Frank Lloyd Wright - Hardcover

Ada Louise Huxtable

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786271817 ISBN 13: 9780786271818

Publisher: Thorndike Press, 2005

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 critic for the Wall Street Journal, offers an outstanding look at the architect and the man, and at the very heart of the medium which he changed forever. This is an expertly wrought tribute to a man whose genius lives on in the very landscape of America.

About this title

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.

From 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.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Thorndike Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786271817
• ISBN 13: 9780786271818
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 333