SALON

Thursday, Feb 14, 2013 7:25 PM UTC

Frank Lloyd Wright’s unrealized skyscraper dreams

The iconic architect envisioned innovative designs beyond his famous Guggenheim and Falling Water plans

By

Topics: Hyperallergic, Frank Lloyd Wright, Architecture, Design, Skyscrapers, ,

Frank Lloyd Wright’s unrealized skyscraper dreams New York's Guggenheim Museum (Credit: Wikipedia Commons/figuura)
This article originally appeared on Hyperallergic.

Hyperallergic

While he achieved the construction of unusual designs for the spiraling nautilus shape of the Guggenheim Museum and the waterfall-spitting Falling Water, Frank Lloyd Wright never really got to build the towering spires of his dreams. One of his skyscraper designs would have dominated the lowlands of the East Village: three angular towers designed to cluster around St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in 1930. As Curbed noted earlier this week, the two 14-story and one 18-story designs would have shadowed over the old church that still houses the bones of peg-legged Peter Stuyvesant, a major figure in New York City back in the 17th century and the owner of the lands that turned into the surrounding neighborhood. (It’s not clear in the designs what exactly Frank Lloyd Wright had planned for the preservation of the cemetery that still exists in the churchyard, although he in his architectural drive likely was going to leave such details to someone else.) The design even included a penthouse for Wright up in the tallest of the towers, although unfortunately for his glamorous city views from the pinnacle of the structure, the whole plan was dashed by the Depression.

However, he did achieve a smaller version of it. The Price Tower, which just happens to be just down the street from the house where I grew up in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, is his only built skyscraper and has the same radial design as the St. Mark’s towers. The structure, nicknamed “the tree that escaped the crowded forest,” is meant to be laid out like the branches of a tree, with the spaces getting smaller and smaller as you near the top (the elevator ride is one of the most claustrophobic I’ve ever experienced). While the competition for standing out from “the crowded forest” of urban skyscrapers is much, much lower out in Bartlesville, and Wright ended up modifying his design to a more diminutive tree, it still shows what ambitions Wright had for stretching his modern forms up to the clouds away from the surrounding, usually more boring, buildings. He also dreamed up a mile high skyscraper called “the Illinois” in 1956 that was unrealized for Chicago, but would have been the tallest building in the world if built. Partly what stopped plans like these was just that Wright was way ahead of his time and such safety features like elevators for such tall building had yet to be developed. However, while Wright had to settle for the Oklahoma prairie instead of the pulsing streets of New York, it’s still interesting to imagine an East Village that would have been loomed over by three pillars of modernity, with Wright himself looking out from the topmost room.

 

 

More Allison Meier.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 1 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

Salon is proud to feature content from Hyperallergic, a forum for serious, playful and radical thinking about art in the world today.

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Who is "Company Doe"? Corporations accused of wrongdoing win battle to keep identities secret
40 points41 points | 1 comment
vote
"Slave descendants seek equal rights from Cherokee Nation": long, detailed narrative of legal and historical complications in red-white-black relations
25 points26 points | 1 comment
vote
Who is "Company Doe"? Corporations accused of wrongdoing win battle to keep identities secret
6 points7 points | comment
vote
Steven Soderbergh's Liberace biopic shows the famously flamboyant entertainer as a person, not a stereotype
6 points7 points | comment
vote
Experts: Fox News spying scandal a game-changer - I think that crackdown is ideologically driven and I think it’s hard to come to a different conclusion given the vigor with which this justice department has gone after people. So I think it is about a method of control that is badly misplaced.
3 points4 points | 6 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations