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"Up Close: Frank Lloyd Wright" by Jan Adkins

Author:

Jan Adkins

Publisher:

Viking, 2007

Reviewed by:

John Warren Stewig, Carthage College , Kenosha, Wis.

Part of a continuing series, this may well elicit a question from young readers: “Who’s Wright?” Others in the series (Robert Kennedy, Oprah Winfrey, and Johnny Cash) are far more widely known among adolescents than is this iconoclast who changed the direction of architecture. A strength of the book is that it continually sets the sometimes incomprehensible Wright career decisions into a larger context. An example is the thorough look at the Chicago World’s Fair buildings, which set off an epic style struggle between classicists and Wright’s forward looking tenets.

The book contains sufficient technical explanation, without overwhelming. For example, an explanation of staff (a materials used in the fair buildings) and Wright’s contact with it, leads to an understanding of his life-long exploration of “inexpensive, quick, unusual building solutions.” Wright’s evolution from older styles such as Queen Anne, apparent in his early works, through his prairie houses, the cast concrete California houses, and into his Usonian ideas, are all described as he evolved a “uniquely American architecture.”

Unconstrained by conventions, Wright was widely reviled by his critics for weaknesses in his buildings, by creditors for his profligate ways, and by neighbors in the fertile valley where his extended ancestral Jones family lived for his morals. He was always the center of his own universe. Adkins creates many effective turns of phrase to capture readers’ attention. Writing about the planting pots Wright often designed, regardless of his clients’ indifference to them, Adkins calls these “vast, expensive, custom-made cauldrons big enough to sleep in.” Though Adkins’ fondness for his subject is always apparent, he doesn’t minimize Wright’s shortcomings, describing him as “one of the most graceful hucksters the United States ever produced.” Despite his glib ability to delude his clients for his own benefit, his influence was worldwide: Adkins reports on Wright’s continuing contacts with Germany and Spain.

The tragedies which dogged Wright are included: Taliesin burned twice, the first time taking the lives of six people. These tragedies are appropriately described for the intended age group. Adkins also deals forthrightly, but age-appropriately, with the scoundrely abandonment of Wright’s first wife, and his subsequent involvements with three other women, finally finding in Olgivanna, the Montenegran, the stable, managing anchor his tumultuous life needed. Surely this book will start young readers on their way to becoming the adult Wright devotees which are so numerous, and vocal in their approval of their hero, warts and all.