Staging Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel

ABSTRACT In recent years, a small but growing number of buildings designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright have been collected, moved and reconstructed by museums for exhibition. While those involved have done their best to mitigate the physical impact of relocation, the remaking of these buildings in new sites also brings an inevitable conceptual shift: a spatio-temporal gap between the ‘original' building and its new life as an ostensible stage set on display. Nowhere is this staging more palpable than at Wright's reconstructed Imperial Hotel. Opened in 1923, the Imperial Hotel maintains an almost mythical presence in Wright's oeuvre, having famously survived the Great Kanto earthquake that decimated Tokyo. Yet, despite its fame, the hotel succumbed to the pressures of redevelopment and was demolished in 1968. Nearly a decade later, a reconstruction of the hotel's lobby and reflecting pool was opened at the Meiji-mura architecture museum as a much-diminished relic combining original salvage with extensive new construction. Through a formal examination of the exhibit, this article examines those questions of authenticity and staging that plague architectural reconstructions in museums. While such exhibits are often perceived as second-rate substitutes for the real thing, the set-like presentation of the reincarnated Imperial Hotel is argued here to instead highlight the inherent theatricality of Wright’s design, which is arguably more apparent in the reconstruction than it ever was in the original.