“Kaneji Domoto at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonia” Exhibition

“Kaneji Domoto at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonia” Exhibition

The Center for Architecture

This event has ended.

The Center for Architecture presents Kaneji Domoto at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonia. Curated by Lynnette Widder, Lecturer in Discipline, Sustainability Management, at Columbia University, and designed by Studio Joseph, the exhibition presents the houses by Japanese American architect and Taliesin fellow Kaneji Domoto in Westchester County’s Usonia, a national historic district.

The community of Usonia in Pleasantville, founded in 1944, 35 miles north of New York City, is the only fully realized example of Wright’s vision for an exurban United States and a unique example of what it meant to design, and live, within Wright’s millieu. Wright designed the site plan and served on the building committee, defining the architectural style for the community, and eventually built three of the cooperative’s 47 homes. Five of the remaining houses in Usonia were designed by Kaneji Domoto, who used the houses to translate Wright’s idiom into low-cost construction.

Kaneji Domoto at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonia follows Domoto as an independent architect working in midcentury America, from his time at Taliesin, to his experiences in a Japanese internment camp in the southwest, to his work in Usonia and beyond. Through construction documents and original photography of his five Pleasantville houses, the exhibition explores Domoto’s architectural style, his references to Japanese design, and his connection to landscape architecture. Widder dives deep into the Lurie House, tracing the history of the home from construction, through the lives of the original occupants, and to Widder’s subsequent renovation and restoration.

Featuring material from private archives never-before shown publicly, the drawings, artifacts, models, letters, and photographs exhibited show how Domoto’s work applied Wrightian idiom and provide a glimpse at life in Frank Lloyd Wright’s inner circles. A site model of the Usonia community, custom-built by students at the Rhode Island School of Design, and furniture by Smilow Design, a company with roots in Usonia, will also be on display.

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