The most pivotal and yet least understood event of Frank Lloyd Wrightrsquo;s celebrated life involves the brutal murders in 1914 of seven adults and children dear to the architect and the destruction by fire of Taliesin; his landmark residence; near Spring Green; Wisconsin. Unaccountably; the details of that shocking crime have been largely ignored by Wrightrsquo;s legion of biographersmdash;a historical and cultural gap that is finally addressed in William Drennanrsquo;s exhaustively researched Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders.In response to the scandal generated by his open affair with the proto-feminist and free love advocate Mamah Borthwick Cheney; Wright had begun to build Taliesin as a refuge and "love cottage" for himself and his mistress (both married at the time to others). Conceived as the apotheosis of Wrightrsquo;s prairie house style; the original Taliesin would stand in all its isolated glory for only a few months before the bloody slayings that rocked the nation and reduced the structure itself to a smoking hull.Supplying both a gripping mystery story and an authoritative portrait of the artist as a young man; Drennan wades through the myths surrounding Wright and the massacre; casting fresh light on the formulation of Wrightrsquo;s architectural ideology and the cataclysmic effects that the Taliesin murders exerted on the fabled architect and on his subsequent designs.
#2979506 in eBooks 2016-12-05 2016-12-05File Name: B01NCHXBUJ
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