Fallingwater, an hour out of Pittsburgh, is described as the world's most beautiful modern house. But fully half of architect Frank Lloyd Wright's fully-conceived masterpieces never left the drawing board.
Wright designed 532 buildings that were made, and about the same number again that never were. His career spanned seven decades. His personal life was beset by chaos. He left his first wife Kittie, then in 1914 his partner Mamah Cheney was murdered alongside six other people by a domestic worker named Julian Carlton. His second wife, Miriam Noel, was a hopeless morphine addict. His third marriage, to Olgivanna, seems to have been all right. Wright famously said that, “not only do I fully intend to be the greatest architect who has yet lived, but fully intend to be the greatest architect who will ever live.” Walking around this show, a beautiful edifice built of the flotsam and jetsam of a long career, one realizes that even a man like that didn’t always get his way.
My favorite FLW fantasy is The Illinois, a mile-high skyscraper that makes the Burj look like a Burger King.
