America Ziggurats & Prairie Skyscrapers
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

A confession: Like many readers, I respond to certain biographies with a powerful bias. In this case, it is well to know that I am an extravagant admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright. His vision has shaped my home and how I live. I first saw him in 1955, when I was 7 and he was 88. I sat with my father in front of our Muntz television and watched Wright, with his flowing white hair and prophet like manner, as he majestically answered Mike Wallace’s questions. Soon after, I began drawing ranch houses, which Ada Louise Huxtable in her new biography (Viking, 256 pages, $19.95) calls the “most rational, reasonable and popular American home of the twentieth century.”
Builders developed the ranch house, the single-family home, in response to Wright’s Usonian prototypes. The name itself was meant to evoke and yoke together the ideas of the U.S. and usefulness. Wright believed such houses could be built cheaply with indigenous materials that suited his idea of an organic architecture – buildings that are, in Ms. Huxtable’s words, “adaptable to almost any site.” My Wright-inspired family (my father built his own Usonian-style house) sat before Wright on television as if it were the hearth around which the architect centered his houses.
Knowing that readers form intense identifications with subjects like Wright, it behooves the biographer to beware: How can justice be done to an idol? Ms. Huxtable won me to her side immediately by beginning with acknowledgments – not only to Wright’s evolving legacy in the computer age – but to his many biographers and critics, especially Meryl Secrest and Neil Levine.
Ms. Huxtable’s biography seems to come at just the right time. It is now jejune to dwell on the discrepancies between the myth Wright made of himself and the actual record of his life, the biographer argues. She acknowledges the “factual slippage” in his memoirs but insists that his own words still give us the “best sense of the architect and the man.” So Wright is heard often in this biography, but this is his performing self, so to speak, with the biographer in the wings, checking the prompt book and occasionally pointing out conflicting testimony and concluding: “The reader is at liberty to decide which is true.”
The Wright family motto was “truth against the world.” An Emersonian individualist, the architect had a mother who brought him up to design his own world. Wright’s great achievements – the Prairie-style and Usonian houses, the Guggenheim Museum, and Falling Water (in 2000, the American Institute of Architects voted it the Building of the Century) – are unique and visionary structures. They are modern constructions that are also eternal entities, suggesting the horizontal rock formations and tree-like rootedness with which Wright anchored himself to the earth even as he aspired to emulate Emerson’s “transparent eyeball.”
There can be no human aspiration that does not arise from the natural world, Emerson wrote in “Nature”: “Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel with God.” Wright had the audacity to try this out in the heart of New York City, creating a museum that is like an inverted ziggurat, in which one ascends in an elevator to the domed top and then walks, spiraling down as in an Indian stupa. Paradoxically, it takes a huge ego to want to go egoless, dragging heaven down to earth.
Unfortunately Wright’s Guggenheim was never realized, laments Ms. Huxtable. His megalomania inevitably aroused hostility in those who wanted to bring him down to earth. And Ms. Huxtable will have nothing to do with what she calls this “collective schadenfreude,” which dwells on the defects of the architect’s innovative designs and on his messy private life – which was, in fact, not very private, since he married one mad woman who trashed two of his houses, ran off with another (abandoning his six children), and was arrested twice for violating the Mann Act (which outlawed transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes).
Ms. Huxtable sees the humor in Wright’s grandiosity. When a judge asked Wright how he could describe himself as the world’s greatest architect, Wright replied that after all he was under oath. She does not excuse his human failings but remarks that the man and his morality are simply not commensurate with the great artist.
Viewers of the remodeling programs on television, for example, watch the Wright credo re-enacted on the hour. “Turn the living areas into a single open space where functions flow into one another with minimal demarcation. No more boxes inside boxes called ‘rooms.’ Allow spaces to swing around the central hearth, or to project out into landscape. Simplify, rather than elaborate. Make the plan and the setting come together as an organic, natural whole,” writes the biographer paraphrasing her subject.
Ms. Huxtable sees no irony in the fact that Wright, a dilatory father and unfaithful husband, put such a premium on the single-family home. Perhaps there is no paradox. Wright involved his two sons in many of his projects, and the apprentices, who flocked to his side, beginning in the 1930s, became family even as Wright exploited them in his ruthless yet paternalistic way. Wright knew what the world gained and lost by dealing with his monumental ego. He once told a visitor to Taliesin, the Wright Mecca, “We’re very democratic here – when I’m hungry, everybody eats.”