Frank Lloyd Wrightʼs appreciation of nature is well documented, with his architecture, furniture, and finishes drawn from “organic” sources. This talk will explore those areas that serve as transition spaces—porches, porticos, and terraces—in Wrightʼs work, on themes ranging from his breaking of the Victorian-era architectural “box,” to how changes in social norms affected his work. It will illustrate Wrightʼs views on outdoors space, as well as his clients, and feature examples form all eras of this career.
Scott W. Perkins was the Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at Price Tower Arts Center, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, from 2006 2012. The Arts Center is housed in Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1956 Price Tower, the architect’s only realized skyscraper design. Perkins was co-author with Pat Kirkham of an essay on Frank Lloyd Wright’s interiors, furniture, and fixtures for Price Tower Arts Center’s 50th Anniversary commemorative catalogue, Prairie Skyscraper: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower (2005), and on the interiors and furnishings of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for its 50th anniversary publication, The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum (2009). In 2010, he contributed to two publications, an essay, “Air,” in Wright Panorama: Elements of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture in 360 degrees, and “Bruce Goff and the Modern Organic Interior,” in Bruce Goff: A Creative Mind, a publication he edited to coincide with an exhibition of the same name. His recent book, Building Bartlesville, 1945-2000 (2008), explores the post-World War II architectural impact of Frank Lloyd Wright, Bruce Goff, and William Wesley Peters upon the community, and in 2013 his essay on Zaha Hadid's 2002 museum expansion project for the Price Tower will appear in Richard Longstreth's Additions, Subtractions, and Adjacencies: Preserving While Modifying the Work of Frank Lloyd Wright (University of Virginia Press).
Perkins’ exhibitions include Wright Restored: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower Interiors (2006), Setting the Table: Designs in Mid-Century Dinnerware (2008), Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (with Michaela Merryday, 2008), UK/OK: Exploring Traditions in Contemporary Design (2009), Lights! Camera! Fashion: The Film Costumes of Edith Head (2010), Fellowship: 75 Years of Taliesin Box Projects (2010), Once Upon an Island: Twin Towers Rising (2011), and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Samara: A Mid-Century Dream Home (2013), a look at a Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian design still occupied by its original owner. His 2006 exhibition Karim Rashid, the first US museum exhibition dedicated to the designer’s work, is the basis for the nationally-touring Designocracy: Karim Rashid’s Designs for Living (2011-2015).
A Wisconsin native, Perkins is a PhD candidate in Design History at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture in New York City, where he received his MA in the same field, and holds a BFA in Interior Architecture from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. He is a member of the the Board of Directors of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, an organization whose sole mission is to protect and preserve the architectural legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Tickets are $5 for Burchfield Penney and Graycliff members and $10 for "not yet" members.