Frank Lloyd Wright:

Europe and Beyond

edited by Anthony Alofsin

University of California Press, $50

The Guggenheim Museum and Falling Water may be landmark structures in America’s architectural canon, but they certainly don’t reflect the diverse accomplishments of their esteemed maker. Frank Lloyd Wright: Europe and Beyond examines the influence of both the country upon the artist and the artist upon the country through a collection of essays written by natives and outsiders from Japan, Iraq, Italy, and other non-European locales. Accented by resplendent black-and-white photographs of the artist’s masterpieces, the essays present Wright as a true cultural connoisseur, a man whose “organic” aesthetic worked not to Westernize the physical and spiritual world of the East, but preserve its ancestral ideology. While some of the essays come across as a bit dry for those not architecturally inclined, others paint a fascinating portrait of Wright as a worldly genius, a man who used “splendid confirmation” of the earth to advance his own artistic brilliance.

This article appears in December 31 • 1999.

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