“Frank Lloyd Wright's Testament”

AboutReview-essay occasioned by Frank Lloyd Wright's book A Testament (1957), published as Wright neared his ninetieth birthday. Moholy-Nagy reads the book as revealing an unacknowledged tragic dimension beneath Wright's public confidence: a lifelong, unconsummated love for an America that repeatedly passed him over for major public commissions. She traces Wright's debt to Louis Sullivan and to American individualist and transcendentalist thought (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Horatio Greenough), and contrasts Wright's regionally rooted, site-specific organicism — Fallingwater, Taliesin West, the Robie House, the Larkin Building, the Johnson Wax Building — with Le Corbusier's placeless, archetypal "Architecture as Idea," represented by the Unité d'Habitation and the Chapel at Ronchamp. She notes Sullivan's own late-career "shouts of desperation" in the Transportation Building and Bayard Building as a cautionary parallel to what she sees as overreach in Wright's late projects, the Price Tower and the unbuilt Mile-High Illinois tower. The essay closes with a postscript recording Wright's death in April 1959.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1543-6322%28195922%2918%3A4%3C319%3AFLWT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9