Art:

...That Wright's public buildings should have been designed along such humane and organic lines rather than in mechanistic service to the "form follows function" credo of modern architecture is hardly surprising...

...To enter Northome is to see why Wright made that observation and how in his work we have an American modernism that, save for its rejection of superfluity and false ornament, is radically different from European modernism...

...and above all, its emphasis is on the individual rather than mass-life...

...The Metropolitan has furnished Northome with chairs, tables, and a couch Wright designed, and it has arranged this furniture as photographs and drawings show Wright wanted it...

...Over the last year, the living room of Northome, the house Wright built (1912-1914) for the Francis Little family of Wayzata, Minnesota, has become a permament part of the Museum's new American wing...

...Art MAKING IT WRIGHT A WHITMAN-LIKE VISION OF AMERICA LIKE MOST GREAT architects of this century, Frank Lloyd Wright could not have had the career he did without an establishment to approve and sponsor his work...

...By contrast a group of people entering Northome would be drawn to the open area between the couch and the table-bookcase at the opposite end of the room...

...Only with a second and higher set of windows do we begin to get a sense of the full dimensions of Northome, but because these windows are separated from those below by a ledge and from the peaked ceiling above by still another ledge, the feeling of openness they help make possible comes across gradually...

...The same qualities that would put anyone at ease when Northome was empty would allow for privacy when Northome was full...

...To reach that peak, Wright would, however, need the kind of space that allowed him to incorporate his houses so deeply into the landscape that they became part of it, and he would not begin to find such freedom until he left Chicago and started to build in the countryside of Wisconsin and Minnesota...

...The outward world is invited in, and in turn one is invited to look out - but from a protected perspective...

...it is designed to meet rather than ignore the natural world around it...

...The application of these ideals is evident in Wright's work as early as the prairie houses he designed in and around Chicago during the first decade of this century...

...In Wright's hands such American architecture could be austere the way Shaker furniture is austere...

...There Wright found the ideal meeting point for his love of nature and his Whitman-like vision of America Domestic architecture, as he wrote in The Natural House, allowed him to create "a home for our people in the spirit in which our Democracy was conceived: the individual integrate and free in an environment of his own...

...In either case he would, of course, be surrounded by unused space, but from each of these spots there would be nothing oppressive about the unused space...

...Yet when we think of Wright's important public buildings, the last thing that comes to mind are corporate monuments...

...It lies instead in his domestic architecture...

...A similar humanness of purpose applies to the way the Northome living room lends itself to social use...

...The best of Frank Lloyd Wright's work is not epitomized by his public buildings, however...

...The Northome living room reminds us that, long before the current objections were raised against the barrenness of so much of the international style, Wright observed, "Modern-architecture is Organic-architecture deprived of a soul...

...Whether his client was an international corporation or a wealthy family, Wright never abandoned his belief that "human scale was true building scale" and "architecture has no need for monumentality unless as natural beauty...

...The result is a look that was much too severe for the Littles, who soon rearranged the room to suit their needs, but it is a look that, nonetheless, points up the basic comfortableness of Wright's design...

...Anyone entering Northome by himself would logically gravitate to the window alcoves or the Wright couch, which sits at one end of the room facing an open fireplace...

...His genius for designing houses would not reach its peak until the depression with the Kaufman "Fallingwater" House in 1936 and Taliesin West in 1938...

...Now, thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an example of what Wright accomplished in the years after 1910 and before his great houses of the 1930s is available to a broad public audience...

...The Northome living room has not only been reconstructed brick for brick within the Metropolitan, the Museum has recognized the degree to which the room itself depends on natural light We do not have, as in so many of the Museum's period rooms, illumination from flourescent lights hidden behind false windows...

...From Bauhaus to Our House but from within the architectural establishment, where critics such as Robert Venturi have challenged the Miesian doctrine of "less is more" by insisting "less is a bore" when the architect sacrifices richness and complexity in the name of simplicity of purpose...

...The lower set are tucked inside an alcove and extend downward from a height slightly above a man's head to a ledge with window seats that runs the length of the room...

...The installation is a masterpiece of museumship...

...It comes just as the purism of modern architecture is under attack, not only in such best-selling books as Tom Wolfe's...

...The Metropolican had the architects of its American wing cut windows into the museum wall that surrounds what was the south wall of Northome, and so, as the museum-goer enters the Littles' living room, he not only sees it in natural light, he is able to look back out its windows to Central Park...

...They provided their owners with privacy and yet gave the feeling of reaching beyond themselves to the surrounding neighborhood...

...There are in essence two sets of them...

...The expansive, pavilion quality of the Northome living room has been kept in check by Wright's insistence on a humanness of scale We see this balance most dramatically in Wright's side windows...

...Even Wright's offices - from the Larkin Building of 1904, to the Johnson Wax Administration Building of 1936, to the Price Tower of 1952 - are distinguishable by the way in which their design has been determined by the inner space Wright set aside for the people who would work in them...

...But for Wright the prairie houses were only the first stage in the evolution of his domestic architecture...

...Its living room is unusually large (30 x 45 feet with a 14-foot ceiling), but as we enter it, its openness rather than its size is what is impressive Northome's high ceiling and skylight do not produce a cathedral effect, nor do the windows that run the length of its long walls yield the exposed look we find in such homes as Philip Johnson's Glass House...

...The windows are tall enough to let in quantities of light, but at the same time by virtue of being set within an alcove they offer the kind of shelter that a bay window provides...

...Built close to the ground with overhanging roofs and low terrace walls that further emphasize their horizontality, the prairie houses were perfect for the flat, relatively small plots of land on which they rested...

...The glass-box qualities of the international style never impressed Wright, and he was even more put off by what he regarded as its "Grando-mania...

...The humanistic impulses behind it ruled out the kind of buildings that glorified the machine or proclaimed the hegemony of the corporation NICOLAUS MILLS...

...All this care has been worth the time and expense Northome sums up a crucial stage in Wright's commitment to designing houses that depended on an organic relationship to the land around them...

...By the time we are aware of it, we have adjusted to it What might be awe has, due to the natural gradations of Wright's interior design, been translated into acceptance...

...There they would have plenty of space in which to mill about, and if two or three of them wanted room for more intimate talk, they could find that as well...

...But it could never treat man reductively...

...Its roots are rural, not urban...

...It would be cut off from his natural line of vision...

...The installation of the Northome living room, although the consequence of years of planning by the Metropolitan, could not be more timely...