Moving In the Wright Direction

Frank Lloyd Wright died in 1959, but the reproduction of his furnishings in recent years has sparked a major revival of his legacy.

In 1986, manufacturers began reproducing select Wright designs for items from chairs to area rugs to fabrics, and marketing them internationally. Since then, the number of repro Wright furniture items alone has grown from 7 pieces to more than 20, and several more pieces will go into production during the next few years.

Eleven Wright-designed repro furniture pieces, primarily chairs, are on display through Sept. 26 at MPLA Associates in Solana Beach. This is a touring show in honor of Wright’s 125th birthday, a mix of marketing and nostalgia. It opened in April in Boston, and closes in November in Coral Gables, Fla.

MPLA, a contemporary furniture store, joined the growing South Cedros Avenue design district last week. The store moved from its old space in a Solana Beach mall to 1,800 square feet of space in a former Teledyne rocket-parts assembly plant that developers have transformed into a design center.

Among the best items in the Wright show are two chairs.

The Robie chair was designed for Wright’s 1908 Robie house in Chicago. With its tall, perfectly vertical backrest of narrow wood strips, the chair may not offer the most comfortable seating around, but it looks great and distinctly Wrightian: You sense its relationship to the house it was designed for, the way the backrest splines repeat the rhythm of short vertical lines on the house’s exterior, while also contrasting with the building’s long, low horizontal forms.

The barrel chair was styled by Wright in 1904 for the Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo, N.Y. This chair shows how Wright could take a simple form and transform it into something elegant. The chair describes a cylinder, but Wright struck a perfect balance between the wood and the spatial voids it defines. He crowned the chair with a sensuously fluted backrest.

Also included in the show are the simple steel-frame Midway chair, designed for Midway Gardens, a dancing and dining hall in Chicago completed in 1914; a second wood Midway chair, with a hexagonal backrest and gracefully tapered legs; the Allen Table, with its long profile and cantilevered end projections, designed by Wright in 1917 for the Henry J. Allen house in Wichita, Kan.; and the Friedman armchair and ottoman, wood pieces Wright designed in 1951, more elaborate than his early furniture and lacking its basic, economical punch.

Swatches of fabric and an area rug bearing Wright’s signature geometric patterns and vivid colors round out the show.

Wright built most of his furniture from oak, but the repro pieces are available in several woods, mainly cherry, in a variety of finishes.

Sales of the barrel chair serve as a concrete example of how Wright’s appeal has increased with the revival of many of his designs through reproduction furniture. The chair has sold more than 10,000 to date, according to Steve Kroeter, managing partner at Archetype Associates in Brooklyn.

Kroeter dreamed up the idea of licensing Wright’s furnishings designs in 1983. He noticed that such innovative architect/furniture designers as Mies van der Rohe, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Gerrit Rietveld all had reproduction furniture lines in their names, but not Wright.

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He approached the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, overseer of Wright’s estate for permission. A percentage of sales from the furnishings goes to the foundation, which runs Wright’s architecture school, maintains his sizable estates in Wisconsin and Arizona and preserves memorabilia, including Wright’s architectural drawings.

The MPLA show is far from a complete look at Wright repro furniture, which is built by Cassina in Milan and distributed in the United States by New York-based Atelier International.

Some of the newest repro pieces are not included. Among the interesting pieces missing are a metal S.C. Johnson Wax desk and chair, which Wright designed to go with his famous circa-1936 Johnson Wax building in Racine, Wis.

Also, the show barely scratches the surface of the many other Wright-designed items such as fabrics by Schumacher; crystal, china and silver by Tiffany; art glass windows by Oakbrook Esser Studios; and decorative metal objects by Historical Arts and Casting.

The show’s presentation lacks imagination and depth. Pieces are laid out haphazardly in one of MPLA’s two showrooms, sharing space with non-Wright pieces.

The exhibit would be more exciting, and more educational, if Wright’s pieces were on their own, given a more dramatic setting, enhanced with photos of Wright houses and other support materials.

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According to a spokeswoman for Atelier International, some stores in other cities are using the repro furnishings as the basis for polished gallery shows, borrowing Wright videos and other materials from the extensive archives he left behind.

Even with its shortcomings, the show at MPLA is still worthwhile. Design events of international import are rare in San Diego County, and this qualifies as one, if only for the fact that this will be the only time most San Diego County residents get a first-hand look at furnishings designed by Wright--even if they aren’t originals.

Experiencing these items in person is a genuinely uplifting experience that drives home once again the full breadth of Wright’s genius.

An argument could be raised about the ethics of mass producing Wright’s furniture. While some people might blanch at the idea of seeing pieces outside their intended residential settings, even the most devoted Wright followers don’t have a problem with the idea.

“I think it’s quite ethical,” said San Diego architect Wallace Cunningham, who studied at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture during the late 1970s. “Many of the designs are excellent, and mass production makes them somewhat more affordable than doing pieces one at a time. Mass production has been the tradition of furniture from the beginning.”

But it would be nice if the repro Wright furnishings were more affordable. Retail prices for the Robie chair start around $2,300, while the barrel chair starts at about $2,500. MPLA is offering 40% off through December. Even so, how many people can pay $1,500 or more for a single chair, even if this represents a small fraction of the cost original Wright pieces, which can range from $30,000 or $40,000 to well into the $100,000s?

“Would Wright approve of this? I don’t know,” Archetype Associates’ Kroeter said. “Who wants to take that on? I don’t think I’m in a position to say. Everything we’ve done, in quality, marketing, we’ve done in the hopes that if he would see it, he would be happy.

“I think our objectives are honorable, to expand the audience for Wright’s work, to give people the chance to live with his designs, because he said he felt it made people’s lives better when they lived with beautiful things. And a third objective is to provide some funding for the education and preservation programs of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.”

Kroeter said quality control does not allow lower prices, but why not take a simple piece or two and mass market them? An unfinished, basic Wright chair for $400 or so would probably be a hit in stores or through a furniture mail-order house.

Farfetched as this notion sounds, something like it is not out of the question.

At a reunion last week in Wisconsin of the Taliesin Fellowship, a group of past and present Wright students and instructors from his architecture school, there was talk of mass marketing the simple plywood furniture designs Wright did beginning in the 1930s, Cunningham said.