Frank Lloyd Wright Expert To Speak

Posted: November 12, 2009 at 4:02 a.m.
Updated: November 12, 2009 at 10:36 a.m.

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BENTONVILLE — From the day the coming of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art was announced, founder Alice Walton made it clear it would be more than a building fi lled with masterworks by renowned American artists. It was to serve up a lifeshaping experience that blurs the line between nature and art.

Enter Lynda Waggoner.

Waggoner will lead the second in Crystal Bridges’ continuing lecture series, “Speaking Of ...,” scheduled for 2 p.m. Sunday at the Old High Middle School auditorium, 406 N.W. Second St. This free lecture series, kicked off last year by renowned art critic Dr. Arthur Danto, brings the most respected thinkers and explorers in the world of art, design and nature to the region.

As vice president of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy and director of Fallingwater, widely considered to be world-renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s residential masterwork, Waggoner is regarded as one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the subject. As is the case with the design of Crystal Bridges, Wright, through Fallingwater, expressed his love of the American landscape and his deep understanding of its archetypal forms. In his own words, Wright described Fallingwater as “a noble consort to man and the trees ... to have repose and such texture as will quiet the whole and make it graciously at one with nature.”

Waggoner was turned onto the architectural masterwork, built over a waterfall in the Laurel Highlands of the Allegheny Mountains in southwestern Pennsylvania, long before she became curator and eventually director of Fallingwater. Author of the book “Fallingwater: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Romance with Nature” (1996), Waggoner served as a guide when the house was first opened to the public when she was in high school. That experience led her to study architecture and art history in college, which significantly shaped the course of her professional career and life. She plans to bring her intimate knowledge of the space and its way of tearing down the walls between art and nature to the podium at Old High Middle School auditorium on Sunday.

“I’m very excited about the opportunity to talk about what Wright was trying to accomplish with his architecture,” Waggoner said. “He was a very democratic architect. He responded to this unique place and landscape. He designed everything to be very much in harmony with the setting, in a way that the setting would be in harmony with it.”

The feeling Waggoner got walking through Fallingwater for the first time as a girl remains with her to this day, as the art of the architecture shaped her understanding and appreciation of nature and our place in it.

“So many people are so familiar with the picture of the side with the waterfall, but that’s actually the last thing you see on the site,” Waggoner said. “It’s a very controlled and choreographed composition of space, almost like you’re in the woods. You come around a corner and it’s like seeing past the next tree. You hear the water. You smell the woods. Some art, we experience intellectually. What’s unique about what Wright created is you also experience it viscerally.”

According to Lynn Berkowitz, director of learning experiences at Crystal Bridges, that experience — that lesson — ties in beyond Fallingwater and the Crystal Bridges building being erected in 100 acres of rolling, wooded landscape in northeast Bentonville.

“That being one with nature, one with art, one with the building and the impact of the Fallingwater space with people certainly resonates with us and what we’re trying to accomplish here at Crystal Bridges, but we also look to our neighbors in Fayetteville,” Berkowitz said. “The Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas ties in perfectly. Fay was an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright and sat on the board at Fallingwater.

“All three of these — in their architecture — the building itself is not an imposition on the landscape and the landscape is not an afterthought,” Berkowitz said. “The landscape truly plays a role in the shaping of the space and the experience.”

Fallingwater is also the inspiration for Cara Armstrong’s new children’s book, “Moxie, the Dachshund of Fallingwater,” the illustrations for which are featured in the current exhibit, “Inspired by Place: Illustrations by Cara Armstrong and Ard Hoyt,” at Crystal Bridges at the Massey. Attendees at the lecture event on Sunday are invited to migrate to the Massey afterward to view the exhibit.

Copies of Waggoner’s book will also be on sale at the auditorium following the program.

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