I started my research on Wright with the project of the Midway Gardens.
It was a large, vast in fact, entertainment complex in Chicago.
And the reason I was interested in it is that Wright has the most elaborate ornamental program
for this project where ornament expands from the plan to the facade to the interior courtyard,
and the interior decorations until even the cutlery, the plates, the chairs and the furniture
for that building.
We can start with this mural that was in fact installed in the tavern, one of the interior
spaces of the complex and what interests me a lot here is first it has this graphic quality
with the circles that you see are hanging in certain sequences like pendants.
So there is an element of both levity and gravity and these two forces compensate one
another on the mural.
Also, I find it very interesting that they were supposed to represent the bubbles of
sparkling drinks.
Midway, I find it very interesting that ornament has a spatial quality.
All of these ornaments that we see here on these electric needles, high columns installed
at the facade and the courtyard were supposed to orient visitors, driving to the complex
from a distance in Chicago at night, but also act as modes of disorientation.
That is, it was supposed to attract and suck them in the atmosphere, this phantasmagoric
atmosphere of the complex and make them stay more.
So these elements of both orientation and disorientation balancing themselves, I find
them very interesting.
And both of them are achieved through ornament.
As we know in Wright in some of his projects, perhaps the majority of even the budget is
about the cost of these ornaments or side objects, lamps, furniture, rugs, murals and
we see that both in public buildings like the Midway but also in residential buildings
as well.
One of the interesting discoveries I made while researching the project was in fact
a drawing for the Barnsdall House that shows a series of furniture, but quite unexpectedly
it shows the price of each and every of these items.
We realize that they cost a lot including the rugs, the lamps and all the pieces of
furniture for each residence, and they might even represent the majority of the expense
for the house.
One of the qualities of what Frank Lloyd Wright calls organic ornament, that is an ornament
that holds the building together that has an integral quality and brings all the elements
together is that in fact it's very hard to extract anything from that scheme.
So it makes these costs for things that might seem marginal or secondary absolutely essential
and very hard to extract from the project.
Another interesting discovery, which I think speaks a lot to the amplified function of
ornament in Wright is the transition from a surface element to the plan.
For example, this graphic design for the Liberty journal covers called “March Balloons”
while it was originally intended to be a journal cover and that never happened, the original
publisher rejected those- it kept transforming and at some point it turned into the plan
of a rug that would cover the floor of the living room for Wright's son, David Wright,
in his house in Arizona around 1950, '51, that is about 25 years after the original
design was made for the Liberty covers.
Overall, the sequence of drawings shows the process of transformation of ornament as a
very interesting and privileged category of object, a unique object that as I said throughout
modernism is under the threat of extinction but in Wright it survives and in order to
survive, it has to change.
And that change is precisely the transformation
we see in Wright from a graphic surface element to the very building the interior organization
and the structure of that building that is both on the exterior, the interior and even
the interior structure of the building itself.