Ada Louise Huxtable's Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life

Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life
By:
Ada Louise Huxtable
Penguin Books 2008

Andrew Pate
Prof. Richard Irwin
History 202
17 November 2011

Ada Louise Huxtable’s Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life is a thoroughly detailed biography with noteworthy insight into the astoundingly topsy turvey life of one of America’s greatest architectural geniuses: Frank Lloyd Wright. Currently the architectural critic for the Wall Street Journal, Ada Louise Huxtable hails from many other prestigious positions and accomplishments including being a former New York Times critic and winner of both the first Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism and the MacArthur Fellow. She has written several other books on American architecture including On Architecture: Collected
Her biography on Frank Lloyd Wright is both informative and entertaining; she not only reveals the long and harrowing journey and the victories and defeats of the rebellious and egotistical architect, but also gives a clear view at the times in which he was most active and the ways in which the country and the world were reacting to his architecture while adapting with everything from changing architectural tastes and styles to economic depressions and the World Wars. Beginning with his birth and childhood in Wisconsin all the way to his latter days of work and death in Arizona, Huxtable details the journey and evolution of his legacy and the tragedies that failed to hinder his art in coherent chronologic fashion. Huxtable begins the first chapters of the biography with the birth of Frank Lloyd Wright and his beginnings as a child in Wisconsin. Huxtable also introduces the fact that Wright manipulated some details of his personal information throughout life to suit his ego and create his own elegantly presented persona, beginning with his birthday. Born truly in 1867, Wright later changed his birth date to 1869 which “made a case for a precocious talent with an impressively youthful, early success in Chicago in the
As his experience and popularity grew, Wright was approached by clients seeking his work apart from Sullivan’s influence and he began “moonlighting” (Huxtable 70). With a newly wedded wife and children on the way, Wright needed more money to support them and his notorious self-indulgence into Japanese prints and fine clothing. Moonlight work, which is working on secret drafts without company permission and reaping all the profit, was forbidden in his contract with Adler and Sullivan and he was eventually found out and immediately fired. The blow to Sullivan was disastrous and the master and apprentice lost touch for years. When he had established himself well enough in the Chicago architectural scene, Wright began taking on employees as draftsman in his home-studio in the Oak Park suburb of Chicago. His Prairie House design and the Larking Administration Building were two of his greatest creations during this period. Wright was just setting himself up with a good starting out career when Huxtable delivers arguably the most controversial and disliked decision that Wright ever made: with children disturbing his concentration and the stresses of marriage and bills weighed together, Wright went through a mental breakdown and “in the fall of 1909, he left, abruptly cutting all ties. He abandoned a wife and