Frank Lloyd Wright [Hardcover]

If you know any American architect, or maybe any architect, by name, it is Frank Lloyd Wright. This is just the way Wright would have wanted it. There is a story that he was a witness at a trial, and after being sworn in, he was asked his occupation. "I am the world's greatest architect," he deposed. When this raised eyebrows, he clearly loved making the explanation, "After all, I am testifying under oath." The remarkable works he produced were a product of that huge ego, as were the financial and marital crises that were present every year of his working life. It is all covered in succinct form in _Frank Lloyd Wright_ (Viking) by Ada Louise Huxtable, one of the admirable "Penguin Lives" series. Huxtable is an established architecture critic, and an obvious admirer of Wright; her book, full of praise and wonder at the works, does not skimp on the questionable morality, which did not just extend to sexual affairs but also to basic financial agreements with clients and creditors. "He never played it safe - in art or in life - and apology was not his style." Any lack of scruples is long gone; the buildings (most of them) remain.

Huxtable is generous in mentions of other books on Wright, to which she refers in the text for the reader's reference. In 1932 he published his own _Autobiography_, much of which is quoted here. Huxtable makes clear with every quotation, though, that there is almost always a second or third interpretation of events, and that he wrote not so much to give particulars of his life but to show himself in "his Olympian position as the self-described inventor of modern architecture." Wright was no imitator, as anyone who examines his works can see immediately: "He remembered everything, but copied nothing, absorbing what he liked and learned into his own creative thinking." He had a hardscrabble upbringing, powered by a mother who wanted him even before birth to be a great architect. He had no formal architectural education, declaring that a conventional education would have been useless to someone of his capacities and sensitivities. He learned by moving from one firm to another until he had his own. His first marriage produced six children, but he was never a good family man. He simply, precipitously left with a lover in 1909, leaving family, debts, and unfinished projects. In his own mind, he was a moral man, but his morality was his own; he could not have been at fault, only a hypocritical society could.

When the depression hit, it hit all architects including Wright. In his sixties, he published his _Autobiography_ and was regarded by others as finished; he had thirty years of celebrated buildings behind him, and no one expected him to continue, except for possibly putting out variations on what he had done before. It did not happen, and his later work was so extraordinary that his refusal to go quietly away even in his nineties is perhaps the most inspiring part of his life. He was brought back into the architectural spotlight with the 1934 Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, a spectacular union of natural and artificial beauty which is now the most-visited architectural shrine in the United States. He never let up until he died in 1959 while another late masterpiece, the dramatic Guggenheim Museum, was under construction. Huxtable's book has a few pictures of the main buildings, enough for this overview, but not nearly enough when each of them merits a photo book of its own. But the brisk narrative is clear, insightful, and provocative, serving as a fine introduction to an astonishing career and personality.

The good news: _Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives)_, by Ada Huxtable, is a biography on Wright that you can recommend to people you know who may be interested in the architect, but who don't want to wade through the larger biographies out there. Her writing is crisp and enjoyable. She provides nice overviews of Wright's interest in and connections to the Arts and Crafts movement and transcendentalism, while also providing neat, compact and well-written descriptions of the Usonian house concept, Wright's winter home, Taliesin West (Arizona), and the Guggenheim Museum, among other movements and buildings.

The bad news: the book is marred by factual mistakes that should have been caught during the editing process. So far, I've definitively found 15 such mistakes, and there are about 5 more that I have to check on. For example: she states that three people survived the devastating 1914 fire that consumed the residential wing of Wright's Wisconsin home, Taliesin. Only two people survived the fire. Twice she assigns a statement to Frank Lloyd Wright's oldest son, Lloyd, that was actually made by another son, David. She also incorrectly assigns a statement to Frank Lloyd Wright regarding his feelings following the 1914 fire. From p. 137-38 of Huxtable's book: "Wright also remembered hearing a whip-poor-will, a sound that would always evoke a terrible sadness." That memory was instead related by Wright's nephew, Franklin Porter, to Meryle Secrest, the author of _Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography_: "For ever after a song of the whippoorwill at night... seems infinitely sad." [p. 222, from the 1993 Harper Perennial edition of Secrest's book.] This statement, as Secrest noted in the book's endnotes, was made to her by Porter, so this was not Secrest's mistake, but Huxtable's.

These are the most egregious errors and the ones that are the easiest to demonstrate, but they are not the only errors. Additionally, the mistakes that I found were corrected in readily available sources on Frank Lloyd Wright. You can find the quotes by David Wright, etc., by reading Secrest's biography. Other sources include Brendan Gill's, _Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright_, and Robert Twombly's _Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture_.

Regardless of these problems, I'm giving the book two stars for the reasons stated in the first paragraph. The book is entertaining, but it is not scholarly. It is not expected to be, and I think that it's a nice start for someone with a beginning interest in Frank Lloyd Wright. But I do think that these mistakes and others should be corrected for the paperback edition. As Huxtable is a Pulitzer Prize winning architectural critic, I would hope that she would want the facts to be straight.

I need a fighter, a lover of space, an agitator, a tester and a wise man. . . . I want a temple of spirit, a monument! - Hilla Rebay to Frank Lloyd Wright, 1943 - and the result was the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Anyone who has seen Fallingwater - even just in pictures - has to stand in awe of the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.

He brought to the Fallingwater, to the Gugg, and to a large number of other buildings a combination of art, function, compatiblility with its surroundings and sheer genius that remains unchallenged decades later.

Great genius in one area does not automatically translate into a great overall life. And in the case of Frank Lloyd Wright that overall life seems to have many versions. The version he preferred is the one he described in his autobiography. It is just a touch glorified. with the opening of the archives of Frank Lloyd Wright thirty years after his death other view emerge.

Ms. Huxtable has merged all the versions of his life into an eminently readable story of the life of a genius -- excellent.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 11 reviews  4.3 out of 5 stars