‘Frank Lloyd Wright: The Man Who Built America’ Review: An Architect for the Ages

Wearing a period-appropriate porkpie hat, an oddly buttoned coat and a look of profound admiration, Welsh architect Jonathan Adams makes a well-suited tour guide for “Frank Lloyd Wright: The Man Who Built America,” and not just because he’s an architect himself. He’s also a critic. Wright, perhaps the most famous and prolific designer of buildings that America has ever known, led a life marked by scandal, adultery and even murder, but Mr. Adams’s stated intention is to get beyond the sensational and focus on the work—the whats, the hows and, just as important, the whys.

This he does, explaining just how Wright’s aim of creating “organic architecture” (“Architecture that belongs where you see it standing,” as Wright says in a clip) led to some of the most famous buildings in the Wright catalog—and, as Mr. Adams doesn’t really have to argue, the most celebrated in architecture, American or otherwise. Fallingwater, for instance, the Pennsylvania “country home” built over a waterfall, which Mr. Adams presents in rather breathtaking fashion, or Taliesin, which Wright built for himself and Mamah Borthwick, for whom he had left his wife and children in 1909—and where she died in 1914 when a servant set fire to the house and killed seven people with an ax.