Frank Lloyd Wright

by Huxtable, Ada Louise

• ISBN13: 9780670033423
• ISBN10: 0670033421
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-11-04
• Publisher: Viking Adult

Summary

From the way we build to the way we live, Frank Lloyd Wright’s influence on American architecture is visible all around us. Now, Ada Louise Huxtable, the Pulitzer Prize- winning architecture writer for The Wall Street Journal—and chief architecture critic for The New York Timesfor nearly twenty years—offers an outstanding look at the architect and the man. She explores the sources of his tumultuous and troubled life and his long career as master builder as well as his search for lasting, true love. Along the way, Huxtable introduces readers to Wright’s masterpieces: Taliesin, rebuilt after tragedy and murder; the Imperial Hotel, one of the few structures left standing after Japan’s catastrophic 1923 earthquake; and tranquil Fallingwater, to which millions have traveled to experience its quiet grace. Through the journey, Huxtable takes us not only into the mind of the man who drew the blueprints, but also into the very heart of the medium, which he changed forever. A story of great triumph and heartbreak, Frank Lloyd Wrightis, like Wright’s own creations, an expertly wrought tribute to a man whose genius lives on in the very landscape of American architecture.

Author Biography

Ada Louise Huxtable is a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic. She is the author of several books, including Inventing Reality, Pier Luigi Nervi, and, most recently, The Unreal American.

A MacArthur fellow, Huxtable is the architecture critic of The Wall Street Journal and was the architecture critic for The New York Times from 1963 to 1982.

Excerpts

Introduction THERE ARE TWO LIVES of Frank Lloyd Wright: the one he created and the one he lived. The first, his own embellished version, is the standard Wright mythology?the architect as maverick genius and embattled, misunderstood loner, the visionary crusader out of step with ordinary mortals, carrying his banner of ?truth against the world??a character and scenario worthy of a prime-time docudrama. One marvels at the absolute confidence with which Wright manipulated facts to suit the person he wanted, and believed himself, to be. The life as he presented it is, in itself, a creative act.As more documents and details became available to scholars with the opening of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives almost thirty years after Wright?s death, a series of publications appeared that were devoted to sorting out a long life full of outrageous claims and scandalous behavior. Everything questionable or shameful has been aired in the rush to historical revisionism and psychobiography; the literature is rich in the revelations that prove great artists, like the less gifted, are capable of doing bad things. The record now stands assiduously and eloquently corrected. The most significant findings, however, are the ones that have increased our understanding of Wright?s creative processes. Beyond the determination of what was true and what was false, Wright scholars have been seeking something else?the elusive reality of the extraordinary man who was arguably America?s greatest architect, whose work and influence have had an impact on an amazing three centuries of radical change in art, ideas, and technology. Born just after the Civil War into a bucolic horse-and-buggy world, Wright died shortly before his ninety-second birthday, at the start of the Space Age. It is hard to grasp both the length of his career and the extent of the revolution that took place during the six decades of his practice. He never saw an electric light until he went to Chicago as a young man looking for a job. He continued to sharpen by hand the pencils that he used for his delicately colored renderings, as fashions in drawing moved on to the quick bold strokes of the Magic Marker and slickly impersonal computer-generated images. The facts of his life are not enough to explain the paradox of an architect who held fast to the nineteenth-century views he grew up with, who clung stubbornly to the romantic moralities of Emerson and Ruskin, while he broke with every convention in his work. How does one reconcile the lifelong embrace of a philosophy already out of date by the early years of the twentieth century with buildings that remain relevant and contemporary, vibrant and alive? Wright?s genius?which he proclaimed loudly and often, in what seems less an exaggerated act of bravado as time goes on and history is revisited?remains constant, timeless, and prophetic. Each succeeding generation finds new areas of relevance in his work; he still has lessons to teach. As the facts emerged, it became clear that reality trumps the mythology being laid to rest. You would not dare invent Wright?s life; it is too melodramatic. He survived scandal, murder, fires, divorces, bankruptcy, social ostracism, and pursuit by the FBI for offenses ranging from violation of the Mann Act, for transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes (twice, and in the appropriate sequence, each ?victim? became his wife), to accusations under the Sedition Act of allegedly encouraging his apprentices to refuse military service during World War II. He lived large and on the edge; to the worst blows of fate he added troubles of his own making. One marvels at the strength and persistence that were required to rebuild his life and practice after each defeat or disaster. He did less well with his personal reputation, but seemed to enjoy and even flaunt his role as outcast and outsider; it becomes clear how necessary that outsize ego really was. At