AIC's 46th Annual Meeting

From Wreckage to Relics: Conserving and Exhibiting Fragments from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Midway Gardens A financial failure from the beginning, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Midway Gardens was bulldozed and dumped into Lake Michigan just 15 years after its construction. Nearly a century later, three salvaged fragments from this entertainment center were uncrated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where they now form part of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archive, acquired jointly with Columbia University’s Avery Library. Built in 1914, Midway Gardens was a precursor to Wright’s textile block houses: employing cast stone blocks with complex geometric relief, it embodied a new use for concrete that united ornament and structure. However, by 1916, Midway Gardens had filed for bankruptcy, and many of the innovative design elements employed by Wright were altered by subsequent owners, including Edelweiss Brewing Company and E. C. Dietrich Midway Automobile Tire and Supply Company, to meet the needs of the various industrial aesthetics. These fragments – relocated first to Wisconsin, and now to New York – arrived with structural damages and without prior documentation. In preparation for MoMA’s major 2017 Wright retrospective, the museum’s Conservation Department partnered with Columbia University’s Historic Preservation Program to research and treat the works. Through examination, mock-ups, petrographic and chemical analysis, and research in the newly accessible Archive, the team shed new light on these works’ technology and history. The transfer of these fragments from the built environment – where they formed part of an evolving structure – to the museum collection – where they have become ossified relics – has shifted the way in which they are approached, both in interpretation and in preservation strategies. Their new home in acclimatized museum spaces expanded treatment options to include more reversible repair and loss-compensation materials than those typically used in historic preservation. This paper will cover the results of this year-long project that culminated in the treatment of these fragments, including the development of a technique to create large, vertical fills in cast stone with toned, Paraloid acrylic resin films and sand.