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.
— The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
The fascinating life and work of the great American architect gets a stimulating, well-balanced treatment in this installment of the Penguin Lives series. Huxtable, the Wall Street Journal architecture critic, pairs a critique of Wright's architecture with an engaging narrative of his scandalous private life, including his abandonment of his first family, the murder of a mistress and her children by a deranged servant, and other tempestuous relationships with artistic, high-strung women. She traces his achievements to his upbringing in a family of Unitarians, where, she contends, he was steeped in the Emersonian transcendentalism that led him to infuse the austere functionalism of high-modernist architecture with romantic spirituality and nature worship. He also acquired a self-righteous rectitude with which he faced down dubious clients, the architectural establishment, and the creditors who would bedevil him throughout a free-spending but impecunious life. Huxtable's well-researched account corrects Wright's mythologizing of his life, but she generally accepts his excuses that his misbehavior and megalomania were necessary to his artistic self-realization. She is clearly a big fan: her reviews of Wright's major buildings are warmly appreciative to adulatory; she considers his revolutionary redesigns of the family home to be models of livability, and his later hypermodern works to be almost miraculous prefigurations of today's computer-assisted geometries. With its dollop of sizzle, this fluently written biography will provoke renewed interest in Wright's architecture among general readers. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Eminent architectural critic meets eminent but-ever-so difficult architect. Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959) was "a fascinating anachronism," in many respects a man of the 19th century, Huxtable says. "He was always out of the mainstream; he fit neither the Neue Sachlichkeit of the 1920s nor the age of irony with which the century ended." Sometimes this was not a problem, and sometimes it was: Wright's old-fashioned insistence on craftsmanship and solid materials customarily led to hemorrhaging cost overruns-"there is no more expensive way to build than this ad hoc, custom procedure with its booby-trapped ‘extras,'" Huxtable sagely observes-but also to extraordinary works of art. Wright is now uncool, Huxtable writes, or at least his later buildings are, and she offers any number of reasons for us not to admire him. He was casually but not programmatically anti-Semitic, "uniformly politically incorrect," a spendthrift, a martinet, haughty and arrogant, if with a sense of humor about it: when called to testify at a court case and asked to identify himself, Wright "announced that he was the world's greatest architect. When asked how he could make such a statement, he replied, with visible enjoyment and a gleam in his eye, that he had no choice, he was under oath." But Wright was also enormously intelligent, gifted, cultivated in the way of someone raised to esteem knowledge and beauty, a true innovator whose ideas on organic architecture gave the transcendentalism of 19th-century America voice in the future; a magpie, he "remembered everything, but copied nothing, absorbing what he liked and learned into his own creative thinking." If he wore great swirling capes, demanded to be treated likevisiting royalty or at least a rock star, designed buildings with odd lighting and leaky roofs, and didn't pay his bills-well, still, he was always interesting. So, too, is Huxtable's biography: a fine and unsparing appreciation of an American original.
