Showcasing the Genius of Wright

In modern architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright towers over all others like the mile-high skyscraper he once proposed.

If the flashy, media-friendly postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s made Wright recede into the gray middle ground of architectural history, “In the Realm of Ideas” brings him back in full living color.

This traveling show, which comes to the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park on Saturday and runs through September, includes roughly 160 pieces from Wright’s career: drawings, models, photos, furniture, assorted decorative arts, plus the real crowd pleaser: a replica of one of Wright’s houses.

With related lectures, performances and films continuing through the summer, the exhibition promises to be San Diego’s architectural event of the year.

From Wright’s Usonian house, juxtaposed with William Templeton Johnson’s ornate museum building, through the idealized section titled “Building for Democracy,” viewers feel the array of masterpieces accomplished in one man’s lifetime.

The delicate color renderings alone--done by Wright, who died in 1959 at age 91, and a handful of assistants--have a pure art quality lacking in contemporary architectural drawings.

Instead of attempting a scholarly show aimed at the architectural elite, the show’s organizers from the Scottsdale Art Center, including a number of Wright’s proteges, went for a broader audience. The images are large and powerful, accompanied by sparse poetic snatches from Wright’s own voluminous writings.

Four ideas central to Wright’s philosophies of organic architecture serve to organize the material: “The Destruction of the Box,” “The Nature of the Site,” “Materials and Methods” and “Building for Democracy.”

Like most geniuses, Wright was a dreamer whose ideas didn’t always translate into reality; only about half the buildings included in the show were ever built.

Most of the show’s images and texts are mounted on flat and curving modular wall panels in Wright’s signature terra cotta color, with a reddish Wright pattern running along their bases.

The “Destruction of the Box” section begins the show.

In the 1890s, buildings were generally boxy and full of small rooms that received little or no natural light. Houses of the Victorian era are typical: long on exterior color and decoration, short on practical amenities.

Wright’s departure from these conventions is succinctly traced, from the Larkin building (1904) and Unity Temple (1906) in Chicago, through several houses, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Johnson Building (1936) in Racine, Wis.

The number of revolutionary ideas Wright used to move beyond boxy designs is astounding: open floor plans that sometimes rely on curves instead of conventional rectilinear plans; skylights, floor-to-ceiling glass and clerestory windows to maximize links between indoors and out; completely new feats of engineering, such as the minimalist, mushroom-like columns within the Johnson building and wide-open spaces made possible by new steel construction methods, and conventional materials such as brick used in unconventional ways.

“The good building makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before that building was built,” Wright wrote, a philosophy that is supported by the “Site” section of the show.

“Fallingwater,” probably the most famous American house of the 20th Century, sits grandly over its Pennsylvania stream, seeming almost to have grown from the earth, anchored at its center by tall walls of stone. The all-wood Pew house is entirely different, with its weathered wood exterior blending into a Wisconsin forest.

The elaborate, unbuilt Doheny Ranch Resort should serve as a model for today’s developers and planners, subtly designed to merge with its hilly setting.

The “Materials” section shows off glass, wood, concrete block, Wright’s own Usonian block, concrete and steel. Buildings include several houses and the Johnson Wax complex, where Wright insisted on skylights and clerestories made of Pyrex tubes bonded together. They were stunning, and at times refracted incoming light marvelously, but in sunny weather the glare was annoying, and they leaked like crazy during rainstorms.

This willingness to try strange, beautiful ideas even though they sometimes failed helped make Wright a true innovator.

“Democracy” closes the show with a variety of built and unbuilt Wright projects, proving just how broad was his contribution to architecture.

Here are Broadacre City (1935-1936, unbuilt), a community maximizing the freedom of the individual through large home sites and few high-rises; the Florida Southern College Campus (1930s, partially built); and the Arizona State Capitol (1957), one of Wright’s most spectacular unbuilt works. Its hexagonal forms were to have been rendered in copper and concrete.

The 1800-square-foot Usonian Automatic House replica (“Usonian” was Wright’s euphemism for the United States) has been updated with appliances and fixtures from Whirlpool and Kohler, sponsors of the exhibition. The house is not at all spectacular; the floor plan doesn’t include the open kitchen/living room of other Usonian houses. But the idea of low-cost, modular concrete-block construction, available to any American of moderate means, was the breakthrough. What star architect of today has proposed such a creative solution to housing the masses?

The show suffers from a lack of specific information on projects. The catalogue, prepared under the direction of the Scottsdale contingent, doesn’t include such necessary details as dates, although it does feature five excellent essays by Wright scholars.

For Saturday’s opening, Eric Lloyd Wright, the master’s grandson and also an architect, will speak at 4 p.m. in the museum’s Copley Auditorium.

For $3, visitors can walk through the exhibit while listening to a headphone presentation that includes commentary from Wright himself and several Wright experts. Guided docent tours are available several times a day.

A schedule of events for the summer can be obtained from the museum. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday and 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Thursday.