User:Ninaperezdesign/Evaluate an Article

Frank Lloyd Wright
(Provide a link to the article here.)

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
It's most relevant to our class and the readings we did for this week.

Evaluate the article
The lead section seemed clear and concise, with a number of reliable links to related pages, and clear indications to the sub-sections within the page. They outline his personal life history, and the trajectory of his career in an inter-connected way, although those aspects if his biography are then sectioned in distinct categories in the contents page.

Although of the content seems relevant and up-to-date, there's little reference to controversial or critical understanding of Wright's work. From my own research, there has been some discourse around the hypocrisies within his "progressive" thinking that are evident in some of his work. For example, in 1928, Wright created a conceptual design for the Rosenwald Schools– an educational network, mostly in the segregated south, for African American children. The project was featured in a major retrospective exhibition at MoMA in 2017, and although the school was a comparatively small project to some of his other work, the way he was documented talking about the building's users displayed a lot of racist and regressive terminology (Wright starts to describe the project–and particularly the way in which he characterizes African-Americans as being childlike, enjoying music and dance, bright colors–[and how] he makes a reference to ‘darkies') which speaks volumes about how the architect was not exempt from the ideologies of his time. I think the lack of reflection of these ideologies and how they may have impacted his work, and the development of major cities points to some of the biases and gaps in equality within Wikipedia, and the lack of criticism and critical review of white male designers.

All of the sources and references provided seem reliable and credible, and reflect the content of the page well. The organizational structure as well as the media and images selected also seem appropriate and reflect the content of the page well, although I wish there were some images of completed projects or rendered drawings from his collection that illustrate the "Community Planning" section, although they do include links to other pages that detail some of the individual projects.