Mrs. Rubin notes those educational theorists who influenced Wright’s mother during the period when she sought out teaching tools to aid her in educating her son. This is how Anna Wright discovered Friedrich Froebel.

The author describes each of the Froebel Gifts, the educational aids Froebel developed from what he had learned from Weiss. Their use as teaching tools is explained. She then points to examples in the Gifts and in Wright’s work that reflect those lessons of his youth. Those readers familiar with the work of Wright will find the book similar to a visit with long-time friends with the added joy of greater understanding. Wright was a gifted genius. He acknowledged the influence of the Froebel gifts on his work. Mrs. Rubin has allowed the reader a greater understanding of the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright while in no way diminishing his gift.

To this reader, Intimate Triangle: Architecture of Crystals, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Froebel Kindergarten is the most important book to date written on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Equally, and possibly more importantly, it is also an amazing exposition on the importance of early childhood education. - Review by Michael John Smith, AIA

Wright aficionados who know- really know- Wright's work often feel that his best-known house, "Fallingwater", is far from his most successful work. What seems to be a practical, sleek house for a modern family is actually a rich man's folly. It required servants indoors and out for its maintenance, is dank with humidity from the falls below it, and has been beset with engineering deficiencies- not necessarily Wright's- that nearly landed its famed cantilevers in the waters of the stream it overlooks.

Given that "Fallingwater" is a house that looks much better than it ever worked, it's somehow fitting that Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.'s Fallingwater: A Frank Lloyd Wright Country House (1986, Abbeville Press, hardcover, $55.00) promises much more than it delivers. Magnificent photographs of the exterior, mainly by Christopher Little and Thomas A. Heinz, show the house from nearly every angle, and for once it is possible to gain a full realization of the house's complex externals from a book. But despite the obvious care taken with shots of the indoors, those pictures fall prey to the lack so common to pictures of Wright interiors- that of failing to provide much sense of how those spaces flow together. One seldom-seen area, a servant's sitting room added in the 1940's, is shown only in a small picture that is mainly of a window frame surrounding a view of the landscape outside it; nothing whatever of the room itself is visible.

Kaufmann, son of the Philadelphia department-store tycoon who commissioned the house from Wright, and who gave the house to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, has much to say about the house's building, but amazingly little to say about the experience of living in it. The clangor of the falls that is so striking to visitors goes almost unmentioned, as does the incredible expense of running the house (a prime factor in its donation to the Conservancy). And the story of building "Fallingwater" has been covered with complete adequacy elsewhere, in less expensive books. Chalk this one up as a nice coffee-table volume to have, but not indispensable. - Review by Sandy McLendon

A book to avoid is the late Brendan Gill's Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright (1990, Random House, Hardcover, original publication price unavailable). Supposedly a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, Gill's book is a lengthy, wearying recitative of Wright's peccadilloes, delivered in tones reminiscent of a story about Robert Downey, Jr. in the National Enquirer. Downey, a fine and talented actor, is far from being the sum of his mistakes in life, and so was Frank Lloyd Wright.

What is most distressing about this gossip-fest is that Brendan Gill elsewhere (notably in the New Yorker) proved himself to be a fine, if somewhat stylized, writer. The elegant phrasing that served him so well in the rest of his career is jarring here, used as it is in the service of scandal-mongering. Yes, Wright was a highly imperfect human being. Yes, some of his buildings are less successful than he wanted us to think. And yes, his relationships with women were sometimes irregular by the standards of his day. But a balanced biography of Wright should show that great achievement existed side-by-side with the eyebrow-raising, and Gill permits that achievement to be subsumed by tittle-tattle.

There seems to be no Wright project, no matter how influential or successful, that Gill cannot reduce to a tale of backstage intrigue or disregard for sexual conventions. In some passages, Gill comes close to making Wright sound like Hugh Hefner, lovin' em and leavin' em and off to the next Bunny- er, lady. None of this is to say that Wright was without his unattractive side, but his many attractive, professional, and generous sides are almost sedulously ignored by Gill. Once, when speaking of his seemingly effortless "Casuals" for the New Yorker, Gill wrote, "I will try to cram these paragraphs full of facts and give them a weight and shape no greater than that of a cloud of blue butterflies."

Unfortunately, on this occasion, Gill's choice of facts seems to be highly selective, and his famed blue butterflies flitter madly around whatever carrion they can find, picking over a carcass that cannot defend itself, hardly ever lending their beauty to Wright's memory. - Review by Sandy McLendon

Michael John Smith, AIA, is a lighting designer based in Houston, Texas.
Sandy McLendon is Editor of Jetsetmodern.

Books reviewed in Jetsetmodern are sometimes out of print. Copies can be found through sources like eBay, Amazon’s used book service, or through Websites like Alibris. Prices mentioned in reviews were the cover price at time of publication; today’s market value for an out-of-print book may be higher than the original cover price.