An unconventional biography of the visionary architect Frank Lloyd Wright

Paul Hendrickson’s previous (and very fine) book was Hemingway’s Boat, published in Britain in 2012. It was a nice conceit to see the writer’s life through his singular obsession with Pilar, the boat he commissioned from a Brooklyn shipyard, which remained the steadiest companion in his choppy voyage.

The enormous life of Frank Lloyd Wright — the architect who was born two years after the Civil War, and died in 1959 when Bobby Darin’s ‘Mack the Knife’ was a hit — offers no such straightforward device. With more than 500 completed designs, splendid eccentricities and a well-developed taste for confrontation, every single Wright building could have become a novella. He was a philanderer, fantasist, liar, cad, spendthrift, anti-Semite (whose most famous clients — Guggenheim and Kaufmann — were Jewish) and a ‘narcissist and control freak’ (at least, according to the New York Post in a spasm of fastidiousness).

But he was also an incomparable creative genius. It was the sight of a worker killed in the collapse of the neo-classical Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, that led him to ‘examine cornices critically’ and subsequently invent an architecture all his own. His best work was — astonishingly — in his ninth decade, when he built the Guggenheim in New York (having essayed the concept in a sports car showroom on Park Avenue) and proposed Mile High Illinois, a building 1,600m tall.

Wright’s combative attitude to clients and his lofty concept of the architect as quasi-divine seer made him the model for Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. His arrogance was epic. When a client complained that an ambitiously designed roof was leaking onto a desk, Wright said: ‘Move the desk.’ His artistic reach always exceeded the technical grasp of his builders.