Some of Wright's designs for high-rises were both highly dramatic and innovative, as the exhibit demonstrates. The only problem was that few of them came to fruition. Among the unbuilt plans was a radical design that would have permanently altered a section of the Lower Manhattan skyline.

As early as 1912 Wright designed a 25-story tower for the San Francisco Call, a local newspaper. The Call Building would have been the highest building in the city, but lack of funds cancelled the project. Then in 1929 the rector of St. Mark's in the Bowery, in the East Village, invited Wright to draw up plans for apartment buildings that would surround the church and provide it with much-needed revenue for the church.

The architect responded with a proposal for a series of towers separated from each other in an expanse of greenery and based on a radical structural concept: each building's floors, made of reinforced concrete, would be cantilevered from a central core, permitting the exterior walls to be glass.

The architectural profession took notice: nothing like this had ever been advanced. But in the end St. Mark's rector got cold feet.

"The glass extending from ceiling to floor? I am assailed at once with vertigo," he said. End of project. Luckily for Wright, he got to build a comparable high rise 25 years later, the 19-story Price Tower in Bartlesville, Okla., constructed in 1955, which similarly uses the cantilever principle. So New York's loss, finally, was Oklahoma's gain.

But the losses and abandoned projects, especially in the 1930s, were almost too much for Wright to bear. His plan for a 112-story tower for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair was not built, nor were other similar schemes. Only in the 1940s, at the same time he was building Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, was he able to build another tall structure-the research tower for the Johnson's Wax company in Racine, Wis. It was the only one.