Non-Fiction Books
"I would much rather build than write about building, but when I am not building, I will write about building — or the significance of those buildings I have already built." — Frank Lloyd Wright Frank Lloyd Wright built a body of works and drawings to illustrate and explain his work: collections of designs with commentary that temperamentally parallel that work: irascible, radical, powerful and dense, astonishing and simple in its clarity. One of his earliest published works illustrates the parallel, preserving thought and design at a prophetic moment, shortly before Wright's genius and fame captured two continents and many converts. The Wasmuth portfolio of drawings (named after the original German publisher) is reproduced here from an extremely rare first edition (1910). Wright's polemical preface indicates the importance he attached to the drawings and their publication: ". . . the work illustrated in this volume, with the exception of the work of Louis Sullivan, is the first consistent protest in bricks and mortar against this pitiful waste [academic, inorganic styles]. It is a serious attempt to formulate some industrial and aesthetic ideals that in a quiet, rational way will help to make a lovely thing of an American's home environment. . . ." "Home environment" for Wright was the Midwestern plain; these these drawings, perhaps his earliest experiments in organic design, partake of the Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin prairie with their emphasis on the horizontal ("the line of domesticity") and the environmental motif: "A beautiful elm standing near gave the suggestion for the mass of the building," Wright says of the Winslow house in River Forest, Illinois, a dwelling he cites as the first embodiment of many of his ideas. Elegant full-page architectural drawings and plans show Wright's atelier in Oak Park, Illinois, many homes, cottages, banks, a burial chapel, Unity Church temple, a concrete house designed for Ladies' Home Journal and numerous studies for buildings, treated as problems in design, that were never built. The republication of this rare work gives access again to what has been called "the single most important collection of work published by Frank Lloyd Wright." Students of American architectural genius will find here the seeds of Wright's greatness.
Text: English, German (translation)
207 rare photos of Oak Park period, first great buildings: Unity Temple, Dana house, Larkin factory, more. Complete photos of Wasmuth edition. New Introduction.
Frank Lloyd Wright's intimate account of his personal and aesthetic relationship with Louis Sullivan, founder of modernism in architecture, with drawings by both artists, and two essays by Sullivan himself
Rear cover notes: "The prophetic vision of one man, Frank Lloyd Wright, dominates the world of architecture in the twentieth century. In this challenging volume the master architect looks back over his career and explains his aims, his ideas, his art. The book begins with the widely discussed 'Conversation' (1953). Mr. Wright's assessment of his work is accompanied by and highlighted with photographs of his buildings in an illustrated text which brings his concepts of an organic architecture vividly alive. THE FUTURE OF ARCHITECTURE also includes some of Frank Lloyd Wright's most controversial papers: The Princeton Lectures (1930), The Chicago Art Institute Lectures (1931), The London Lectures (1939). Here, too, is a definition of the Language of Organic Architecture as the architect has employed it throughout a lifetime of work."
Hardcover 9 1/4" X 12 1/4" 256 pages. B/W Photos and Drawings.
Presents a selection of the architect's writings and sketches of many of his buildings
Frank Lloyd Wright in his Renderings, 1887-1959 [jp_oversized_book] Wright, Frank Lloyd [Jan 01, 1984]
In May 1939, when London's architecture could only wait helplessly before the coming destruction and man's spirit—and spiritual claims—were at a low ebb, Frank Lloyd Wright delivered four talks to some young British architects. In these talks he affirmed his belief in the future with a positive conviction that was reinforced by the derision with which his acidulous wit reacted against the sterilities of the past. Wright on this occasion was as ever the conscious radical jeffersonian whose message resonates with every "younger generation": At the outset I may as well confess that I have come here with a minority an informal Declaration if Independence. Great Britain had one from us, July 4, 1776: a formal Declaration of Independence which concerned taxes; this one, May 2, 1939, concerns the spirit. Am I, then, a rebel, too? Yes. But only a rebel as one who has in his actual work, for a life-time—or is it more—been carrying out in practice day by day, what he believes to be true. This book is the verbatim text of those four talks, which a champion of Wright's has called "one of the best statements of his principles and his ideas." The talks, like all of Wright's productions, are free-ranging and spontaneous in inspiration, solid and workmanlike in execution. In speaking to Londoners at this point in their history and at this point in his own development, Wright is prompted to universalize his concept of organic architecture. Perhaps more than this in his other books, the emphasis shifts from an American—Usonian—architecture growing indigenously from the soil of the American heartland to a more general concept of an architecture than can take root in many landscapes as an honest expression of both the nature of diverse materials and the nature and living needs of diverse populations. What is architecture anyway? Is it a vast collection of the various buildings which have been built to please the varying tastes of the various lords of mankind? No. I think not. I know that architecture is life; or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore is the truest record of life as it was lives in the world yesterday, as it is being lived today or ever will be lived. So architecture I know to be a great spirit. No, it is not something that consists of the buildings which have been built by man on his Earth. Architecture is that great living creative spirit which from generation to generation, from age to age, proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man, and his circumstances as they both change . That really is architecture. Three of the talks open with Wright's narration of films showing examples of his recent work and life with his apprentices at the Taliesins. Here Wright is at his informal best, and the visual references are supplied in the book by the photographs of finished buildings, models, and plans at the end of the volume, dating from projects of the 1930s and roughly paralleling the content of the films. A bibliography and a list of buildings and projected works through 1939 round out the volume.
New York. 1975. Architectural Record Book. 29x22. 246p.
Frank Lloyd Wright exerted perhaps the greatest influence on twentieth century design. In a volume that continues to resonate more than seventy years after its initial publication, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography contains the master architect's own account of his work, his philosophy, and his personal life, written with his signature wit and charm. Wright (1867-1959) went into seclusion in a Minnesota cabin to reflect and to record his life experiences. In 1932, the first edition of the Autobiography was published. It became a form of advertising, leading many readers to seek out the master architect--thirty apprentices came to live and learn at Taliesin, Wright's Wisconsin home/school/studio, under the master's tutelage. (By 1938, Taliesin West, in Arizona, was the winter location for Wright's school.) The volume is divided into five sections devoted to family, fellowship, work, freedom, and form. Wright recalls his childhood, his apprenticeship with Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, the turmoil of his personal life, and the background to his greatest achievements, including Hollyhock House, the Prairie and the Usonian Houses, and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.
Photographs and detailed floor plans illustrate the works of the leading American architect, revealing the distinctive features of his designs
From rear cover notes: "This first ever published collection of letters by Frank Lloyd Wright reveals an articulate genius at his intimate best, witty, wise, wistful, devastating, sometimes all within a single page. Written for the most part to his apprentices, these letters also serve to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Taliesin Fellowship, the 'school' Frank Lloyd Wright founded in 1932...."
[publisher: California State Univ Press, 1984, first edition HARDCOVER] COLLECTORS VERY FINE w/ very fine dustjacket. Interior pages clean, very fine. 228 pp with b&w photo plates.Collection of letters written by Wright to his fellow architects, including Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson and others. [New York, NY]
Truth Against the World offers a singular portrait of Frank Lloyd Wrightthe master architect, and perhaps Americas most famous architect, as public speaker. It was a role Wright often disdained but which he also obviously enjoyed. Including thoughtful analysis with introductions by editor Patrick J. Meehan, AIA, Truth Against the World provides the first comprehensive, single-volume collection of Wrights most important speeches during his 70-year career to diverse audienceshigh school and college students, architects, engineers, business executives, and society matrons. Topics covered by the 32 presentations include Wrights thoughts on Beaux Arts architecture and the Columbian World Exposition of 1893, organic architecture, prefabricated housing, hospital design, the use of the machine in design, and contemporary society, among many others.
Frank Lloyd Wright's classic account of his vision for an organic architecture—in a beautifully designed new edition Modern Architecture is a landmark text—the first book in which America's greatest architect put forth the principles of a fundamentally new, organic architecture that would reject the trappings of historical styles while avoiding the geometric abstraction of the machine aesthetic advocated by contemporary European modernists. One of the most important documents in the development of modern architecture and the career of Frank Lloyd Wright, Modern Architecture is a provocative and profound polemic against America's architectural eclecticism, commercial skyscrapers, and misguided urban planning. The book is also a work of savvy self-promotion, in which Wright not only advanced his own concept of an organic architecture but also framed it as having anticipated by decades—and bettered—what he saw as the reductive modernism of his European counterparts. Based on the 1931 original, for which Wright supplied the cover illustration, this beautiful edition includes a new introduction that puts Modern Architecture in its broader architectural, historical, and intellectual context for the first time. The subjects of these lively lectures—from "Machinery, Materials and Men" to "The Tyranny of the Skyscraper" and "The City"—move from a general statement of the conditions of modern culture to particular applications in the fields of architecture and urbanism at ever broadening scales. Wright's vision in Modern Architecture is ultimately to equate the truly modern with romanticism, imagination, beauty, and nature—all of which he connects with an underlying sense of American democratic freedom and individualism.
Each page is a postcard. Over 30 of his most famous buildings.
This famous and important study offers a richly illustrated overview of Wright’s extraordinary early works: Unity Temple, Robie House, the Imperial Hotel and many more. Included are essays on Wright by Louis Sullivan, Lewis Mumford and other critics, as well as 5 essays by Wright himself. 136 photographs, 63 floor plans.
From the turn of the century until his death in 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright produced an almost uninterrupted stream of projects that redefined the American architectural vision. The most comprehensive summary and appraisal of Wright's achievement ever assembled, with nearly 500 illustrations, including 190 in color, this volume presents an impressive array of works: single family houses that provided images and models for generations of suburban buildings across the United States, community solutions to housing for Depression America, and an astonishing progression of landmark commercial and institutional structures. In these pages appear Wright's most spectacular commissions--among them Fallingwater, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Tokyo's Imperial Hotel--but also a retrospective selection of other projects from all periods of his enormously productive career. Photographs of actual buildings and of models, plans, and sketches, as well as reproductions of the architect's masterful drawings, many previously unpublished, are all included.
Celebrating the works of one of the most famous contributors to American architectural history, a beautifully bound book highlights Frank Lloyd Wright's Oak Park/Chicago years and contains many lavish photographs.
Pedro E Guerrero began his career as an architectural photographer in 1939, working for Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West in Arizona. He went on to photograph the work of many other architects and sculptors, and he continued working for Wright until the latter's death in 1959; but his first photographs of architecture remained, in his own view, among his best work.This catalog is the record of an exhibition of Guerrero's photographs of the original Taliesin West, outside Scottsdale, and the Pauson House, outside Phoenix. Because Taliesin West stands now in much altered form and the Pauson House is lost, these images have great historical importance. Beyond that, they are also superb examples of photographic art. Admirers of Wright's work will find that this collection of historical images, many never published before, provides invaluable information on two major works from one of Wright's most productive periods. Bernard Michael Boyle is Professor of Architecture and Humanities at Arizona State University, where he teaches classes in the history of architecture. He is the editor of three previous volumes in the series. No. 4 in the series School of Architecture Historical Publications.
He was the most iconoclastic of architects, and at the height of his career his output of writings about architecture was as prolific and visionary as his architecture itself. Frank Lloyd Wright pioneered a bold new kind of architecture, one in which the spirit of modern man truly "lived in his buildings." The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright is a one-volume compendium of Wright's most critically important--and personally revealing--writings on every conceivable aspect of his craft. Wright was perhaps the most influential and inspired architect of the twentieth century, and this is the only book that gathers all of his most significant essays, lectures, and articles on architecture. Bruce Pfeiffer includes each piece in its entirety to present the architect's writings as he originally intended them. Beginning early in Wright's career with "The Art and Craft of the Machine" in 1901, the book follows major themes through The Disappearing City, The Natural House , and many other writings, and ends with A Testament in 1957, published two years before his death. This volume is beautifully illustrated with original drawings and photographs, and is complemented by Pfeiffer's general introduction, which provides history and context. The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright is a must-have resource for architects and scholars and a delight for general readers.
The most influential, provocative, and enduring writings of the American master are gathered in this anthology. Twenty-one carefully chosen selections from Wright’s extensive literary output span the important period between 1900 and the late 1930s, when the architect exerted a powerful influence on the developing modern movement. A concise biography, explanatory head notes, and a short annotated bibliography make this an ideal introduction for students. 25 illustrations
The architect of the Guggenheim Museum, Fallingwater, the Robie House, and the Johnson Wax Administration Building, Frank Lloyd Wright once said, ";You do not learn by way of your successes. No one does."; Just as he flouted convention in a series of astonishing buildings, so did Wright go against the grain in his career as a writer and lecturer. On subjects as diverse as McCarthyism and cement blocks, he produced countless lectures and articles, a half-dozen books, and a remarkable series of informal talks delivered to his apprentices on Sunday mornings.Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, the author of several collections of Wright’s writings and Director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, has culled more than two hundred quotations from a wide range of sources, drawing heavily on transcripts of the Sunday talks. The themes to which Wright returned most often serve as the book’s sections: the value of architecture takes precedence, but topics such as government and the ge
Unpacking Wright’s archive of more than two million objects, on the 150th anniversary of the master architect’s birth Published for a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this catalog reveals new perspectives on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, a designer so prolific and familiar as to nearly preclude critical reexamination. Structured as a series of inquiries into the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives at Taliesin West, Arizona (recently acquired by MoMA and Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University), the book is a collection of scholarly explorations rather than an attempt to construct a master narrative. Each chapter centers on a key object from the archive that an invited author has “unpacked”― tracing its meanings and connections, and juxtaposing it with other works from the archive, from MoMA, or from outside collections. Wright’s quest to build a mile-high skyscraper reveals him to be one of the earliest celebrity architects, using television, press relations and other forms of mass media to advance his own self-crafted image. A little-known project for a Rosenwald School for African-American children, together with other projects that engage Japanese and Native American culture, ask provocative questions about Wright’s positions on race and cultural identity. Still other investigations engage the architect’s lifelong dedication to affordable and do-it-yourself housing, as well as the ecological systems, both social and environmental, that informed his approach to cities, landscapes and even ornament. The publication aims to open up Wright’s work to questions, interrogations and debates, and to highlight interpretations by contemporary scholars, both established Wright experts and others considering this iconic figure from new and illuminating perspectives.