Introduction

Frank Lloyd Wright
by Ada Louise Huxtable

A Pulitzer Prize-winning arcitecture critic takes a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at an American pioneer - his art, his craft, and his life.

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.

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 an age when most men retire, he charged into the magnificent creative renaissance of his old age.

By the standards of his contemporaries, he led a shockingly unconventional and thoroughly reprehensible life. He was considered morally and fiscally irresponsible, a view he encouraged with illicit romantic liaisons and perpetually unpaid bills. He made whatever promises and accommodations were necessary as the occasion and his art required. Shame was not an emotion he entertained. He could charm endless advances out of clients' pockets, writing marvelously witty and wheedling letters, while buildings went over budget and out of control. Guile, at the very least, was essential to a lifestyle that was incompatible with solvency, but was also required if he was to build at all. It is hard to realize how strange his work must have seemed in the early 1900s, how unlike anything else and how totally out of step with prevailing taste, how offensive even to conventional neighbors on those suburban lots who considered his houses so peculiar they called them "harems." Clients were scarce and resistant; they had to be as boldly visionary as the architect or be seduced into patronage. He was a master of the art.

The denial of any sources or influences other than his own ideas was one of his most assiduously practiced deceptions. Scholars have established that he was an avid consumer of art and architectural cultures, from pre-history to the avant-garde. We have learned that he was an early, active participant in the exchange of information with his European colleagues, although he maintained throughout his life that he was the sole inventor of modernism. He took an adversarial stand against the International style, in part because he did not share its theories or conform to its doctrinaire principles, but also because dissent suited him so well. He saw himself as the sole possessor and defender of a higher architectural truth, a role he played to the hilt, to the end.

Facts alone are limited in what they can reveal. It takes both the corrected and the doctored versions of the life to give us the full picture of the gifted and fallible person behind the carefully constructed pose and skillfully revised events. What is too easily forgotten is that the art supported by Wright's wiles - whether out of temperament or necessity - has unassailable and enduring integrity. The dismantling of the legend has no effect on this ultimate reality. In the end, art is truth, as sententious as that sounds, or as close to it as we get, and the truth of the man is in the work. The buildings convey the deepest convictions and most authentic expression of the artist; there is nothing duplicitous about them. They tell us the meaning of the life and what it was lived for. This personal view is an attempt to fit the man and his work together through his story, to explore those currents of art and life that he synthesized so brilliantly to change architecture, and how we see it, forever.

© 2004 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

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.