The Museum of Modern Art and Columbia University have jointly acquired the archives of Frank Lloyd Wright, MoMA announced today.
Among the architect’s extensive archives are “23,000 architectural drawings, 44,000 historical photographs, large-scale presentation models, manuscripts, extensive correspondence and other documents.” Columbia’s Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library will take on all the paper-based material, including drawings and correspondence, and MoMA will house the three-dimensional works, including prototypes and models, some of which, as MoMA points out in their announcement, were made for Wright’s 1940 exhibition at the museum.
In a statement, Barry Bergdoll, the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA and professor in the Art History and Archeology Department at Columbia, said:
“At MoMA, Frank Lloyd Wright’s work will be in conversation with great modern artists and architects such as Picasso, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier…This collaboration provides opportunities to reposition Wright as a key figure in the larger development of modern art and architecture, after decades of scholarship that have often emphasized his lone genius and his unique Americanness. A new chapter in appreciating Wright is opened by this new setting for his legacy.”
On that note:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf0RrF6KsI8&w=420&h=315]
