(bubbly and funky pop music) - 1913 is a year that is so associated with the Armory Show in New York, breakthroughs in the world of Cubism, of Futurism, that people often forget that extraordinary things
were happening in Chicago. In 1913, Frank Lloyd
Wright, one of America's great architects, gets two commissions of a scale that he had
never experienced before. Midway Gardens, represented in this model, a great pleasure ground,
beer garden, in Chicago, and one of the other seminal
buildings of his career that represented a whole new scale, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Neither exist today, and
therefore many forget that in 1913 Wright was experimenting, pushing his search for
an abstract architecture of intersecting spaces
to a whole new dimension. (bubbly and funky pop music) At first glance, Midway Gardens appears almost, especially
if we see its red roofs and its pavilion system,
and its monumental symmetrical axes around
a great courtyard space, almost to be a re-creation
of an Asian palace. One might think of Chinese
or Japanese palaces. But one would be hard-put to find anywhere in the history of architecture a building that interweaves indoor and outdoor spaces in such complex and exciting ways. And in every direction, space and material is pierced to allow the light to come down through the building,
it originally would've also sported an enormous system of vines and come into flower in
the spring and summer. No longer an architecture of walls, but an architecture of
piers and columns that allow the eye to gravitate and
move through the space. (bubbly and funky pop music) He was in quest of what
he called the organic. By this he meant not only an architecture that might grow and change, but an architecture in
which all of the parts, from the smallest fragment
to the overall composition, were interrelated to one another. And he begins to introduce
precast concrete panels, thinking about architecture
in relationship to the machine, which was a major theme of the 20th century and a
preoccupation of Wright's, but at the same time he realizes, if he's going to cast, he can incorporate many of the geometrical experiments of the larger composition
into the single piece. So the single piece becomes
a kind of microcosm, with this incredible
play between symmetries and dynamisms, different
spaces, different depths, so that the material
itself becomes penetrated. These panels actually would have lined, and in a certain sense, dematerialized, into a filigree of light and shade, in almost a textile way,
this entire intermediary zone of the pavilions and the main building. So this is a building that simultaneously culminates almost 20 years
of Wright's experiment in the so-called Prairie Style, but also the opening of a new period
in material exploration in which this industrialized
concrete will be introduced into the more traditional
system of building with brick. (bubbly and funky pop music)