From 1690 on, children in colonial America were taught the letters of the alphabet with the New England Primer. Millions of copies of these primers formed the pedagogical cornerstone of elementary education for the next two centuries. These schoolroom textbooks iterated the basic building blocks of the English language—vowels, consonants, syllabariums—supplemented with woodcut illustrations and rhymed couplets that undergirded literacy with moral lessons imbued, in turn, with religious themes and catechisms gleaned from the King James Bible. Given this long tradition, had Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother not stumbled onto the Froebel system of kindergarten instruction as one alternative to primers, the development of a modern American architecture might have taken an entirely different course. The Froebel “gifts” were a series of disciplined exercises that challenged a child to construct increasingly intricate patterns from sets of elemental two- and three-dimensional shapes. They were later claimed, perhaps somewhat mythically by Wright himself, to be the motivating force behind his best architectural form-making. Despite the undue emphasis sometimes given by scholars to the Froebel system as a requisite condition for Wright’s design prowess, it surely did hold the same import for him that a primer would have had for other children of ordinary ability. The system, moreover, taught a basic alphabet of forms that was woven through with timeless moral principles, as it inculcated within the young Wright a certain immutable worldview that nevertheless embraced infinite variations.

In On and By Frank Lloyd Wright: A Primer of Architectural Principles, editor Robert McCarter has assembled a series of fourteen essays that provide limitless insights into the many factors that inspired Wright’s works while also unveiling the ordering principles that allowed Wright to surpass other architects of his era. Insomuch as Wright’s celebrity has overshadowed his work—especially of late, when such widespread familiarity has acted to obscure and dismiss the importance of his huge and unwieldy body of work—McCarter argues that the answers to all the questions about Wright’s creative processes have not yet reached a truly penetrating understanding of his design methods, precisely because they have been “rarely thought about” (6). That is to say, systematic analyses of Wright’s oeuvre on its own terms have been of secondary scholarly concern in contradistinction to the more prevalent muckraking through all of Wright’s personal affairs.

Thus, McCarter and his fellow authors turn traditional Wright scholarship on its head. Rather than seeing Wright’s architecture as a product of biographical and historical circumstances, McCarter’s scholars engage the architecture directly, through meticulous, thoughtful analyses of critical drawings created either by Wright or by the authors themselves as reinterpretations of the originals. According to McCarter, “the work of architecture itself [becomes] the primary source” (10) of authority on Wright’s form-making, not the widely disseminated and sensationalized accounts of his marital troubles or his cantankerous personality. Those unbecoming aspects of Wright’s personal conduct, usually on display after work hours outside the studio, are entirely wrung out of this unsullied rediscovery of “the incredibly complex and creative mind of Frank Lloyd Wright at work in his works” (10; emphasis in original). As McCarter so deftly puts it in his introduction, “Taken together, these fourteen critical analyses of Wright’s work indicate that, rather than being the creator of arbitrary form, as he is often portrayed, Wright was in fact the most principled architectural designer of our modern time” (21).

On and By Frank Lloyd Wright represents an expanded and considerably improved reworking of McCarter’s earlier edited “primer,” Frank Lloyd Wright: A Primer on Architectural Principles (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991). The essays have doubled in number, some having been written originally for different purposes at different times with different intentions in mind. The essayists include easily recognizable names such as Colin Rowe, Kenneth Frampton, David Van Zanten, and Neil Levine. Each analyst, of course, brings a distinctive perspective. Nevertheless, their essays are gathered together into a cohesive and organic whole through McCarter’s masterful editorial skills. Arranged in very rough chronological order, the contents of the essays naturally have the tendency to overlap, to double back on and spring ahead of each other, and even to contradict each other.

For instance, the iconic Fallingwater is invoked any number of times: as inevitable culmination of the Prairie School house (Werner Seligmann, 84); as rarefied progenitor of the humbler Usonian house (John Sergeant, 196); as crystallization of the spiritual union between architecture and nature (Kathryn Smith, 229); as transcendent metaphor for nature’s four classic elements (Levine, 253); as consecrated refuge for body and mind (Jonathan Lipman, 264); and as concrete record of an idea already fully formed in an astoundingly prescient mind (McCarter, 289). Similarly, the Seligman essay on the evolution of the Prairie School house expends considerable verbiage articulating exactly how the interlocking spatial intricacies of the main volumes (living and dining rooms) of the Isadore Heller House reverberate in their respective facades whereas, just a few dozen pages later, it is the linear axis of the hallway linking the main rooms in the Heller House that attracts Richard MacCormac’s attention in an essay drawing out the “transposition of the Froebel disciplines into [Wright’s] architecture” (132).

These varying analyses are not so radically different as to be mutually exclusive; that is, they in no way conspire to reinforce old misperceptions that Wright’s design process was so idiosyncratic that it must necessarily signify an “impenetrable system of thought” (124). Rather, these differing analyses ultimately complement each other. They neatly demonstrate that, to have true relevance, no architect’s art (especially that of a bona fide genius) should ever be considered so hermetically personal as “to emphasize the mystery of genius at the expense of communicable ideas” (124). Indeed, Wright himself was a prolific communicator, and his essays (three of which are appended to the main collection) provide ample confirmation of the varied interpretations deciphered by these scholars from their direct consultation first with the buildings themselves.

Two essays in particular stand out as models of thoughtful and nuanced analysis, for they forge especially fresh insights into the manner by which a single underlying design principle can permeate the whole of an architect’s career (even one as long as Wright’s seventy-year practice) and yet still go unrecognized as such because the visible, outward forms of that architect’s buildings otherwise appear to have been subjected to periodic radical adjustments in conceptual thinking. Smith’s essay, “A Beat of the Rhythmic Clock of Nature: Wright’s Waterfall Buildings,” effectively demonstrates how that single most lyrical schema traditionally held to have set Fallingwater above and apart from all his other works—the building’s placement over a waterfall—actually had a significant number of antecedents and progeny spanning over four decades. Levine’s “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Diagonal Planning Revisited” goes one better by searching for a design principle of such constancy that it spanned the entirety of Wright’s career. He finds it in the diagonal line or vista. The effect of Levine’s incisive observation is to implant diagonal planning firmly alongside the pinwheel/cruciform plan and the horizontal line as yet another hallmark of Wright’s coherent, not arbitrary, style. When Levine demonstrates how even the deceptively loose array of circular forms that comprise the Guggenheim Museum is actually highly regulated in plan by that same straight-line diagonal imperative governing so many of Wright’s earlier orthogonal design schemes, the reader experiences a pure moment of what McCarter elsewhere describes as the “sense of being both old and new, both universal and of its place, both inevitable and full of wonder” (21).

Taken as a whole, the fourteen essays redefine and correct what have become the all-too-standard clichés regarding Wright’s contribution to the formulation of a modern architecture. At least four interdependent theses emerge, all resuscitative efforts to reinstate Wright’s proper place in modern architecture. First and most importantly, especially given the approaching fiftieth anniversary of Wright’s death, distances created by the passage of time afford scholars today (who never knew Wright personally) the benefits of a much needed objectivity, forcing upon them an honest assessment of his works and the artifacts he left behind instead of the idiosyncrasies of Wright as fallible human being. In fact, Wright has finally become so much a historical figure—even, one might add, during his own long lifetime—that we see more clearly today than ever before just how deeply he mined history as well as his own rich repository of design ideas right up until his death. Wright did not reinvent a new architecture every Monday morning.

Second, it is altogether appropriate that Wright’s work should be subjected to rigorous analyses because Wright himself employed an exacting methodology, engrained in him since his youth, by which to dissect everything he observed in nature and architecture. As a consequence, rather than being straight-jacketed by biases that limited the styles from which he drew inspirational ideals, Wright possessed a reverence for the past that, according to McCarter, opened up “the entire history of art . . . as the source of ordering principles” (15). Wright was not always the iconoclast he is supposed to be.

Third, as McCarter observes so acutely with particular reference to the “destruction of the box” stereotype that so often besets the Wright legacy: “A closer study of his work reveals that such singular interpretations are misleading—though no doubt highly effective for Wright’s polemical purposes.” McCarter goes on to assert that “Wright was interested not in limiting his formal choices but in expanding them. . . . It would perhaps be better to say that what Wright destroyed was not the room-as-box but, rather, any singular interpretation of the room” (314). Therefore, by extension, the contemporary historian must no longer consign any of Wright’s contributions to a narrow, airtight box but needs to recognize, instead, that Wright should be generally credited with expanding the modern architectural vocabulary more than any of his peers.

And finally, the totality of Wright’s professional life was focused on the creation of a virtually infinite set of variations of form, communicated through just a very few fundamental principles and structured as much by Wright’s too often ignored consideration of the experiential dimension of architectural spaces as by the harmonious disposition of the elements of a building in plan. As McCarter notes, the pursuit was relentless and “did not end when the design was committed to paper. . . . It continued throughout the process of design, development, presentation, construction, and publication” (293). Wright’s experiments were exhaustive as he endeavored to draw nearer and nearer to an ideal that was never truly reachable. He was “designing” even when he was not designing. The workings of his mind were compulsively unceasing and unfathomably intricate.

Parenthetically, it is only obliquely that the essayists leverage Wright’s genius as an “indictment” of contemporary architectural design, arguing just here and there, as McCarter does in his summary essay, that Wright’s work exposes the “spiritual vacuity” of today’s unprincipled architectural forays into “ever-expanding ‘pluralism’ . . . incessant style-changes, and . . . increasingly ‘disturbed plans’” (335–36).

If there is one troubling flaw in On and By Frank Lloyd Wright, it is found ironically enough in those very instruments of analysis so critical to the revelations within—the accompanying illustrations. In countless instances, they are simply too small. They give one’s bifocals a real workout because many of their components are reduced to nothing more than microscopically useless specks. Without exception, plans have no cartographic directional arrows, an oversight the reader notices immediately whenever any essayist begins to analyze a plan by locating orientations or axes along cardinal compass points. Most frustrating, however, is the chronic lack of correspondence between the printed words that dissect a particular drawing and the placement of that drawing within the text; the reader typically finds herself or himself a page or two behind or ahead of the commentary. The consequent continual flipping of pages back and forth is a distracting irritation. By contrast, a truly effective primer, like those of days long past, understood that the careful marrying of word to image was absolutely vital to achieving its educational objectives.

However, comparisons of McCarter’s tome to primers should not be taken too far. It is only incidentally that linguistic references are introduced at all: when Louis Sullivan is quoted as condemning the clever use of metaphor and simile to justify unprincipled architectural design; when McCarter briefly invokes Wright’s own reference to a “grammar of architecture” (299); or when Frampton confirms “the regional inflection that was always latent as a creative impulse within Wright’s work” (184). Other than Rowe’s contrast of Wright’s reassuring confluence of spatial and structural systems to the unsettled “dialectical opposition” (95) of those same elements in the International Style, there is little in these collected essays that deliberately reaches beyond a sober exposition of Wright’s vocabulary of forms into the headier constructs of modernist polemics or postmodernist syntax.

In compiling a volume he classifies as a “primer,” McCarter obviously implies that he wishes to enumerate an edifying set of fundamental architectural building blocks and maxims comparable to those found in early American schoolbooks that taught children to read and write. Indeed, so clear and reasoned is the rhetoric of his scholars that McCarter’s “textbook” ought to be, by all rights, required reading for anyone claiming to be a student of architecture.

McCarter’s “primer” is more than a primer. If truth be told, it is sufficiently penetrating and boundless for this author to anoint it the “bible” of architectural design principles. Fittingly, Lipman’s penultimate-positioned essay is titled “Consecrated Space.” Just as the Bible ends with revelations of a future new world order inspired by the resurrection of the awesome prototypical Judge of right and wrong, McCarter finds, unwittingly perhaps, the Savior’s counterpart in Wright. McCarter transmits Wright’s apocalyptic vision directly when he quotes from the architect’s collected essays, In the Cause of Architecture: “To judge the architect one need only look at his ground plan. He is the master then and there, or never. Were all the elevations of the genuine buildings of the world lost and the ground plans saved, each building would construct itself again. Because before a plan is a plan it is a concept in some creative mind” (299). Establishing an undeniable Alpha-and-Omega quality to Wright’s profound genius, the final page of McCarter’s own last essay concludes that “architecture began again in that Wright constructed new forms for ancient meanings: he was ‘original,’ both in returning to origins and in creating something new and unique” (337). In so attesting, McCarter appears to disregard his own cautionary words, found very early in his introductory essay, to avoid the sort of scholarship contained in certain biographies and “devotional tracts” (8) on Wright that try to pass themselves off as objective analyses of his designs. McCarter’s exceptional volume comes very close to crossing into that realm of adulation. But if it is adulation, it is at least principled adulation.