It’s unusual to step into a Frank Lloyd Wright building and not find at least a few examples of the architect’s furniture designs. That’s in part because the designer always wanted complete control over the environments he created, and in part because many of his designs look silly with more conventional furnishings. The Museum of Wisconsin Art, or MOWA, in West Bend, Wisconsin, is now hosting the exhibition “Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design“ that looks at his career through the prism of his chair designs, including some that have been brought to life for the first time.
The exhibition was curated by Eric Vogel and Thomas Szolwinski with Jennifer Gray. Szolwinski, who is curator of architecture and design at MOWA, notes that while Wright has been the subject of dozens of exhibitions and more than a thousand books, this is the first exhibit exclusively devoted to his chairs and the first exhibit on the Wisconsin-born architect at the museum.
While not encyclopedic in scope, the exhibition is organized chronologically with work completed between 1903 and Wright’s death in 1959. Thirty of the 42 objects displayed are historic, with the remaining dozen fabricated specifically for this exhibit. The creation of these “new” pieces is significant as these chairs were previously known only through drawings or photographs. While none of these designs are earth-shattering, they do fill in missing information about Wright’s furniture studies with tangible objects for additional study.
There are two types of chairs: comfortable ones and the other kind. To their credit, the curators of the exhibit don’t try to save the famed architect from himself, including Wright’s frank admission: “Well, I don’t design chairs to be comfortable to people; I design chairs to dignify man.”
Wright designed some 800 individual pieces of furniture, including 200 chairs, during his long career, but it’s rare to come across his furniture outside the context of buildings he designed.
That’s not true of other architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer and Eero Saarinen. They didn’t just design furniture for their projects; they created enduring chairs that have been available for purchase (albeit often quite pricey) since the time of their creation. Wright’s furniture has never enjoyed mass production — not because they couldn’t be reproduced, but because there’s little demand for such forthrightly uncomfortable pieces, regardless of provenance. Philip Johnson, one of architecture’s primary arbiters of taste through much of the 20th century, posited that one’s aesthetic embrace of a chair influenced its perceived comfort. But many of Wright’s designs are attractive while being uncomfortable.
For Wright, the chairs he designed were principally cultural artifacts, conceived as extensions of his groundbreaking spatial creations. But just as his buildings can be challenging, some of his chairs can be literally backbreaking. They are high-level exercises in form, not function.
The curators use Wright’s Taliesin homes (in Wisconsin and Arizona) as the lens for presenting the pieces. “We’re looking at Taliesin as this experimental space for him to think about furniture,” Szolwinski said. “He’s living with furniture pieces from many different commissions, and he’s making furniture for himself in different iterations before he designs that kind of design for somebody else.”
The Dining Chair for Taliesin dated 1911-12 has been replicated for the first time in over a century based on a single photograph that depicts the piece in situ. Its austerity is dramatic and prescient; one can imagine the same design emerging from the Bauhaus a decade later. The Armchair for Taliesin is another reconstruction for this exhibit. The original design from 1914 sat at the head of Wright’s dining table for more than a decade until the house was destroyed by fire in 1925. Its wide board back suggests the importance of the chair’s occupant while emphatically demarking the space of the room.
The early designs were produced for homes during his Prairie period and stay true to the right angle, but by the 1930s, Wright begins to incorporate more varied angles in his chairs — as well as his buildings.
The Chair for the A.D. German Warehouse in Richland Center, Wisconsin, of 1935 reflects the more formal experimentation that occurs when Wright has access to a workforce of avid apprentices at Taliesin. The interlocking wood planes point to the sort of design that keeps Ikea a strong force in worldwide furnishings today. The “Origami” Armchair for Taliesin West of 1946 is probably better known than the other pieces in the exhibit. The splayed seat is more welcoming than most, and its angles reflect Wright’s interpretation of the southwestern desert landscape that was his winter home in the latter decades of his life.
Even in the last years of his long life, Wright was still producing interesting furniture designs. The whimsical design of a Child’s Chair and Stool prototypes for the Wyoming Valley School (1958) in Spring Green, Wisconsin, still seems eager to enchant children and adults alike. And the Café Table and Chairs for New York’s Guggenheim Museum beg to be produced and installed at the museum’s cafe. Rendered in spun aluminum, an unusual material choice that screams atomic age, the pieces share kinship with Saarinen’s Tulip table and chairs from the same period.
“Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design” is a unique opportunity to see genuinely new Wright material, thoughtfully presented in the context of similar work from throughout his long and prolific career. That’s worth celebrating, even if his enduring disdain for comfort means his furniture will never become commonplace in our homes.
“Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design” remains on view through Jan. 25 at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, Wisconsin, about 125 miles north of Chicago.
Edward Keegan writes, broadcasts and teaches on architectural subjects. Keegan’s biweekly architecture column is supported by a grant from former Tribune critic Blair Kamin, as administered by the not-for-profit Journalism Funding Partners. The Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content.
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