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The
Guggenheim Museum, all curves, and one of Frank Lloyd Wright's
most celebrated architectural spaces, is celebrating the 50th
anniversary of the building with a landmark exhibit that runs all
summer long! Frank
Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward includes 64 projects
(including residences) and over 200 drawings, new
three-dimensional scale models, special animations, as well as
projects that were never built. Wright's work was inventive,
always possessed of a certain sure beauty and harmony. A
harmony of nature, architecture and man -- itself always the
result of a constructed simplicity, a deliberate geometry, of
spaces that were fluid and blurred distinctions of inside and
outside. To have the exhibit housed within that marvelous
open spiral is to feel the sense of freedom that Wright's
buildings possessed.... Wright's
sense of space, that certain openness and tranquility, owe much to
Japanese art and architecture. We were recently looking at
Wrights's The Japanese Print, An Interpretation, a book
that contains his famous essay on the subject as well as plates of
numerous Japanese prints (the book is out of print, but still
available online and in used book stores). Japanese
architecture emphasized the rectilinear and asymmetrical, with
dramatic sweep of roof and open plans - all elements that Wright
consciously used in his work. He was the owner of a vast
collection of Japanese prints and in fact actively bought, sold,
and traded them, and as he said, "Japanese prints...intrigued
and taught me much. The elimination of the insignificant,
a process of simplification in art in which I was myself already
engaged." Hiroshige and Hokusai were particular
favorites. Wright was taken with the structural nature of
the prints, the consciousness of geometry and arrangement, the
flat colors that emphasized the rhythm of form and line so that,
as Wright says, the "…organic integrity within the work of
art itself is the fundamental law of beauty." His own
architectural drawings owe much to Hiroshige and the Japanese
print in their graphic qualities, the use of foliage, and a sense
of continuity of line in his renderings. And there is
something of this graphic sense in the signature on his drawings -
the famous 'red square' with his initials, and a version of this
red square was also the logo he used on his stationery.
Frank Lloyd Wright often had a single simple red tile with his
signature, FLW, set into the facades of some of his buildings….it
was, in many ways, his seal of approval!
See:
Frank
Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward,
Guggenheim
Read:
The Japanese Print, An Interpretation, Frank Lloyd
Wright
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