Anyone involved in design should find plenty to contemplate – perhaps to be inspired by – in two current New York exhibits: Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive, at the Museum of Modern Art, through October 1; Ettore Sottsass: Design Radical, at the Met Breuer, through October 8.
Wright, quintessentially American, remains probably the world’s most famous Modern architect-designer 60 years after his death. The design accomplishments and ideas of the Italian Sottsass, 10 years departed, are well worth exposure, lest they be forgotten.
Wright: Dipping into the Archive
It’s just impossible to mount a comprehensive show on the works of Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed over 1,000 buildings, over 500 of them built. And his designs encompassed more than just buildings, but included whole communities at one extreme and at the other the most thorough design of interiors — including tableware and occasionally even what his clients were to wear.
Drawn from the vast Wright archives acquired jointly in 2012 by MoMA and Columbia University’s Avery architecture library, this exhibition is conceived as a mere sampling of that trove – although even this selection seems huge. Organized by Barry Bergdoll, both a curator at the museum and a professor at Columbia, it encompasses a dozen subject-specific sections chosen by guest curators, whose observations about their choices can be watched on discreet video screens in each of their areas.
The subjects for these dips into the archive are widely varied. Several are project-specific, like those on Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, his totally fanciful Mile-High Tower in Chicago, and his designs for foundation-subsidized African-American elementary schools in the rural South. Another focuses on circular geometries in Wright’s designs, ranging from colored glass windows
to plot plans for residential subdivisions. Still others take up such broad concerns as “Urbanism” and “Ecologies and Landscapes.” The “Drawing in the Studio” section acknowledges that Wright’s distinctive renderings could not have been produced by one genius and recognizes the contributions of his pencil-wielding alter ego, Marion Mahony — one of the country’s earliest licensed female architects.
Wright’s most famous projects are all represented here, mainly by seductive drawings: the Unity Temple, the Fallingwater house, the Price Tower in Oklahoma, the Guggenheim Museum, the Marin County Center in California. His intensive design of interiors, down to the last detail, is evident in only a few subsections of the show. The Imperial Hotel portion gives ample attention to that early landmark’s remarkable interiors, exhibiting a couple of Wright-designed chairs, along with swatches of fabric and some pieces of the china he designed for the hotel’s dining spaces. The “Ornament” subsection includes an intricately divided residential window, a selection of patterned fabrics produced by Schumacher, and some striking designs for magazine covers.
For readers of officeinsight, the show’s categories largely skip Wright’s innovative and in some cases extensive designs for office interiors. We don’t see here the atrium-like clerical core of the Larkin Building in Buffalo or radically reconceived desks and chairs of his S.C. Johnson offices in Racine, Wisconsin. The exhibit does, however, document some other very special interiors, such as that of the V.C. Morris shop in San Francisco and the automobile showroom on New York’s Park Avenue.
Any design-oriented visitor is bound to find sources of inspiration – and occasional awe – among the show’s almost staggering array of items. And today one may respond by searching on line, as I have, for Wright-related subjects that the archive might yield for future exhibitions.
Sottsass: Design Iconoclast
Born in 1917, 50 years after Wright, Ettore Sottsass grew up as Modern design was maturing and dedicated himself to challenging its more austere conventions. Identified as both architect and designer, he made his major contributions in the design of furniture and objects.
Having made his first trip to the U.S. from still war-torn Italy in 1956, Sottsass worked briefly for the great American Modernist designer George Nelson and soon became a consultant for Olivetti, then a leader among design-conscious manufacturers, creating a widely admired Valentine portable typewriter and the iconic Synthesis 45 office chair, both exhibited here. He also designed furniture for the adventurous manufacturer Poltronova and began producing ceramics, glassware, and jewelry with often-humorous historical and symbolic references.
His early furniture included both wood pieces in bold, glossy colors and three low stools incorporating marble slabs, called Doric, Ionic, and Tuscan. Strongly contrasting to such playful pieces is an ultra-functional prototype for modular storage units on wheels to serve the nomadic modern user. Shown here as well are samples of patterned textiles and plastic laminate sheet. His few forays into the architecture of buildings are represented here by drawings that look more like wry commentaries on house design than realistic proposals.
As has become the fashion for museum exhibitions, this one includes not just the work of the featured artist, but also a generous scattering of objects that are thought to have inspired him or show related visual characteristics. Juxtaposed to Sottsass’s works are objects from the earliest dynasties of Egypt and from ancient India. Included as well are representative works by some of his Modern precursors: the Vienna Secession architects Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffmann and their contemporary Wiener Werkstätte designers, the Bauhaus-related artists Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky, and Sottsass’s American contemporaries Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and Donald Judd.
In 1981, Sottsass was a founder of the Memphis Collaborative – deriving its name both from the ancient Egyptian capital and the words of a Bob Dylan song. With Memphis, he designed some of his most iconic items, including the freestanding multicolored, shelved room divider widely recognized as an icon of his work, some convention-defying tables, and an elaborate bed with a footboard ironically recalling earlier furniture fashions.
H. 39-3/4 x Dia. 24 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, © Studio Ettore Sottsass Srl
One of the virtues of attending an exhibition at the Met Breuer is yet another opportunity to savor the design virtues of this fine building, which could not accommodate the Whitney Museum’s need to expand. One feels that, “radical” as he was, Sottsass must have appreciated architect Marcel Breuer’s more muted design idiosyncrasies here – the canopy of circular lighting reflectors on the lobby ceiling, the subtly unconventional contours of the granite stair slabs, the few strikingly polygonal windows. If you go to see Sottsass, be sure to revisit Breuer.