The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. - book reviews

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1996 by Philip Tabor

By Neil Levine. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1996. US$85, 59.50 [pounds sterling]

The approaching millennium confirms what popular acclaim knew all along: that this century's greatest architect was a photogenic American in a pork-pie hat. This has irked many Europeans, and many Americans too. To them Frank Lloyd Wright was the Wisconsin hayseed who hit the spot a couple of times -- the Prairie Houses of the 1890-1900s and the Usonian Houses 40 years later but otherwise, from the Hollyhock House to the Marin County Civic Center, reflected America's addiction to corny sentimentality and fantasy kitsch.

That Wright was therefore excluded from the True Church of Modernism, a process that began as early as 1918 and continues today, should bother us no more than it did him. But critical orthodoxy did not simply ignore Wright. While acknowledging his freaky genius it demonised him as an antitype by which to define itself. And he of course responded with his own thunderous self-mythology.

These opposing rhetorics, each fed from the other, generated a kind of feedback howl whose echo still hinders our ability to enjoy, assess and learn from Wright's unparalleled achievement. Neil Levine's huge book -- over 500 large and generously-illustrated pages -- sets out, not to suppress the polemic (on the contrary, Levine traces its history meticulously), but to correct the resulting distortions.

It looks at first like several other tomes on Wright in that it treats the recognised masterpieces in chronological order, adopts a stance which, if not adulatory, is fairly indulgent of Wright's legendary flaws; and, like Wright's magnificent Autobiography, sees his life story and his work as intimately interconnected. Levine's monograph is not what its size and title might suggest, an encyclopaedic compendium of plans, so is perhaps best read m company with William Allin Storrer's invaluable Frank Lloyd Wright Companion. But it excels, and is unprecedented, in its geographic and archival scope.

Levine has covered a formidable amount of ground. He has visited and mapped the sites of built, unbuilt and demolished projects (a melancholy pilgrimage, now suburbia sweeps towards Taliesin West) and shows in detail how Wright made his architecture recreate the meaning of its surrounding landscape. He has also disassembled Wright's voluminous correspondence and the vast literature of Wrightian studies, reconstructing from them the shifts in thought and feeling which forged the architecture.

Along the trail he unearths and illustrates some telling curiosities, like Wright's projects for his own house in Fiesole. He scrutinises those projects to which Wright attached great importance but which embarrass even loyal fans, such as the Plan for Greater Baghdad. And he suggests, fairly persuasively, certainly with relish, that especially after the war Le Corbusier owed many of his best tunes to Wright.

While avoiding psychoanalysis, this book shows more methodically than any before how Wright's turbulent emotional life shaped his work (the Taliesin mass-slaughter and fire was only the most horrific episode). The wanderings and abrupt `exiles' he sought and suffered -- from the Midwest to Italy, Japan, the Southwest while not diminishing his fevered drive and self only his architectural language but also his aesthetic theory. In this respect Levine nails once and for all the stereotype, in which Wright in some ways colluded, that Wright was architecture's Johnny B. Good, an unlettered intuitive, a noble savage. He read widely, kept abreast of cultural currents (more than he sometimes admitted), wrote copiously, fluently and vividly, and was acutely conscious of the philosophical import of his projects and architecture's mission, as he saw it, to protect modern life from environmental and spiritual destruction.

Comparing Wright's words with his works, this book charts how his thought developed. At base was a childlike grasp, which never faded, of the seamless continuity between the works of humanity and those of nature. This may be expressed and engendered through art which, he believed, through abstraction rather than imitation, can represent nature -- remake nature, in other words, to draw out its essence and potential. This book shows that Wright's constant, and constantly-refashioned, preoccupation was to recover for architecture its unique representational role so that the world might be remade.

Narrative was the key. Each of Wright's major projects `tell a story', a fable based on fact, a lie which tells the truth, time-laden but outside history. In depicting Wright as architecture's master fabulist, Levine himself constructs a colossal, convincing and captivating story.