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The St. Mark's Tower is one of Frank Lloyd Wright's earliest designs for a
skyscraper. This was planned to go around St. Mark's Church in downtown Manhattan,
and had it been built it would have been the first glass skyscraper in New York
City. The model came to us in very, very poor condition. It was missing about 50%
of its exterior, it was covered with soot and grime. It was up to us to bring it to
a stable enough condition to be studied and exhibited.
I began by vacuuming, first, to remove the bulk of the grime and dust and then I
went over all the surfaces with a very slightly dampened sponge cut into small
shapes so I could get into the interior parts of the model. The first thing I
noticed, when you look past the damage, is how intricate the object is. It has a lot
of detail both on the interior floorboards and the exterior walls. Little stenciled
drawings and incised designs. He just left the windowpanes totally empty with the
occasional pane open, tilted open and painted blue to reflect the sky. The
landscaping is also very carefully executed. They took little pieces of
paperboard and wood and glued them to the balconies so they would look like plants
cascading over the balconies.
I learned by looking at correspondence in the archive why St. Mark's Tower was
never built. Part of the reason was because Wright's client was worried that
it was too avant-garde for its time. He wrote that he was afraid that tenants in
the building would be struck with vertigo on the upper floors, having nothing
between them and the city streets but a thin pane of glass. When the building
wasn't built, Wright went on to reuse or recycle the model, showing it in his
exhibitions he curated about his designs, and these exhibitions would tour the
country and sometimes the world. The extensive exhibition and travel that this
model underwent really took its toll, so it's not surprising that we see early
touch ups and restorations carried out by Wright and his students. Once we got to
the point where the model was stabilized and clean, we came to the question of
whether to restore it and if we restore it, how far to take it. This was a
conversation we had with the curators at MoMA. We discussed everything from leaving
it just as it was in this ruined state. We also discussed restoring it fully, but
that felt a little bit heavy-handed. The decision to leave one corner of the model
unrestored felt to us like it struck the right balance between respecting the
object's history but also respecting Wright's original vision.
For the restoration, a lot of it was just cutting acid-free paperboard to the
right shapes, painting them, and gluing them in place. Then I was also able to
take advantage of new techniques to replicate these exterior stencil designs
by printing them on Japanese paper made of mulberry fibers, which go transparent when
you add adhesive to them. With this tiny furniture that came along with the model,
we don't have photographs of how it was originally arranged but we do have
drawings where Wright stipulates how you should arrange his Wright Design
furniture.
The primary goal of this conservation campaign was to make Wright's vision more
clear to audiences today and in the future. But the restoration is also
designed to be revisited, reversed if desired, by future generations who may
have a different interpretation of this model.
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