On Exhibit: Frank Lloyd Wright at Wallach Gallery

October 10, 2017

This fall the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery brings together two very different mid-20th century visions for housing in the U.S. with its exhibition, Living in America: Frank Lloyd Wright, Harlem and Modern Housing.

Presented as two interwoven narratives, the exhibition includes drawings, photographs and other materials dating from the late 1920s to the late 1950s. One narrative tracks Wright’s idealized concept for housing development, which he called Broadacre City and proposed in 1932. It was dominated by single-family homes on uniform plots of land. The other tracks the development of public housing, such as the Harlem River Houses, an apartment complex completed in 1937 that was one of New York’s first such developments.

The exhibition is curated by Columbia’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, part of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and co-presented with the Wallach Gallery and the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. Avery acquired Frank Lloyd Wright’s archives jointly with New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2012.

“This is a living history, in every possible sense,” said Buell Center Director Reinhold Martin. “The difficult questions about American society that are raised by these buildings, projects and ideas are as relevant today as they were then.”

Living in America is on view at the Wallach Gallery through Dec. 17.

To learn more, visit www.columbia.edu/cu/wallach.