Frank Lloyd Wright Car Showroom

Minor Works

Hoffman Auto Showroom, 430 Park Avenue, 1955. Photo: Ezra Stoller.

In the mid-1950s, Frank Lloyd Wright accepted a commission he had never attempted before: an automobile showroom. The client was Max Hoffman, an Austrian-born importer who had spent the postwar decade single-handedly building the European car market in America. Hoffman was responsible for putting the Mercedes 300SL Gullwing into production, convincing Porsche to build the 356 Speedster, and helping sketch the Porsche crest on a restaurant napkin. He was, by any measure, a man of exceptional taste — and he wanted a room to match.

Wright was 87. The two men, both ardent drivers, got along immediately. The deal was partly transacted in Porsches.

The room

The space at 430 Park Avenue was modest by any standard — 3,600 square feet carved out of the ground floor of a curtain-wall tower, exactly the kind of building Wright despised. His solution was to ignore the container entirely. A semicircular ascending ramp wrapped around a central rotating turntable large enough to display four cars at once, presenting each one in turn like objects in a vitrine. Three more cars could be shown on the ramp itself. Structural columns — square, and ordinarily the kind of element Wright would express honestly — were clad in mirrors to dissolve them entirely. It was an unusual concession: architecture subordinated to merchandise. The room was, above all, a stage.

Rotating turntable and semicircular ramp, as completed 1955.

The ramp shape was not new to Wright. He had been developing the spiral idea for the Guggenheim since the early 1940s — first sketches date to 1943. The showroom is better understood as a rehearsal at small scale than a source of inspiration for the museum. At 3,600 square feet with a low ceiling, the ramp never achieves the spatial liberation of its larger sibling. Ada Louise Huxtable wrote that it too clearly recalled the ramps of parking garages. She wasn't wrong. But the intention was legible.

The showroom was originally planned around Jaguar. A large leaping jaguar statue was shipped from Coventry to serve as the centerpiece. By the time the room was complete, Hoffman had moved on to Mercedes. The statue went back.

What remains

This was one of only three Wright projects in New York City. In April 2013, the owners of 430 Park Avenue received a call from the Landmarks Preservation Commission indicating the space was under consideration for interior landmark designation. Three days later they applied for a demolition permit. It was approved the same day. Within a week the room was gone. It is now a TD Bank branch.

Hoffman commissioned more than a showroom. That same year Wright designed him a Usonian house in Rye, New York — low-slung, copper-trimmed, overlooking Long Island Sound. The two projects together, one a stage for selling cars and one a home for living among them, say something about the depth of that client relationship. The showroom is gone. The house survives, and was purchased in 2019 by Marc Jacobs.

Sources: Metropolis Magazine; Hyperallergic; Wikipedia — Hoffman Auto Showroom; Core77; Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

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