Frank Lloyd Wright [Anglais] [Relié]

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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As readers of Huxtable's Pulitzer Prize-winning criticism know, she is a discerning writer fluent in architectural thought and practice. She now offers a fresh perspective on Frank Lloyd Wright's much scrutinized yet still surprising life. Comfortable with ambiguity and complexity, Huxtable not only parses both key events and overlooked subtleties, she also wrestles with the prickly questions about character and creativity raised by the contrast between Wright's self-serving, tyrannical behavior and his enormously influential achievements. Fascinated by Wright's supreme confidence, fiscal recklessness, con-man charm, and phoenixlike resurrections, Huxtable tells the still shocking stories of his abandonment of his first wife and six children; the gruesome murders at Taliesin, his Wisconsin estate; and the conflicts with his vindictive second wife that landed him in jail and left him homeless. But Huxtable is no less compelling in her chronicling of Wright's ever-evolving vision of "organic architecture," which gave rise to his Prairie house; the Usonian house, the prototype for the ranch house; and many other innovations, thus renewing appreciation for a wildly unconventional but essential architect. Donna Seaman
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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.

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.