(WEST BEND, WISCONSIN) – Time has been kind to New York’s Guggenheim. Today, it’s considered Frank Lloyd Wright’s crowning statement and an unequivocal masterpiece of modern architecture, but upon opening in 1959, its revolutionary form drew comparisons to a washing machine, marshmallow, and a giant corkscrew. The chairs Wright designed for the museum’s café were no less futuristic. Sleek and minimalist with a spun aluminum tulip base and an eye-shaped backrest, they seem to belong on the flight deck of a ship gliding through the solar system. They were never realized. Now, nearly seven decades later, the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) has commissioned a pair as part of a new exhibition that reframes Wright’s furniture within the Wisconsinite’s practice and American modernism more broadly.
READ FULL ARTICLE