Synopsis
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 Times for 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 Wright is, like Wright's own creations, an expertly wrought tribute to a man whose genius lives on in the very landscape of American architecture.
The New York Times - James F. O'Gorman
Wright's architecture, ''in which nature and building were one,'' found precedent in the geological analogies of H. H. Richardson; his hearth-centered cruciform plans follow those in 19th-century house-design books, and his agrarianism (as Huxtable notes) echoes Jeffersonian ideals. But even with a fuller accounting of Wright's resources it would still be apparent that, as Huxtable emphasizes in this stimulating book, the work that came out of the mix was wholly, uniquely and sublimely Wrightian.