We're looking at a drawing that was not made for a real project.
No one commissioned this skyscraper.
No one asked for it.
Wright imagined it and presented it as a kind of polemical gift to the world.
This drawing, over 8 feet tall, we know from photos in the archive, was prepared for a
press conference that Wright called, in Chicago in 1956, to present to the world the absolute
outlandish project for a mile-high skyscraper.
So this drawing, it's a manifesto about architecture because it has a lot of information, inscriptions,
depictions on it that are very intriguing and curious.
A little hard to understand at first glance.
Well, very easy to understand but hard to figure out why.
It's also, in a way, an autobiography because it has Wright's educational degrees, statements
about who he is, and a list of people that he admires.
So I wanted to figure that out, unpack all the inscriptions, understand what it is.
Almost a half of the sheet is not taken up by the design itself, but is taken up by this
long scroll of information and then this embedding, if you will, of the skyscraper, not just in
the lands of the prairies of Chicago, but also in the history of architecture.
What we actually see, if we tried to unpack this panorama, is the great pyramid of Cheops,
Egyptian civilization, a modern obelisk, the 19th-century Washington Monument in Washington,
DC, by the architect Robert Mills, the tallest freestanding masonry all stone building at
the time of its completion, the first really great tall iron, new material of the 19th-century,
ironwork, the Eiffel Tower of 1889, and then the Empire State building of the late '20s,
early '30s, the tallest building when it was unveiled.
You could say that there are two time scales here.
There's a time scale that's very long history of civilization, gathered together almost
like an imaginary world's fair in Chicago, and a history of architecture as it relates
to engineering through a series of great figures, a kind of pantheon of great men because they
were all men.
Architects, one only, Louis Sullivan and engineers.
Some of the people are still famous.
Others, I had to really dig around to try to find out who they were.
First, I thought this list that starts off with Louis Sullivan then goes to Elisha Otis,
the inventor of the elevator.
Others, Coignet and Monier, less well known unless you're an expert in the history of
development of reinforced concrete.
Very vital for the principle that Wright is going to work with here.
Memorials, which also includes John Roebling, the engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Then salutations to a group of people Torroja,
Beggs-Cross, Pier Luigi Nervi, Polivka, Malliart.
For the most part, very, very well-known engineers.
Polivka perhaps the least well-known.
The Polivka archive is at the State University of New York at Buffalo, off in JetBlue to
Buffalo, and in that wonderful set of boxes that Polivka's widow left to Buffalo, find
snapshots of Polivka visiting with Frank Lloyd Wright, the telegram that Polivka sent to
Frank Lloyd Wright saying he admired his ideas on organic structure, the proposal to work
with him on various projects, the sheets of calculations that I can't make any sense out
of, of how he figures out the mathematics of the ramp of the Guggenheim.
A very deep connection is emerging as I go box through box.
I've come to the working conclusion trying to understand this complicated drawing with
all of it’s packed in messages that this ultimately is Wright's last autobiography.
He wrote one that he amended over the years from its first publication in the '30s, enlarged
long reading project, but this is the most concise autobiography that he's left.
It's how he wants to be seen in the future as a landmark of the history of architecture.