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MORI ON WRIGHT
By Barry Muskat
How fitting that an exhibition on Toshiko Mori’s Martin House Visitor Pavilion is being staged at the Albright Knox—for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House and E.B. Green’s Albright-Knox, by themselves a study in contrasts, have more in common than might initially meet the eye.
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Toshiko Mori
Photo: Nana Watanabe.
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The year 1905—an important moment in Buffalo’s rich architectural past—saw completion of two buildings. One was the original Albright Art Gallery. Designed by Edward B. Green of Green & Wicks, the City’s most successful architectural firm at the turn of the century, the Gallery was the first museum of the Acropolis type in the United States. A gift from Buffalo entrepreneur and philanthropist John J. Albright, it was constructed of the purest white Maryland marble. As it sits proudly along the western edge of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Delaware Park, its ionic columns sing in pure Greek symmetry. The rhythms of each detail of its Neo-Classical proportions epitomize ancient ideals of perfection.
In the very same year, another Buffalo entrepreneur—a man said to be the highest paid executive in America—was completing a home for his family on the opposite side of Delaware Park. Building on a 1.3 acre site along the curvilinear streets of the Parkside neighborhood (also designed by landscape architect Olmsted), Darwin D. Martin had engaged an out-of-town architect—the young Frank Lloyd Wright of Chicago. This commission, a five building estate, would become one of the treasures of Wright’s golden Prairie Period and later be praised as one of the jewels of his entire career. In fact, Wright himself would refer to the Martin complex as his opus, “a nigh perfect composition.”
Buffalo is now engaged in what John Courtin, Executive Director of the Martin House Restoration Corporation, describes as “the most successful Frank Lloyd Wright restoration effort ever undertaken in America.” A textbook restoration of the historic building and rebuilding of its missing elements, the Martin House effort has raised more money that any other project of its kind. It is anticipated that droves of architectural aficionados will be attracted to the site—and thus an appropriate Visitors’ Center is needed.
A national competition was held to search for the architect of the new building. The force behind the competition was Mark Mendell, President of Cannon Design, Chair of the MHRC’s Visitors’ Center Planning Committee and of its Architect Selection Committee. “When we’re faced with the challenge of doing a building next to a masterpiece, we immediately create the most daunting challenge imaginable.” The proposed building had to be respectful of the masterpiece, to be absent yet present, to have its own integrity of design.
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Views of the Mori design from the front and back.
Photos: Biff Henrich
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Mendell points out that the competition was “born of an attempt to go back in time.” Martin had commissioned Wright “when Wright was hardly the great American architect.” In fact, Wright was an emerging name just beginning to get recognition outside the geographic area of his practice in Chicago.
The Committee set about to identify a cluster of young designers who had already begun to attract attention in the design world, but hadn’t yet reached celebrity status—perhaps at the same stage in their careers as Wright had been when he landed the Martin commission. Not only might the competition itself become a platform for an architect to advance his or her own career, but the panel saw a situation that offered potential to engage the designer to be personally invested in the continued process “rather than hiring a star who would assign assistants to perform many tasks.”
Certainly there exists a rich legacy of architectural competitions, one of the most significant in the course of American Modernism being the famed Chicago Tribune Competition of 1922. Robert McCormick, the newspaper’s outspoken owner, announced an international competition to design “the most beautiful and distinctive office building in the world.” Conservative judges awarded first place to the relatively unknown architects Hood and Howell for their Gothic Revival style office tower. This would have enormous influence on the future of the skyscraper—not so much for the building’s own design or merit, but for the incredible energies and discussions which emerged from and around the competition.
Brian Carter, Dean of the University of Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning talks about the Visitors’ Center competition within the larger context of young architects in America seeking the opportunity to design significant buildings. Carter suggests that the way most architectural practices are organized in America finds them more specialized than in Europe with the result that a lot of young American architects are designing houses, finding it difficult to take the next step. In Europe, where architectural competitions are much more common, the competitions become a vehicle by which “a young architect may move up from private to public scale.”
Carter sees all of the competitors in the Visitors’ Center competition as “good, even great young architects.” At the current point in their careers, securing a prized commission such as this would have major significance. “It’s incredibly brave that a client would do that,” Carter says, concluding: “This project demonstrates that the inspired patronage which created Buffalo’s outstanding architectural legacy is very much alive and well today.”
Kent Kleinman, Chair of the School of Architecture, who sat on the Selection Committee agrees that the five architects who participated in the competition are all “top flight, submitting entries with divergent philosophies, all executed superbly.” He continues, “I’ve sat on a number of competition juries, and I can attest that these designers went all out.”
Mendell comments that the most gratifying part of the process was that the respondents felt inspired by the idea. He clarifies that this was not really a competition to design a building, but was in actuality a competition to select the architect. There was no guarantee that what was prepared in submission would actually be built. “This was an idea competition as well as a building design competition.”
The competition’s winning design is Toshiko Mori’s unique glass pavilion.
Mori (who is Chair of the Architecture Department at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design) was in Bordeaux, France when her cell phone rang asking her to be in the competition. On her way home, Mori traveled via Basil, Switzerland and then through Rome while her mind churned about the presence of history enhanced by its relationship with the new. Eagerly agreeing to participate in the competition, she found the process psychologically and emotionally grueling. “If building next to the Pantheon, what would you do?” she comments.
Mori confesses that glass is a material with which she is fascinated. “In terms of physics, it’s a liquid ... a mutable, responsive material,” she says. “Candy is the same—melt candy and it’s sugar and water—as temperature cools it returns to a solid state.” She adds, “The addition of layering, coating, adding a film, can enhance the performance of a building: the performance criteria of glass has exponentially increased in the last twenty-five years.”
The Mori pavilion
Mori cites the Martin House as the place where Wright used the most number of windows of his Prairie Houses. “He called his windows light screens: he used them as a threshold between nature and artifice ... as a screening device mediating the human environment with the outside.”
Indeed, Wright built the house on Jewett like a Chicago skyscraper, using reinforced concrete and steel. Massive piers allow walls which are non-structural, an innovative technological advance at the time. Mori sees that as an important clue in terms of how Wright used glass, and cites his essay on glass (first published in The Architectural Record in 1928), where he describes modern, machine-made glass as “the most precious of the architect’s new material.” By using glass as the major fabric for the Visitors’ Center, Mori declares to Wright, “You’re absolutely right; you made a manifesto out of it; you predicted it; here we are!” She thinks that the Center’s glass walls “dematerialize the mass of the building as its transparency allows an immediate connection with the landscape.”
One of the most intriguing aspects of Mori’s Garden Pavilion is the roof. It echoes Wright’s gentle sloping roof and signature overhanging eaves—broad and sheltering. However, in contrast to a conventional roof whose ridges guard against Buffalo’s infamous weather, Mori’s roof is boldly flipped, intentionally inverted to collect the snow. In addition to using snow for its insulation value, Mori explains that the storm drainage from a large roof surface becomes a major ecological issue for the delicate fabric of the site. “This roof will be made of a light material, a carbonfiber structure with fiberglass surface.”
“It is built like the hull of a boat—because of its lightness, it can cantilever further and can compensate for the extra snow load,” she says.
Mori’s roof will hold snow and rain and channel them through four piers into a holding tank whereby they can irrigate the extensive gardens of the Martin complex and mitigate any drainage issues. In fact, Mori’s design (as well as the restoration and reconstruction of the entire complex) are all geared toward a “green building” approach. By minimizing dependence on mechanical and electrical components, the geothermal approach will eliminate noisy condensers, be neighborhood-friendly, and acoustically non-intrusive.
The Albright-Knox exhibition
The design competition is now the subject of a rare architectural focus at the Albright Knox Art Gallery. Entitled Mori on Wright, the show explores the individual and communal synergy that has flowed through the project. Most ardent among the participants is UB Architecture Chair Kleinman. As co-curator, he conceived and conceptualized the show. Under his guidance and counsel, architecture students at UB have designed the installation and made many of the exhibited models.
One student team made five large (four feet square), detailed, and impeccably- crafted wooden models of the entire Martin House complex into which wood models of the five competing schemes have been seamlessly inserted. This installation allows visitors to fully understand and appreciate each of the five alternative proposals in the context of Wright’s master work.
Another student team designed a custom display system that allows the competitors’ drawings and models to hover in space without actually touching the gallery floor or walls. The sole physical connection to the gallery is a slim steel ribbon that mounts to the wall: all models and drawings are supported off this delicate “horizon” line. The models project into space without visible support. The drawings are sandwiched between ten foot long glass sheets, supported at only two points. Kleinman explains, “The arrangement is intended to evoke a sense of weightlessness, or rather the paradox of simultaneous weight and weightlessness that characterizes both Wright’s achievement and Mori’s poetic response to Wright.”
During the actual competition, the Selection Committee had been deadlocked on the designs. After extensive review, in an unanticipated move, the panel initiated a second round of the process by inviting two finalists—Mori and Office dA—to further develop their proposals. Nehdar Tehrani, a principal of Office dA, describes their proposal as “a didactic machine,” a sequence of spaces using the ramp as a spine in a device to “cleanse the palate of assumptions one might have about Wright.” It leads the viewer “from transition-to-presentation-to-representation-to-actuality,” along the path allowing only glimpses of fragments of the historic building. The visitors sit in an auditorium watching an orientation presentation on a large screen; as it ends, the screen lifts and reveals a clear glass wall framing their first full view of the Martin House.
Tehrani speaks of the “incredible honor and incredible responsibility” of taking on the challenge to participate in the competition. Mendell marvels that the committee found themselves in a wonderful dilemma as the client: “There were two great choices, and whichever we selected, we were unable to make a bad choice,” he says.
In recent years, the Albright Knox has set attendance records with blockbuster shows: Monet, Modigliani, the Phillips Collection. Yet Louis Grachos, Director of the Gallery, finds the more modest focus of the Mori on Wright show particularly exciting. In a general way, he sees the museum as a venue for future architectural projects, envisioning programming that incorporates all of the arts and disciplines. “In the landscape of what we cover as an institution, architecture is certainly an important part of the scene.” This show is part of a larger program philosophy, one which appears to more aggressively use the gallery’s great collection within a more contemporary focus on programming.
To support and contextualize the show, Grachos saw an opportunity to present a very strong selection of works from the permanent collection—works that “refer to architecture, or in form imply architecture, or represent the way an artist may think of space.” In examining the way artists have been influenced by architecture over time, Claire Schneider, Associate Curator at the Gallery, has assembled a complementary exhibition, entitled Architecture into Form. The show focuses on the importance of buildings, cities, and manmade structures of all kinds as a source of inspiration and cornerstone of artistic breakthroughs in contemporary art.
A concurrent show, Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting, also features an artist whose abstracts derive from architecture and the dense urban environments of the city.
Kleinman and Schneider have also created an interpretation of the show through hand-held audio guides. The anchor voice on the audio is Kleinman’s—the text allows all to appreciate the show, whether one is a professional architect or is a person uninitiated in the language of the built environment.
For each gallery visitor, it is impossible to experience the architectural exhibits (housed in the museum’s original building) without gazing out the sculpture court and across to the modernist addition to the original Albright Art Gallery. Designed by Buffalo native Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore Owings & Merrill and completed in 1961, the Knox addition to the Albright and the newly designed Martin House Visitors’ Center were generally conceived for similar purposes — to improve circulation; provide additional exhibition, education, and curatorial space; and to generally enhance the total visitor experience.
The Albright connector separates the new auditorium from the original gallery while still allowing a relationship of perfect balance and scale. Forty years after its completion, the addition stands in pure Miesian minimalism, flawlessly seamed, dark glass against light, its stark rectilinearity preserving the integrity of both the old and the new. Like Mori’s proposed Garden Pavilion to Wright’s complex, the Bunshaft addition to Green’s museum is confident in its own integrity. As such, there is beautiful harmony—each of the new structures can jubilantly play first violin and allow the historic landmark to be concertmaster.
Mori on Wright continues through March 14. There will be a symposium on the Vistor Center competition with Toshiko Mori, Stephen Cassell, Brian Healy, Warren Schwartz, Nader Tehrani, and Joseph Giovanni Nov. 8, 3-5 p.m. at the Albright-Knox. Call 270-8292 to buy tickets.
Barry A. Muskat is a regular contributor to Buffalo Spree on architectural issues. In addition to his career in the private sector, Muskat is a professor at Canisius College where he teaches Architectural History in the Department of Fine Arts.
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