The American house beautiful.(Frank Lloyd Wright's )

Over the course of a highly prolific career lasting some seventy years, Frank Lloyd Wright was first and foremost an architect. But he was concerned with the harmonious dialogue between a building, its landscape setting, and its interiors, and felt that they should all be shaped and manipulated to best advantage and integrated to form a total work of art. Wright was always outspoken, and the principles he espoused along these lines influenced the way houses were designed, furnished, and lived in over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. The evolution of Wright's architecture, his interiors, and his furnishings are the subject of a traveling exhibition currently on view at the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina, where it may be seen until February 4, 2007. Future showings will be listed in Calendar.

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Entitled Frank Lloyd Wright and the House Beautiful, the exhibition includes approximately one hundred objects, among them drawings, furniture, metalwork, textiles, household accessories, and books. Wright's thoughts about the components of a functional and beautiful house are explored in three thematically organized sections. The first addresses how American democracy allowed Wright to explore entirely new directions in modern architectural design. The second focuses on how interiors and their furnishings could be successfully integrated with architecture; and the last explores the ways in which Wright experimented to bring his ideals to average Americans.

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