Mounting a show on architecture in an art museum, in which the primary object, the architecture itself, is never able to be seen or occupied or otherwise experienced, is antithetical to the museum’s purpose. The one-to-one relationship we strive for in experiencing works of art, viewer to object viewed, is not the same as that involved in experiencing works of architecture. Those who consent to exhibit architecture as art have agreed to a doubly diminishing compromise, whereby secondary materials—drawings, models, photographs, text, and the like—stand in for the work itself while no stand-in can be offered for the first-hand experience of the work. One reason we consent to this arrangement is the fact that the museum is practically the only forum in which architectural education is possible. Another reason is that the attribute of architecture which exhibiting likenesses can never supply—the psychological coming-together of the person and the building— often eludes the building’s general user, so that it would not appear to be any more absent in a show about a building than in that user’s experience of the building itself. But for those whom buildings do engage, the absence is a sore one indeed.

If ever there was an architect who taught the untutored the nature of this engagement, that architect is Frank Lloyd Wright. His architecture renders space in such a way that we find our place in it, forging a connection to something that heretofore had been only there—intangible, unconsidered. It is through his