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Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania
Westmoreland Art Museum
No. 221 North Street
Greensburg, PA 15601
October 15, 2023 – January 15, 2024
Fallingwater is one of his most famous buildings, but there’s a good chance you don’t know the other half of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern PennsylvaniaHeld at the Westmoreland Art Museum, it explores realized works and paper architecture, including high-rise residential buildings, parking garages, and the White Elephant of the Pittsburgh Civic Center complex.This collection of Wright projects fills a chapter on Neil Levine Frank Lloyd Wright’s Urbanism (cited by the curators as inspiration) and received gripping attention here. The exhibition is now closed but will travel to the National Building Museum in April 2024.
Jeremiah William McCarthy, chief curator of the Westmoreland Art Museum, explained that the purpose of the exhibition was to provide a primer for the relatively unfamiliar and “for the very familiar Reintroducing Wright’s background”. The ultra-fresh context here includes his most vivid take on Pittsburgh’s ambitious plans. We’ve long known that there’s something amiss about Wright’s image as a perpetual herder, but it’s rarely been proven so convincingly—here, the audience sees instead a quixotic lunatic.
Like the exhibits, the exhibition features plans, renderings, drawings, photographs and models. But the curators are aiming for more than just a traditional retrospective. Scott W. Perkins, senior director of preservation and collections at Fallingwater, explained: “Our initial goal was to explore the projects that Wright did, particularly for Pittsburgh, through , helping to illuminate futuristic visions by using today’s technology to recreate them. In virtual form.”
This type of conversation often raises concerns. CGI museum videos are often as engaging as airport public service announcements. Not this time.
Brian Eyerman is the founder and CEO of Skyline Ink, a video and animation studio with a portfolio of museum and art history projects. A trained architect and skilled animator, Ellman knew exactly what he was doing in both capacities. The amount of information available for this work varies widely. They provide a reasonable amount of content for the Rhododendron Church and Gatehouse project, but require some squinting. Three unfinished Fallingwater projects were relaunched with sparse original resources. In many cases, they look at similar project details to fill in unclear details. For example, Ellman discovered that the details of Edgar Kaufmann’s unfinished garage (commissioned for Fallwater House) matched perfectly with those of the Guggenheim Museum and could easily be modeled after the latter.
The real monster is the redevelopment of Wright’s Civic Center complex – a project designed to combine an arena, convention center, opera house, multiple theaters, an aquarium, two bridges and a few other things, because that might not be enough. Kaufman paid for the program and engaged in some noble deception, never explaining to civic leaders just how ridiculous the project he hoped to bring them was. Its capacity was 123,000 people, equivalent to one-fifth of the city’s population at the time.
Wright was quoted as saying at the time: “The entire scheme is arranged with sufficient trees, shrubs, grass and gardening, all of which are combined with the vast flowing river surface to make the entire building volume gentle and humane.” The film is riveting from every angle, bringing complex scenes to life in a way that even relatively rich presentation graphics can’t. Gardens envelope the entire building, the circulation is mesmerizing, and the project’s vast array of permeable interior and exterior layers creates a visceral excitement. The glass sphere of his aquarium looks more like a Moebius picture than anything we’ve successfully built to date.
However, this design is definitely not from an era when computer modeling was easily replicable. Ellman describes it as one of the most laborious pieces of his 25 years of work, “It’s a conical spiral and there’s absolutely nothing repeated on the building, which means everything had to be modeled and merged.”
Ellman modeled more than he could animate and said he was eager to complete the work. It’s an enticing prospect for a first-person wandering video game.
Anthony Paletta is a writer living in Brooklyn.
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