The life and work of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) has always seemed to call for the epic treatment. The late Arthur Drexler, for example, long-time director of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, confessed to me in 1981 that one of his life’s ambitions was to “take over” the museum, as his colleague William Rubin had recently done with Picasso, and devote every available gallery space to a Wright retrospective. As we discussed this project over several long lunches in the early 1980s, we concluded that nothing less would be appropriate for documenting and interpreting Wright’s colossal achievement.

First, there would have to be a long introductory section on Wright’s antecedents from William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement to H. H. Richardson and the American Shingle Style. This would be followed by crucial moments in the architect’s education, from his childhood discovery of Friedrich Froebei’s kindergarten blocks to his Chicago apprenticeship with Louis Sullivan and his own early rendering in the 1890s of various late Victorian modes. Several galleries would be devoted to Wright’s mature “Prairie Style” of the first decade of the twentieth century, during which time his low-slung villas included the great houses for the Willits, Heurtley, Robie, Gale, and Coonley families. Special attention would also be given to that same period’s public and commercial monuments, particularly the Larkin Building, Buffalo, New York (1903), and Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois (1904).

Drexler was concerned that sufficient emphasis