‘Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania’: two exhibitions bring new life to historic designs

‘Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania: The Fallingwater Projects’, currently on display at Speyer Gallery at Fallingwater, located approximately 70 miles southeast of Pittsburgh in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, features unrealised projects that Wright designed for the Unesco World Heritage site from the 1930s through the 1950s. The exhibition was inspired by Wright’s two-dimensional drawings created in collaboration with Edgar Kaufmann Sr for projects intended for the Fallingwater site, as well as downtown Pittsburgh.

‘The impetus for this project was [a booklet] we found called Pittsburgh in Progress, to accompany an exhibition that was held in Kaufmann's department store. The “Pittsburgh in Progress” exhibition was set up in 1946 to commemorate 75 years of the department store's history … looking forward 75 years, which would have been 2021. We wanted to also consider the changes or [consider] what this city thought it would look like at 75 years versus the reality of what it actually is in the 2020s,’ said Scott Perkins, senior director of Preservation and Collections for Fallingwater. 

Brian Eyerman, an architectural designer with Skyline Ink Animators + Illustrators, of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, employed 21st-century technology to create multimedia renderings of projects that were never constructed, as an examination of how the surrounding rural landscape might have been realised.

‘Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania’ at The Westmoreland Museum of American Art

The Fallingwater exhibition is presented alongside a complementary show, ‘Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania’, at The Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, which employs three-dimensional renderings of five unrealised Wright projects for Southwestern Pennsylvania.

Skyline Ink Animators + Illustrators was also tasked with executing renderings for the Westmoreland Museum exhibition, including a civic centre (1947), a self-service garage for Kaufmann’s Department Store (1949), the Point View Residences designed for the Edgar J Kaufmann Charitable Trust (1952), the Rhododendron Chapel (1952; seen in the animation below), and a gate lodge for the Fallingwater grounds (1941).

‘People who know about Frank Lloyd Wright [are] going to be super familiar with some of the projects. They’re going to know about the model for Broadacre City, or they're going to know about Fallingwater, but they're going to see these objects in a completely new light where you see them activated through the mind of Frank Lloyd Wright,’ said Westmoreland Museum chief curator Jeremiah William McCarthy.

‘For people who have very little familiarity with Frank Lloyd Wright, this is a great introduction to his work because it helps you understand his practice in a holistic sense,’ he added.

‘Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania: The Fallingwater Projects’ runs through the end of December 2023,  fallingwater.org

‘Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania’ runs through 14 January 2024, thewestmoreland.org

‘Toshiko Mori & Frank Lloyd Wright: Dialogue in Details’, a further complementary exhibition, is on view in the Westmoreland Museum’s Paneled Rooms, and runs through 14 April 2024