The time is Wright

The MFA has a unique opportunity to execute an unbuilt design by America's greatest architect

by Douglass Shand-Tucci

SKYLINE

Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, so recently in the news for its triumphant foray to Japan, is about to embark on an equally visionary project here at home -- a great new American wing, the announcement of which is imminent.

I hope very much that it will be designed by Sir Norman Foster, who has just won (in timely fashion for Boston's fundraising) what he has long deserved: the Pritzker Prize, the highest award the world of architecture can bestow.

Certainly Foster would be an exciting choice. Hardly less exciting, however, is the possibility I would like to raise here: that Foster share top billing with Frank Lloyd Wright.

That this is a real possibility I can attest to. If, that is, the museum is as interested as the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in the idea of incorporating into the new American wing a gallery I believe Wright designed for Boston's museum (certainly he designed it for one of its greatest collections) some 80 years ago.

It is a work long since lost sight of, to be sure, but the Wright Foundation has carefully preserved all the construction drawings for just such an opportunity.

It is not very widely realized that Wright grew up in Boston in the 1870s. His first memory of the city, as the leading authority on his work, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, told me once, was as a boy of nine, standing in front of the Jordan Marsh store (of happy memory -- it's now Macy's) on downtown Washington Street. Passersby, it seems, had noticed young Wright's cap, probably set rather cockily to one side, and he never forgot their recognition.

It was a fugitive memory of childhood visits to the city's heart that stood out for Wright, whose suburban childhood on Boston's South Shore was decidedly a mixed business. From 1874 to 1878, from his seventh to his eleventh year, Wright lived in Weymouth, where his father was the minister of the First Baptist Church. "The little preacher family was desperately poor," he would later recall, the center of their lives "a modest, gray, wooden house near a tall and white brick church in drab old Weymouth."

Modest? Gray? Drab? These were not good memories for the World's Greatest Architect. Indeed, Pfeiffer recalls, Wright solemnly declared to him once that "Philadelphia was the ugliest city in America, unless it was Boston."

Still, Wright's youthful time in Boston was not all grim. It was at another downtown store -- Milton Bradley's -- where, he recalled, his mother bought the Froebel blocks the architect famously played with as a boy, and it was in the Weymouth house that he learned to love classical music, which his father was apt to play well into the night.

Bach, Beethoven, and Froebel blocks constitute a very short story, of course. Nor do Wright's three late works in Boston's orbit -- interesting but not major houses in Amherst and in Manchester, New Hampshire -- and the few references to Boston in his writings make the story much longer.

But this is really to skate over the surface of things. In the gallery design, Wright did conceive of what would have been Boston's first example of radical Modernist design. And while as a place Boston may not arise often in Wright's life and work, as an idea -- several, in fact -- Boston is all over the place.

Wright's architecture was in the first place enormously influenced by the work of Boston's leading architect of the 1870s and '80s, Henry Hobson Richardson. Moreover, as I will document in the new edition of my book Built in Boston, City and Suburbs: 1800-2000 (due out this fall from the University of Massachusetts Press), Wright's overall philosophy had vital roots in Boston, with which he had something of a love/hate relationship

Think Concord, not Weymouth, and this becomes clearer. For Wright himself recalled that he had indeed found in drab Weymouth "the Transcendentalism of Concord . . . in the books of Channing, Emerson, Theodore Parker, and, yes, Thoreau" -- names that, more than a half-century later, Wright would blazon in a kind of shrine-niche in his famous Unitarian church in his birthplace of Madison, Wisconsin -- "all Bostonians!", Bruce Pfeiffer mused to me recently, wonderingly.

Notice, too, that Unity Church in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, one of Wright's most celebrated buildings, was Unitarian -- "the Boston religion" Mark DeWolfe Howe called it, of which Wright was himself a leading member.

Boston's influence on Wright would seem to have been, in fact, more various and more significant than has previously been thought. It may thus surprise less that, however subterranean and obscured his response to those influences (as was always the case with Wright), he was on at least one occasion mightily stimulated to create quite a brilliant design for Boston.

Wright shared a passion for Japanese prints with John and William Spaulding, Boston's most celebrated collectors in this field. One night in January 1913, at their Beacon Street townhouse opposite the Public Garden, Wright dined very well indeed on the Spauldings' offer that he advise them in putting together a collection that within a year had become one of the greatest in the world -- a collection Wright was enormously proud of.

So proud was he, and so much more the designer than anything else, that by February of 1914 Wright was at work on a design for the Back Bay area: an art gallery or print room for the storage and exhibition of the Spaulding collection. ("You must tell us of the plans for the Museum print room as they take shape," wrote William Spaulding to Wright ardently.)

The intimate character of the room (notice the low armchair and adjustable, slanted easel for studying specific prints) may mean it was designed for the top floor of or as a rear addition to the Spauldings' townhouse, with which Wright was, of course, familiar. On the other hand, the reference to the "Museum print room," with a capital M, suggests a more institutional setting -- surely Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, to which the Spauldings gave their collection seven years later. In that era, when the museum had just moved into its current building in the Fenway, it encouraged just such flair and artistry, particularly in the design of the Japanese department's galleries. Witness the celebrated garden court and temple room of 1910, designed by Ralph Adams Cram.

Wherever in the Back Bay area the gallery was intended to be, the uncertain times of those days at the start of World War I surely waylaid the idea. That, and the scandal attaching to Wright! Notorious already for having abandoned his wife and children, Wright found himself in the summer of 1914, just after starting work on the Boston gallery, at the center of a lurid and unsavory mass-murder story. A crazed servant killed Wright's girlfriend, her children, and others, and set fire to Wright's country house. Beacon Street must have been horrified.

Yet no fault could be found with Wright's design, as Julia Meech -- who has documented the relationship between Wright and the Spauldings -- has pointed out. It is exquisite. Indeed, so highly did Wright prize this design he later offered it to the Metropolitan Museum when his own collection of Japanese prints went there, and the Spaulding Gallery design has been cited by architectural historian William Jordy as a source for one of the last and greatest of Wright's works, the Guggenheim Museum in New York. And at least one major American museum has in recent years considered creating Wright's wonderful print room for the Spaulding Collection.

What an opportunity for Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. The response of America's greatest architect to one of Boston's -- and the world's -- greatest collections of Japanese prints is a priceless artistic and intellectual legacy that ought finally to be realized.

Of course, neither the assembling of the Spaulding Collection nor the design of the Spaulding Gallery is a tale exactly unknown. They're just to be found in very different books, so to speak -- books that must be put together to understand the full significance of either.

What a coup it would be for Boston's museum to install a Wright interior designed for one of its greatest collections, and more than likely for its present building.

(Although this does raise an interesting question for the museum and the architect. Wright's design, of course, was to have housed a collection of Japanese prints, and I'm proposing the gallery be placed in the new American wing. There is obvious value, independent of its use, in the Wright interior, which -- though a highly functional gallery -- might be treated in any number of ways. It's an opportunity to be creative.)

The MFA surely seeks a Wright room anyway -- who doesn't? There's one today even in so distant and venerable an institution as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which carries out Wright's unbuilt work when circumstances permit, is not uninterested. And the proposed new American wing about to be announced by MFA director Malcom Rogers (just the buccaneer Boston's museum has long needed) is the ideal opportunity. I propose a millennial gift for Boston.

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Because of an editing error in last week's column the courtyard of Dante's restaurant was attributed to F.H. Stahl. In fact the designer is said to have been Ralph Adams Cram. It was Stahl, in an interview with me, who made the attribution.

Historian and critic Douglass Shand-Tucci is the author of several books on American art and architecture and New England studies. His column appears biweekly in the Phoenix.