The life of Frank Lloyd Wright: Seeking light and harmony in the midst of personal disaster

The Zimmerman House, in Manchester, N.H., one of only five houses in New England designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and the only one open to the public.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Frank Lloyd Wright was arguably the greatest U.S. architect so far, designing natural-light-filled, “organic’’ buildings that fit in elegantly with their surroundings. He was also often a superb, if untrustworthy, writer. But his life – especially the first part of his adulthood, was rife with disasters, most horrifically murders and fires, as well as extra-marital scandals and financial bad behavior and distress. The central horror came on Aug. 15, 1914, when a crazed servant set Wright’s already famous Wisconsin residence, Taliesen, ablaze and murdered Wright’s mistress, Mamah Cheney, her two young children and four others with an ax.

Paul Hendrickson, in his new book Plagued by Fire: Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), a thickly researched, passionate and often deeply speculative -- and sometimes overly ruminative biography – brings this huge figure to life in all his genius, arrogance, reckless ambition, contradictions and doubts. Along the way, he also weaves in a great deal of American aesthetic, sociological (including racial) and even economic history. But then Wright got around as he designed more than 1,000 structures, of which 532 were completed. And his family and friends comprised a Shakespearean cast of characters.

Mr. Hendrickson summed up Wright’s gigantic life thus:

“If harmony and order were his great artistic ideals. Wright could find little of them in his own debt-plagued, scandal-wracked, death-haunted history.” We are fortunate that many Frank Lloyd Wright buildings are still around to marvel at.