Frank Lloyd Wright at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao
Bilbao Holiday Rentals: Frank Lloyd Wright is one of the great masters of 20th century architecture
The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao hosts an exhibition dedicated to Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the great masters of 20th century architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright is an exhibition about the significance of Wright’s thinking about space and the large impact this has had on the organization of modern life. Dates: 10.22.2009 – 02.14.2010.
Frank Lloyd Wright is co-organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which owns and operates the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, the primary source of loans to the exhibition. The more than eighty projects in Frank Lloyd Wright-ranging from privately commissioned homes and office, civic, and government buildings to religious and performance spaces as well as unrealized urban sites-accentuate Wright’s oeuvre as an architecture that encourages social interaction and integration with the natural world.
The exhibition is presented through a range of media, including over 200 original drawings; historic and newly commissioned models; historic and contemporary photographs, as well as through related books, periodicals, and correspondence. In addition, newly created video and digital renderings will shed light on Wright’s designs. This unique presentation of Wright’s work aims to inspire visitors to think about architecture as a vital extension of daily life.
Biography
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) was born in rural Wisconsin in 1867, the son of William Carey Wright, a well-educated musician and composer from New England, and Anna Lloyd-Jones, the daughter of a Unitarian preacher who had emigrated from Wales. Wright said the career choice of architecture was preordained by his mother, who wanted her son to grow up to build beautiful buildings. To this end she hung engravings of old English cathedrals in his nursery. She also introduced him to the Kindergarten Gifts and Occupations of Friedrich Froebel, the German educator and inventor of the “kindergarten.” These wooden stacking blocks meant to develop children’s spatial and construction abilities awakened a young Frank Lloyd Wright to the “rhythmic structure in nature.”
Within a decade he had transformed American residential design, creating what became known as the Prairie Style. He resolutely moved away from European models that had set the standard up until that timeby lowering overall heights and breaking up the common boxlike Victorian rooms by removing unnecessary interior partitions, introducing free-flowing interior spaces and walls of art glass he called “light screens.”
Over the course of his long career, Wright created hundreds of government and commercial buildings, hotels, apartment towers, recreational complexes, museums, religious houses, residences for the wealthy and those of more modest income, decorative pieces, furniture and lighting features, textiles, and art glass. His wide-ranging output shared one characteristic, the seamless integration of form and function and a close connection with the natural world.
More information
The Guggenheim Museum: Frank Lloyd Wright
