By JOHN MARTIN
Such is the importance and influence of Frank Lloyd Wright that an exhibition has been mounted that focuses not on his famous structures themselves, but on the designs for projects that were never realized.
"Frank Lloyd Wright: Designs for an American Landscape" highlights five unbuilt projects Wright (1867-1959) designed between 1922 and 1932. It offers a unique view of his aesthetic, one that combined attention to site, native forms and modern materials to create an organic architecture distinctive to America's wide open spaces.
In preparation for nearly six years, the exhibition, organized by the Library, the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, employs newly discovered material, three- dimensional models and computer simulations to bring Wright's projects to life. According to C. Ford Peatross, curator of the Architecture, Design and Engineering Collection in the Library's Prints and Photographs Division, the idea for the exhibition began in 1986 with a gift of important drawings from Donald D. Walker, a draftsman who worked for Wright at Taliesin, the architect's sprawling residence near Spring Green, Wis. Always a work in progress, Wright used Taliesin to experiment with an architecture that harmonized building and landscape.
Wright's sensitivity to natural conditions appears throughout the exhibition. The Gordon Strong Automobile Objective, for example, a proposed development for Sugarloaf Mountain, Md., reflects Wright's ambitious use of complex geometries to reveal and perfect the chosen site. Designed in 1924-25 as a destination for motorists from Washington and Baltimore, the futuristic tower crowns the truncated top of the mountain, reached by a spiraling roadway that merges into the design of the spiraling building. An ascent by automobile would treat the driver to an ever-changing panorama of the surrounding countryside.
Wright wanted his architecture to reflect the capability of modern technological advances, such as the automobile, which was enabling the population to move farther away from the central cities. He foresaw that technology would make life possible in once uninhabitable terrain, including the desert. The A.M. Johnson Desert Compound, offered in 1924 to the owner of a 1,500-acre site bordering Death Valley, reflects Wright's answer to building in an environment that dwarfs human scale. The backbone of the design is a wall of concrete blocks stretching almost 1,000 feet that would join the compound to its surroundings. The approaching road passes through the compound, reaches the main residence and opens on an endless vista of sky, cacti and hills.
This fusion of form, function, site - and movement - displays an aspect of Wright's genius that Mr. Peatross calls "the architect as choreographer." The "Automobile Objective" also shows Wright playing with circular patterns and flowing water, techniques that would reappear in later, and better-known projects, such as the design of Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum and the famous Fallingwater residence outside Pittsburgh.
The presentation also explores Wright's use of innovative designs and new building technologies to achieve what he called an architecture of "integrity," which made use of indigenous materials in forms that would evoke the natural setting. This can be seen, for example, in Wright's conception in 1923 of the Lake Tahoe Summer Colony on Emerald Bay, Calif. Departing from the right-angle rule of traditional Anglo-Palladian architecture, Wright's lodges make extensive use of the triangle and are reminiscent of Native American wigwams. Finished in native wood, the tall, narrow cabins also mimic, in shape and composition, the fir trees that surround them.
As explained in Wright's In the Cause of Architecture (1925), integrity also meant recognizing the potential of machine-age materials to free American architecture from the conventions of another time and place. The exhibition, for example, features textured masonry blocks that Wright designed specifically for projects in Southern California, such as the Doheny Ranch Development in Beverly Hills (1923). Wright intended to use the interlocking concrete blocks to construct an immense residential complex rimming the base of a dry ravine, or arroyo, in the Santa Monica mountains. New construction technology would make this "massiveness" possible. The result would be rooted firmly in pre- Columbian architecture - and in the canyon floor from which it seems to grow.
Yet Wright's proposed solutions to the problems of movement, material and enormous space may represent the road not taken in American architecture. His visionary approaches exceeded the resources of even his wealthiest clients. Only one of the five featured projects, the San Marcos desert resort, ever neared construction; it crashed, along with the stock market, in 1929.
Wright, a pioneer in the use of "sprawl," would be horrified, Mr. Peatross mused, by its manifestation in today's suburban landscape of strip malls, sodded lawns and cheek-to-jowl colonials. As critic Ada Lousie Huxtable observed, "The direction today is full speed backward. … Younger architects, and some more mature ones too, are retreating bravely into academic convention and nostalgic revivals."
But this apparent counterrevolution only makes Wright's unrealized vision more compelling. As Mr. Peatross notes, conceiving just one of the five projects would secure any architect's reputation. "Wright's achievement," he says, "is not just having broken the mold. He threw all the traditional elements of architecture - the design vocabulary, appropriateness to site, materials and methods of construction - into the air and mastered them."
"Frank Lloyd Wright: Designs for An American Landscape, 1922- 1932," will be on view at the Library until Feb. 15, after which it will travel to the Whitney Museum of Art in New York. It may also be "visited" online at the Library of Congress's World Wide Web site at http://www.loc.gov/.
John Martin is a copyright examiner in the Copyright Office.