Frank Lloyd Wright drawings
Nowadays people try to preserve and restore Frank Lloyd Wright’s drawings. And this is quite a hard work, as paper work is very delicate and most of Wright’s drawings are more than 50 years old. Therefore they needed restorations before conserving and preserving them.
The good news is that Mr. Wright did not throw away great part of his work. However a lot of them are quite altered by time. That is why they must be restored through special treatment by professionals in the domain of paper conservation. For example some of them were repaired with tape, others were performed on boards, or they were fitted with rubber cement. Some of them were drawn on very week paper or they could not be read because of stains.
Restoration is not very easy. That is why funds were necessary from different sources. Up to now there were restored more than 1,000 drawings. They cover an interval of time from Wright’s work from 1887 to 1959. They include working drawings, renderings and sketches.
Wright drawings are kept in a film, a Dupont R Mylar one and they are preserved in an arcade which is air conditioned. This collection may be analyzed through CD-ROM, 8x10 prints and 4x5 transparencies. Major architecture institutions exhibit a part of Wright’s drawings, for example: the Library of Congress, from Washington DC, the Canadian Centre for Architecture from Montreal, or the Museum of Modern Art from New York. Apart from drawings, Frank Lloyd Wright left us over 400,000 articles, which can be considered now museum exhibits: personal art collections, letters, school records, manuscripts, fellowship records and different personal papers. Before being able to design a building, an architect must be able to draw it, to imagine its details, even the most insignificant ones. Therefore an architect also needs talent for drawing, as it is no use to have ideas in your mind if you can’t put them down on paper. You may explain them to a professional able to draw them, but they lack originality in this case. Talent for drawing must be innate, even if it is useful to cultivate it in a special school. For example did you know a drawing story of Frank? When he was a little boy he had a girl friend next door. One day she needed a drawing for school. The theme of the drawing was “My pet”. She wasn’t able to draw it, so she went in a hurry to her neighbor and friend Frank, who drew it immediately. It was a black and white cat on the carpet. The girl’s teacher said that it couldn’t have been drawn by a kid, bit it seemed that she was not right. Maybe that day a career began. Unfortunately, that drawing could not be kept, but we were told this memory by somebody who knew Frank very well.
From drawings to color, then from geometry and engineering to artistic creation and long lasting works, Frank’s life was not lived in vain for sure.
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