At first, the number at the lower left corner of the small drawing seems to be a trace of curatorial cataloging: 01.01.87. But then it reveals itself to be a date: Jan. 1, 1887, written in the architectâs own hand: a Saturday, on which day he was all of 19 years and six months old. âFirst Drawing,â heâs written above the numbers. Faint graphite on tracing paper, itâs a delicate and leafy elevation of an odd house that the actual curatorial catalog, in the form of adjacent wall text, normalizes as Victorian Queen Anne: narrow windows aligned in strips, a low conical turret, a front door engraved in a broad semicircular Richardsonian Romanesque arch. But there are other annotations in the same handwriting. âDream House,â says one in red pencil. And another, more prosaically: âStudy made in Madison previous to going to Chicago.â And another, crossed out and half-erased: âProject. Cooper House, La Grange, Ill.â And then, boldly overwriting the lightly penciled and presumably earlier notations: âDrawing shown to lieber meister when applying for a job.â Here, at last, is the legend: Hereâmaybeâis the very drawing that got the teenager the internship that turned him, over the subsequent five years in which worked as a draftsman for Louis Sullivan, into Frank Lloyd Wright.

The First Drawing
The First Drawing is the very first drawing you see, just inside the entry, in the exhibition âFrank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive,â which runs until Oct. 1 at New Yorkâs Museum of Modern Art. In one of architectural scholarshipâs better ironiesâgiven the famous mutual slighting and snubbing between Wright and Philip Johnson over Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcockâs canonical International Style exhibition at MoMA in 1932âthe museum, in partnership with the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, acquired in 2012 the vast archive of Wrightâs seven-decade career that had been assembled by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives. As curator Barry Bergdoll explains in the showâs introductory text, â âUnpacking the Archiveâ refers to the monumental task of moving across the country 55,000 drawings, 300,000 sheets of correspondence, 125,000 photographs, and 2,700 manuscripts, as well as models, films, and building fragmentsâ representing 1,000 building designs and 500 built works.

Jonathan Muzikar/The Museum of Modern Art
A view of the exhibition

Jonathan Muzikar/The Museum of Modern Art
Exhibition view
The Effort Behind the Effortless
A trove of such abundance and variety invites two approaches. The first is a kind of big-data grind: a tenacious and comprehensive project of excavation and pattern-recognition. This is the work of Avery Library curator Janet Parks, whose endeavors are highlighted in the exhibitionâs central gallery display, Drawing in the Studio. Parks sorts through the drawings produced by Wrightâs various ateliers, identifying not only the role of his hand in the workflow but also the distinguishing the handwriting and handiwork of generations of draftspeopleâMarion Mahony Griffin above allâwho constructed the Wright aesthetic. âThereâs close to half a million of pieces of paper,â Parks observes in a short film accompanying the drawings on display, and yet the encounter with each piece of paper is intricate and intimateâa glimpse into the effort behind the seemingly effortless. âHeâs reworked it so often,â Parks notes of one drawing, âthat thereâs a cutout in the middle.â âHeâs such a larger-than-life figure,â she reflects, âthat you kind of expect these vast drawings. But in fact heâs quite delicate, working his way through the details. His handwriting is small.â

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
A cross section of Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1913â23)

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library
Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1913â23)
The second approach to such an abundant archive is to go narrow but deep: to drill down into the far corners and under-reported stories to which all that paper gives new articulation. This is the approach taken in the thematic galleries, which are arranged around the central drawing display, and each of which highlight key documents and ideas identified by different scholarsâeach of whom, like Parks, are featured in looping films. Itâs touching to see and hear their energy and rigor. Architectural historian Ken Tadashi Oshima studied 800 drawings and documents around Wrightâs long-since-demolished Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, which opened in 1923. âOne of the great finds was this book from 1924 that I had never seen before,â he says, referring to Teikoku Hoteru, an illustrated photographic compendium of the hotel. The book was the only form in which Wright ever saw the finished buildingâand on which he kept reworking it, penciling over the illustrations, refining the landscaping and details. A conventional interpretation of the hotel is as a prodigious synthesis of Orient and Occident, assimilating Wrightâs early fascination for traditional Japanese prints with a latently Neoclassical and symmetrical master plan. But Oshima repositions the work, pointing to a single sentence in the book that asserts the building is not a synthesis of sources, but, âNeither East nor West,â a unique artifact somehow suspended between global cultures. âThatâs part of the reframing,â he observes, that the archive enables.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library
A portrait of Wright by an unknown photographer
Problematic paradoxes and hidden histories abound. Mabel Wilson, an associate professor at Columbiaâs Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, identifies an unbuilt project that, as she observes in her filmed commentary, âdoesnât have a big footprint in the archiveâ but that carries significant historical weight: Wrightâs little-known 1928 redesign of the standard Rosenwald School building, part of a subsidized but segregated school-construction program for African-American students that was undertaken across the South in the first few decades of the 20th century by Sears, Roebuck & Co. chairman Julius Rosenwald. Wright enriched the dourly spartan schoolhouse template with a gracious patio and pool. Wilson notes that, âhe was willing to adapt those ideas,â from rarefied prior projects to a very different context. And yet, she observes, Wrightâs correspondence characterizes all African-Americans, not just schoolchildren, âas being childlike. Thereâs a sensibility of the cultural hierarchies of that time.â

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library
Wright's Rosenwald Foundation School for Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia (1928)
In another gallery, landscape architectural historian Therese OâMalley takes on a dilemma hiding in plain sight: Wrightâs stylized plant motifs, which in received wisdom are evocations of the American prairie. But, âlooking at the hollyhock,â she notes, âit was actually naturalized at this kind of imperialistic moment when we wanted to bring them in,â importing them from their native habitats in Europe and Asiaâprompting OâMalley to ask, âWhat is an American garden?â Adds MoMA researcher Jennifer Gray, âitâs also about social ecologies and political ecologies. All of these natures are very constructed.â

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library
A detail from the terrace of Hollyhock House
The Emergence of Architectural Historiography
Itâs tempting, in our age of hacked email dumps and fake news, to look for stable truths in primary sources like the Wright archive. But what makes documents like the First Drawing so compelling is not that any of Wrightâs annotationsâDream House; Study; Project; Cooper Houseâmight be the definitive one, but that all of the drawingâs sequential or simultaneous identities may be differently true. This polysemous possibility is the great advantage of considering any one piece of paper not in isolation, but as part of a pattern of a half-million such pieces that might be placed next to it. For all the paper that architects, even now, produce, architectural historiographyâthe interpretation of documents and recordsâstill feels like an emerging field. While fully sounding the depths of the archive will take years, the breadth, variety, and scholarly chorus of âUnpacking the Archiveâ enables us to see the work of Wrightâwho as early as 1932 was already the ubiquitous, prodigious, overfamiliar, clichĂ©-adjacent Frank Lloyd Wrightâas if for the first time.