The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 14 April 2010
by Ada Louise Huxtable
There are a number of superstar architects out there, the "starchitects". They include the likes of Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind, Renzo Piano and Zaha Hadid. But no architect in the past century and a half has been as famous or infamous as Frank Lloyd Wright. Somehow, history has adopted some of his aggrandizing self-labeling, and granted him his office as Greatest American Architect. The starchitects of the 21st century have yet to live up to his kind of personal fame. Perhaps, it would be better for them if they didn't try. There is, of course, no shortage of Wright literature out there. You can hardly toss a rock without hitting a calendar of Wright's most famous buildings. Part of this is the undying appeal of his domestic architecture. It was far ahead of its time, back at the turn of the 20th century, and retains its warmth and human scale. It was ahead of its time until the modernists came along and marginalized Wright, going so far as to label him the greatest architect of the 19th century. But Wright continued to plug along, creating works of surpassing originality, technical finesse and beauty unlike anything anyone was doing throughout his long life. So, why do we need another Wright biography, particularly one as brief and breezy as this one? Perhaps because it is written by one of the best architecture critics of the 20th century, Ada Louise Huxtable, who wrote for two decades for the New York Times and still writes for the Wall Street Journal. Her writing is witty, irreverent, engaging and entertaining. She looks at Wright at least partly through his famously delusional autobiography, picking out the parts that have good writing, insight and even a little truth in them. She uses these as stepping off points from which to explore Wright's personality, some of his most famous works, and the broad swath he cut through his century, his family, and the people who tried to love him. And she forgives, but does not absolve, Wright his excesses, excusing him from too close a personal scrutiny in the face of his artistic achievements. There may not be much here that hasn't been said before and at greater length. This was published in 2004 as part of the Penguin Lives series, which are typically idiosyncratic, engaging and sometimes personal accounts. Yet Huxtable has great affection for the deeply flawed man that was Wright, while expressing also her overarching admiration for his artistry and originality. He was the first starchitect. It is a tidy little portrait of a famously untidy life, full of artistic adventure, tragedy, self-delusion, deep debt, and even motherly love.
See Also: [Loving Frank by Nancy Horan]