the report

Frank Lloyd Wright and Housing Modern Society

A new Columbia University exhibition seeks to unpack Wright’s role in the development of public housing in the U.S.
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Frank Lloyd Wright with a model for the Guggenheim. His work is the subject of one of several talks at this year's D&D fall market.Photo: Getty

It’s the year of Frank Lloyd Wright. On the occasion of the architect’s sesquicentennial, museum shows, books, and articles aplenty (including many by this publication) are popping up to fête Wright’s inimitable mark on American architecture. The latest? An exhibition at Columbia University’s Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery titled “Living in America: Frank Lloyd Wright, Harlem, and Modern Housing” that unpacks the fascinating relationship between Wright’s work and public housing developments in the Manhattan neighborhood.

Of main focus will be Broadacre City, Wright’s decades-long obsession in urban and suburban development, itself a tour-de-force manifesto on utopian living in modern America. First introduced in Wright’s 1932 The Disappearing City (and later flushed out in When Democracy Builds (1945) and The Living City (1958)), Broadacre is a direct reaction to what Wright saw as the outdated pedestrian urban center. Under Broadacre, each family would receive an acre of land on which to live, while all out-of-home centers—business, government, shopping, et cetera—would be, in perhaps the most important part of Wright’s plan, accessible by automobile. Though it was never built, historians are quick to note Wright’s indelible influence on modern suburbia.

The Wallach will display Wright’s expansive and to-scale Broadacre City model alongside drawings and photographs from the Harlem River Houses, a now-famous public housing project from the same era built to house working-class African-Americans in a highly segregated urban environment.

"The exhibition explores the concurrent development of new housing systems through more than 400 objects including architectural drawings, photographs, archival documents, video, and audio," explains Wallach Gallery director and chief curator Deborah Cullen. "For the first time, Wright's work is placed in a new context alongside figures such as John Lewis Wilson Jr., the first African-American graduate of Columbia's School of Architecture."

The exhibition, which opens on September 9, is copresented by the Buell Center, part of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, the Wallach Gallery, and the University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, and is shown in conjunction with MoMA’s "Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive." The show will be on view through December 17.