Book Summary
Few architects of this age or any other have stirred up as much controversy or commanded as much notoriety as Frank Lloyd Wright. The subject of a bestselling novel in the 1950s, and described by architect Philip Johnson as "the type of genius that comes along only once every three or four hundred years," Wright has become a 20th-century cultural icon on the order of Einstein and Freud. An heroic genius to some and a charlatan to others, Wright was a man whose indomitable character continues to be, more than thirty years after his death, as controversial as his revolutionary theories of architecture.
About Wright offers us a uniquely intimate look into the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, his philosophy, his oeuvre and his wide-ranging and often complex family and professional relationships. Compiled and edited by renowned architect and former Wright apprentice Edgar Tafel, and with an introduction by bestselling author Tom Wolfe, it includes personal correspondences, anecdotes, and interviews with some of Wright's clients, students, apprentices, and family members. Nearly all contributed pieces were written especially for this volume and span the period from the 1920s to the architect's death in 1959. Many of the contributors names are well known to the general public such as Philip Johnson, Arthur Miller, Andy Rooney, Maria Stone, and Robert Moses, while others such as H. R. Hitchcock, George Nelson, and William Wesley Peters are renowned within the architectural community. And each of them reveals some new insight into Wright the man and the effect he had on those who knew him.
For example, there is Maria Stone's account of Wright swatting flies at a picnic and jovially exclaiming "That's Gropius ... and that's Corbusier ...." In his reflections on "Cousin Frank," we read Robert Moses's begrudging tribute - "how much is genuine architectural genius and how much fakery: I say 25-75%. Them's high marks in the arithmetic." Arthur Miller, in his humorous account of his and wife Marilyn Monroe's efforts to convince Wright to redesign their country house, describes Wright as "a great romantic, a man of style, a theatrical type of the old school who Orson Welles would love to have played." And there is Philip Johnson's surprising admission, "There isn't a day that I don't feel - when I have a pencil in my hand anyhow - that that man isn't looking over my shoulder.".
Including numerous photos from Edgar Tafel's private Wright archive as well as dozens of previously unpublished letters and interviews with those who knew Wright, About Wright is a valuable addition to the growing corpus of work on one of our century's most influential characters.
