Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright is what happens when an architect looks at a perfectly ordinary box and takes it as a personal insult.

Spencer Hart’s Frank Lloyd Wright is a handsome wander through the life and work of the great American architectural visionary, ego-generator, roofline enthusiast and professional enemy of dull domestic rectangles. Wright did not merely design buildings. He persuaded houses to crouch into landscapes, roofs to float like philosophical pancakes, windows to become moral positions, and living rooms to suggest that civilisation might be improved if everyone sat a little nearer some very serious timber.

This is the man of the Prairie houses, Fallingwater, the Guggenheim, and all those clean horizontal lines that seem to be saying, “Nature is wonderful, provided it agrees to my floor plan.” Wright wanted buildings to belong to their sites, which is a noble idea, although in his case “belong” often meant “arrive dramatically, rearrange the view, and make every other nearby structure feel like a storage shed.” His houses do not simply sit there. They recline, brood, hover, project, command, and occasionally appear to be waiting for a wealthy client to admit they were wrong about the budget.

The great pleasure of a Frank Lloyd Wright book is that you get the genius without having to live inside the maintenance schedule. On the page, the angles are pure, the cantilevers are bold, the glass glows, the fireplaces radiate organic democracy, and nobody has yet discovered that the roof has developed a personality of its own during heavy rain. Architecture in photographs is beautifully obedient. Architecture in real life sends invoices.

Hart’s book gives the reader the satisfying tour: the ideas, the buildings, the restless invention, the long career of a man who seemed incapable of leaving well enough alone. Wright took the American house and gave it space, flow, horizontality, drama and a rather strict talking-to. He made architecture feel less like stacked rooms and more like an argument with gravity conducted in wood, stone, glass and self-belief.

There is also the irresistible comedy of the total designer: furniture, interiors, windows, lamps, carpets, every last detail drawn into the orbit of the master plan. In a Wright house, even a chair looks as if it has been briefed. You imagine asking where to put your mug and being told, gently but firmly, that Mr Wright had already considered that in 1912 and found your instincts disappointing.

This JG Press volume is in Good condition, which is suitable for a book about a man whose buildings were often expected to age nobly while their owners quietly negotiated with weather. It has lived a little, as proper second-hand books do, but remains presentable, useful and ready to restore architectural ambition to a shelf otherwise oppressed by right angles. Crappy Old Books offers it for anyone who enjoys beautiful houses, impossible clients, heroic roofs, and the enduring belief that a building should do more than merely keep the rain out — even if, in practice, that part is still quite important.

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