“Review of Frank Lloyd Wright versus America: The 1930s, by Donald Leslie Johnson, and Three American Architects: Richardson, Sullivan, and Wright, 1865–1915, by James F. O'Gorman”

AboutTwombly reviews two 1990–91 books on the "trinity" of Richardson, Sullivan, and Wright. He faults Johnson's Frank Lloyd Wright versus America for disorganization and a politically tendentious closing section that defends Wright's opposition to U.S. entry into World War II while mischaracterizing European modernism as a monolithic "Central European" socialist architecture; he credits its extensive new archival research from the Taliesin West archives but judges the synthesis to add little genuine interpretation. He reviews O'Gorman's Three American Architects more favorably on Richardson but criticizes its central thesis that Sullivan and Wright were essentially conduits for Richardsonian ideas — "one Olympian, plus two minions" — arguing this undervalues scholarship by David Van Zanten, Lauren Weingarden, Wim de Wit, and Narciso Menocal showing Sullivan's ornament and banks to be intellectually independent, and Wright's own range of influences beyond Richardson. (Note: this PDF's extracted text runs slightly past the review's actual end into the opening paragraph of the next article in the issue — Leonard Eaton's separate review of The Midwest in American Architecture, catalogued here as sullivan187.pdf — a page-boundary artifact of the scan, not part of Twombly's review.)

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28199206%2951%3A2%3C210%3AFLWVAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M