Lloyd Wright’s Necessary Noise : MANY MASKS, A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright <i> by Brendan Gill (G.P. Putnam’s Sons: $24.95; 560 pp., illustrated) </i>

In 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright was supervising two of his most original projects, New York’s Guggenheim Museum and Beth Sholom Synagogue in suburban Philadelphia. Two different geometries were used by the then 92-year-old architect to radical effect. To the end, Wright was uncompromising, idiosyncratic and inventive. He was unusual among American artists for having survived his early celebrity and continued his creative work for nearly a century.

Brendan Gill’s “Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright” is an admiring but not uncritical appraisal of the architect’s long career. Gill, 50 years a staff writer and theater critic for The New Yorker, has had a continuing interest in American architecture. As part of this commitment, he recently revived Lewis Mumford’s “The Sky Line” column for the magazine. As a former theater critic, he is sensitive to Wright’s capricious use of persona to dramatize himself and encourage a project forward to completion. His book is a useful addition to Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s “In the Nature of Materials,” Norris Kelly Smith’s incisive “Frank Lloyd Wright” and Robert Twombly’s interpretive biography, “Frank Lloyd Wright.” Gill is less scholarly than his predecessors, but he is more sensitive than they to the fustian rhetoric of his subject, whom he quotes at length, to offer a glimpse of a man impossible to know fully.

Setting words against deeds, we get a strong sense of how difficult it is in America to practice the art of architecture. No matter how sympathetic the client, Wright always struggled to gain more from the commission than money or time would allow. Wright dramatized himself to insulate the work from architecture’s more practical role. So completely are myths entwined here with fact that any biographer is too often at the mercy of his subject or those in charge of keeping the legend. The architect frustrates attempts to place him within a tradition. All his life, he disclaimed influence, even his obvious debts to Austria and Japan at the turn of the century, and argued that he was his own school.

Wright raised to principle the particulars of his own experience. Having dropped out of the University of Wisconsin as a freshman, he distrusted formal education all his life and preferred an apprentice system where he had complete control. After his initial career of 20 years in Chicago, most notably in the office of Louis Sullivan and later on his own in nearby Oak Park, he installed himself as chief designer and guru of his own school, the Taliesin Fellowship. First in Wisconsin near where he was born and later in Arizona, Wright attracted young men and women willing to study with the master at a fee. Many stayed on forever lending their own ambition to his. Always in debt and ever able to charm, he was able to get his work built. Late in life, Wright explained to Gill, “I had to make a noise in the world, in order to gain as much of the world’s attention as I could. Otherwise, I would have had a lot of work on paper and only a little of it coming out of the ground in bricks and mortar.”

Making a noise came easily to him. He wore his hair long, fancied theatrical capes and drove fast cars. A champion of hearth and home, he left his young family and thriving career in 1909 to run off with a client’s wife. Gill lets us see how the exuberance of the life transformed the work. Wright was never content to replicate or to institutionalize what he had invented. Like Jefferson’s Monticello, the architect’s homes, first at Oak Park and then at Taliesin North and West, were sites of constant experimentation. Monuments of his early career, such as the Larkin Building (Buffalo, 1904), Unity Temple (Oak Park, 1906), Robie House (Chicago, 1909) and the Imperial Hotel (Tokyo, 1916-’22), reveal his uncanny ability to conceptualize a project three-dimensionally and then build it in the most challenging form available. The predominant horizontality of the early work created an uncommon freedom of interior space. His reputation as one of our greatest architects would have been sustained had he never built anything after 40. But he continued to experiment.

Some of these stylistic and formal investigations of his middle age are less successful than others. His Mayan-like Barnsdall (1920) and Ennis (1924) houses in Los Angeles suffered from lack of close attention during the critical construction stage when he was in Japan attending to the gigantic Imperial Hotel. But at the end of this period, before the outbreak of war, he had completed Fallingwater (Pennsylvania, 1936-’37), the bold extension of the cantilevered “Prairie” principles of his earliest houses to a wild wooded site, and his refinement of the “streamlining” aesthetic for the Johnson Wax Co. (Racine, 1936-’39). He continued his study of new construction techniques, mass production, low-cost or “Usonian” housing and investigations into form up until the last great buildings. Wright’s built work was his laboratory, a place to test the imagination.

Wright was one of those rare early modernists who embraced the machine age but never lost his faith in 19th-Century individualism. He never stopped tinkering or trying to find more elegant solutions to problems of design. To him, architecture was still a hand-crafted object. He lectured Hibbard Johnson, one of a band of intrepid clients who put up with his delays and cost overruns, what it meant to hire an “architect” and not a builder. “You seem to feel you’ve paid your old architect an awful lot, and the work costs an awful lot more. . . . No architect creating anything worth naming as creative work ever made or ever can make any money on what he does. . . . I have, as you know, given my personal attention to every little matter of minutest detail in both buildings (Johnson Wax Administration Buildings and home for Mr. Johnson). To me, neither structure is just a building. Each one is life in itself, one for the life that is your business life, and one for your personal life.”

On a recent trip to Oak Park, I saw the buses pull up and unload a group of pilgrims to Wright’s House and Studio. A place long abandoned by the architect and never visited after he married his client’s wife, Mrs. Cheney, has now been restored and kept lovingly as a shrine. The busload of tourists this day were all owners of Wright homes who were engaged in the expensive and endless restoration of Wright’s work. They looked as proud and content as if they had been themselves creators of a great piece of art. It is the special intimacy of great architecture that allows people to inhabit the mind of a genius. Gill captures this sense of awe in his conclusion. “It is another Wright who flourishes today, far beyond the boundaries of his life and time. His fame multiplies at a rate that even he would find satisfactory. Admiration of his handiwork approaches the universal. Who complains any longer that his roofs leak, that his chairs draw blood, that he never used to pay his bills? Old scamp, old teller of lies, old maker of wonders! How do you manage to go on performing this feat of hypnotism upon us?”