dull cream as the rest of the Museum. To make matters worse, he interposed a sloping shelf between the wall and the spectator, so that anyone interested in a closer view—whether because of myopia or a curiosity about brush stroke and treatment—could not get near a canvas. Nor could he escape the light shining in his eyes from the narrow slots in the wall. Only on the first two floors, where there are no light slots, did he forgo this embarrassing embankment.
Short of insisting that no pictures at all be shown, Wright could not have gone much further to create a structure sublime in its own right but ridiculous as a museum of art. The most pretentious Renaissance palace could hardly have served a modern artist worse. There is not a mistake in rigidity of plan, in scale, or in setting made by the pompous academic temple museums of the past that Wright did not reproduce or actually cap. Even the sculpture on view has difficulty in surviving Wright’s treatment; it is in hopeless competition with the overwhelming sculptural force of the building itself. It is as if Wright had only one condition to impose on rival artists—unconditional surrender.
With infinite labor, the Museum has since sought to neutralize Wright’s blunders and to salvage the concept of the Museum as a public place for viewing works of art. But there are errors that no ingenuity can overcome, and one of them is the ramp. With it, the whole building is in motion, and the spectator must be in motion, too—part of a moving procession of people, with no place to sit down except a side bench at each floor, no place to retreat to, no possibility of changing his relation to the object viewed, except by viewing it at a distance, from the opposite side of the hall. The worst feature of the old-fashioned museum was the continuous corridor, and it is not improved here by being made a spiral. It remains only for some pious machine-minded disciple of Wright’s to go one step farther and place the pictures on a moving belt, so that the spectator may remain seated. The sloping ramp and ceiling, and the slanting vertical members that divide the wall into segments, magnify the problem—the annoying distortion of view—by destroying parallels and right angles for anyone who has come to look at pictures. Who has not felt an excruciating necessity to readjust a picture when it is hung even slightly out of kilter? In short, in the state Wright left the Museum in, it was magnificent but unusable, and the very worst service James Johnson Sweeney, its director, could have done Wright’s reputation would be to open the museum without making any changes. That might have been a justifiable revenge in return for Wright’s dismissal of all suggestions that lessened his sense of omnicompetence and omnipotence, but I am glad that the Museum did not avail itself of it. Failing to enlist Wright’s understanding collaboration, the museum authorities made a gallant effort to treat this formidable shell the way an engineer might treat a mountain he cannot remove but can circumvent by a tunnel. They called in Alfred Binder, a lighting engineer, and in association with Mr. Sweeney he evolved a system of back illumination that diffuses the natural light from Wright’s narrow slots in the wall and supplements it with artificial light—front lighting that focusses directly on the pictures instead of on the spectator. The cream of the interior was changed to white, and the pictures, instead of being propped against the wall, jut forth from it, supported by adjustable steel rods, as much as four feet. This device spares the visitor, as far as possible, the distortion of view caused by Wright’s interior plan and presents the pictures under an intense illumination, full of radiance but not without glare. Thus the lighted wall becomes the real frame of the pictures. My first impressions of this ingenious rectification were highly favorable, apart from my residual doubts about the value of constant artificial illumination of such intensity. But further visits have disclosed that when the sun pours through the dome the brilliance of the lighting is unkind to paintings of any subtlety, and that the glass-covered channels of the back lighting above the pictures are so near the paintings as to be distracting. Only when one sees the paintings across the wide void of the gallery, from the other side of the ramp, with the wall lighting troughs cut out by the impending ramp, does one view them in a satisfactory light. Though the present arrangement is doubtless better than Wright’s cavalier treatment, it needs to be modified and perfected. Even in that triangular exhibition room, the lights that face the spectator are irritatingly obtrusive.
Wright might have felt that these innovations ruined the architectural effect of his great spiral, but their sole effect, as far as I can see, is to alter the relation of light and dark, and sharpen the dramatic effect of the winding ribbons of space and wall. The method of displaying the pictures at a distance from the wall was employed, I understand, at the big Picasso exhibition in Rome, and it makes use of technical resources and concepts that belong as properly to our particular age as the lushly carved gilt picture frames did to the palatial mansions and pompous ceremonies they were part of. Very likely this “framing in light” will be copied by museums that do not have to meet the difficulties that Wright gratuitously imposed. On a plot as generous as this one, with Central Park to provide both a contrasting outer view and the maximum of natural light, he had a rare chance to evolve a solution that would do full justice to the art, to the museum visitor, and not least to his own imagination and invention. But by committing himself to the continuous ramp and the closed shell of the building he turned his back on that open landscape and the varied natural light that were his for the asking. As if to emphasize this perversity, he wasted half the imposing frontage on the administration offices and enclosed them in a wall as nearly windowless as the gallery. The fact that Wright threw away such advantages—which lent themselves to many alternative solutions in forms just as bold as the present one—is the bitterest pill this box holds for at least one of his admirers. Even in creating a place in which to exhibit himself as supreme master of abstract art, he hardly did justice to himself, for the self he put on display was his worse self, the exhibitionist and the autocrat, not the poetic creator of form who could evolve a hundred fresh architectural images while his rivals were painfully trying to evolve a single one.
In every aspect of architecture, except as an abstract composition in interior space, one’s final judgment of Wright’s Guggenheim Museum must, then, be a sadly unfavorable one, such a judgment as only an old friend may in fear and trembling impart to the living and only a lifelong admirer feel free to deliver over the work of the dead. In coming to this verdict, I pass over the minor flaws—the absence of sufficient storeroom space, so that one whole floor of the spiral must be devoted to storage, and the lecture hall, too wide for its purpose, too lacking in facilities to serve as a little theatre, since it has none of the flexibility of function and seating that such a room might easily have had—for in some degree they are all counterbalanced by many ingratiating touches. So, too, I ignore the administration building, with faults as flagrant as those in the Museum itself, and I blame the city’s building code, rather than Wright, for the lowness of the balustrade that lines the outer edge of the ramp—a lowness that seems scarcely adequate to its protective function. There are two dominant types of architecture today, both anti-functional, both meretricious—that of the package and that of the Procrustean bed. This museum is a Procrustean structure; the art in it must be stretched out or chopped off to fit the bed Wright prepared for it. The building magnifies Wright’s greatest weakness as an architect—the fact that once he fastened on a particular structural form (a triangle, a hexagon, a circle), he imposed it upon every aspect of his design, with no regard for the human purposes it presumably served. He thus sometimes turned a too strict logic into a hollow rhetoric. Despite all the sculptural strength the interior of the Guggenheim Museum boasts, the building as a whole fails as a work of architecture. And it is ironic to find that this failure is of exactly the same order—and because of the same kind of arrogance and willfulness—as that of Le Corbusier’s equally ambivalent Maison d’Unité d’Habitation. In both cases the plan is arbitrary, the interior space is tortured, and the essential functions are frustrated in order to comply with the architect’s purely formal aesthetic choices. This is not architectural originality but academicism.
The architects who pursue their formal aims so intently without consideration of all the public functions they serve are really claiming the privileges of the painter and the sculptor without fully accepting the responsibilities of their own profession. And they do this to their own disadvantage, for they forget that even minor irritations arising from functional deficiencies may seriously lower the aesthetic vitality of their form. In the case of the Guggenheim Museum, the lapses are not minor, and Wright’s hollow triumph is all the worse because he was lending the weight of his genius to the fashionable aberration of the moment—the curious belief that the functional aspects of architecture are unimportant. Instead of showing, as he well might have, how a great modern architect does justice to every aspect of a building, and not least the aesthetic—without making timid compromises or irrational sacrifices or frivolous omissions—Wright turned his back on that challenge. He thus defeated his own purpose by producing a building that in order to function at all could not remain what he had planned it to be long enough to be formally opened. The old should not set such a bad example to the young, and the greatest of our architectural masters should not, while still hale and of sound mind, have added such a codicil to his last will and testament. I can think of only one way of fully redeeming Wright’s monumental and ultimately mischievous failure—that of turning the building into a museum of architecture. This would be in keeping with the form of the building and would cover up most of its mistakes. Could it be that it was this, and not abstract painting, that Wright had in mind, at least unconsciously, all the time? ♦
