The Wright Imperial Hotel at 100: Frank Lloyd Wright and the World
The Wright Imperial Hotel at 100: Frank Lloyd Wright and the World
The Wright Imperial Hotel at 100: Frank Lloyd Wright and the World
Professor Ken Tadashi Oshima curated/authored The Wright Imperial Hotel at 100: Frank Lloyd Wright and the World, a major exhibition and fully-illustrated book currently at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art designed by Yoshio Taniguchi. Five years in the making, this exhibition builds on the 2017 MoMA exhibition, Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive, for which Professor Oshima was a co-curator, to celebrate the centennial of the 1923 opening of Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.
In bringing together works from Columbia University’s Avery Library, MoMA, the Library of Congress and Japanese collections, this exhibition reexamines Wright as one of the first global architects pursuing this decade-long project at the nexus of his vast career spanning art, architecture, and design to writing, landscape, education, construction and urbanism. Highlights of the exhibition include film footage of the construction of Wright’s Fallingwater (1936-), a full-scale Usonian House installation and contemporary color animated film of Broadacre City (1929-35). The reexamination of Wright also considers his designs in the context of his travels and passions connecting different landscapes and cultures around the world, and pursuit of high-rises including his 528-story Mile-High Illinois skyscraper (1956). Today, a further evolution of Wright’s vision can be seen in the design of the new high-rise Imperial Hotel (2021-2036) by Tsuyoshi Tane (1979-) that bridges past/present/future.
Professor Oshima will also present this work on-line in collaboration with the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and Foundation for the lecture series “Unpacking the Imperial Hotel at 100: Frank Lloyd Wright and the World”
Thursday, November 9, 2023
7 p.m. EST / 4 p.m. PST
2024 Exhibition Dates
The exhibition continues in 2024 at the Panasonic Shiodome Museum of Art (Minato-ku, Tokyo) January 11 – March 10, 2024 and Aomori Museum of Art (Aomori City, Aomori) March 20 – May 12, 2024.