Frank Lloyd Wright Book Collection

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Drawings and Plans of Frank Lloyd Wright: The Early Period (1893-1909)

Frank Lloyd Wright

"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.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Thomas A. Heinz

"Photographs of homes and other buildings designed by the distinguished architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, are accompanied by a brief account of his career."
Frank Lloyd Wright: Letters to Apprentices

Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer

"The 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.

The letters presented here have been selected and arranged so as to recapture, in full color, the on-the-spot experiences of Frank Lloyd Wright's culminating burst of creativity. During those final 27 years 91932-1959), until his death at the age of 90, he planned and designed such landscapes as Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax Building, the Usonian houses, the Guggenheim Museum, the Beth Sholom Synagogue, the Gammage Memorial Auditorium, the Marin County Civic Center. All this, as the letters show, was witnessed and abetted by the Taliesin Fellowship, those many hundreds of young men and women who underwent an architectural education unique in history - learning to build by doing, and by doing everything, under the direct supervision of the greatest architect of our century.

These letters tell the story of that training and that creative out-pouring from the special angle of vision of the man whose genius made both possible. Too, they give us more than architecture at its crest. They introduce us to a novel and arresting thinker who talks profoundly and disturbingly about art and life, war and politics, marriage, morals, the spoiled younger generation, and that total complex, desperately in need of reform, called democracy.

What the reader will encounter in these letters, then, will be the everyday intensity, the dazzling accomplishment, the wisdom, the ever-expanding vision...a whole of which all Taliesin apprentices - and all of the rest of us too - are inescapably a part."
The Early Work of Frank Lloyd Wright: the "Ausgeführte Bauten" of 1911

Frank Lloyd Wright

"207 rare photos of Oak Park period, first great buildings: Unity Temple, Dana house, Larkin factory, more. Complete photos of Wasmuth edition. New Introduction." - Amazon
Frank Lloyd Wright's Hanna House: The Client's Report

Paul R. Hanna and Jean S. Hanna

"The Hanna house is a milestone in Frank Lloyd Wright’s career and one of the acknowledged masterworks of 20th-century architecture. The Hannas tell how they came to commission Wright, how they received his ingenious yet provocative design—based on a hexagonal pattern like a bee’s honeycomb—and how it was built all within their means. In this reprint of the 1981 MIT edition they also tell what it meant to live and enjoy life in this unprecedented structure that was eventually given to Stanford University."
Frank Lloyd Wright: Three Quarters of a Century of Drawings

Frank Lloyd Wright, Alberto Izzo, and Camillo Gubitosi

"Photographs and detailed floor plans illustrate the works of the leading American architect, revealing the distinctive features of his designs."
Global Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright - The Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan 1915-22

Frank Lloyd Wright and Yukio Futagawa

This edition of Global Architecture features photographs and renderings of Frank Lloyd Wright's The Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Japan. Numerous photographs show exterior and interior spaces from many different angles as well as drawings. Text is in both English and Japanese.
The Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright

David A. Hanks

Book Inside Cover: "This major study based on the career of the world-famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright is of special importance, as it concentrates for the first time on the decorative arts in many of the important buildings he designed. This is an aspect of Wright's contribution to modern architecture and design that has been insufficiently studied up to now. Wright's aim always was to create a totally cohesive environment for his clients: no detail was too small for his attention, for all the many elements - furniture, curtains, rugs, decorative window glass, lighting fixtures, vases, etc. - individual space or building. By means of the book's authoritative text and over 200 halftones and color plates we can understand fully the beauty and complexity of Wright's achievement in this field."
Years with Frank Lloyd Wright: Apprentice to Genius

Edgar Tafel

"From the special vantage point of a former apprentice who for nine years lived and worked under 'the fury and wrath of genius,' Edgar Tafel presents a wonderfully revealing portrait of America's greatest architect. Unpredictable, cantankerous, a striking figure with white hair, cape and cane, Frank Lloyd Wright was an individualistic spirit who delighted in acting out his own myth. Here is an intimate view of the many moods of Wright the man, warts and all, the inspired teacher, and the creative visionary, by a devoted student who came to know him as few others have. Now a successful architect in his own right, Tafel takes us back to 1932 and the early years of the Taliesin Fellowship when a group of promising young apprentices gathered in Spring Green, Wisconsin, to be near the 65-year-old master and work at his elbow. We are privy to the incredible richness and diversity of Wright's thinking, his passion for artistic truth and devotion to the cause of architecture, his unfailing creative surges, as well as to his eccentricities and fascinating details about life at Taliesin. We see genius at close range as he designs the most famous house of the twentieth century. Fallingwater, the magnificent Johnson Wax Building and Wingspread; as he ceaselessly tinkers with his designs, all the while proclaiming his organic theories of architecture; as he badgers, bullies, awes and inspires a generation of young architects. Tafel's memoir provides us with a rare view of the man who considered his chief mission in life to create a genuinely American architecture and style of living, wholly personal and original. Here are illuminating anecdotes about his Prairie house and Oak Park periods, his disdain for the Bauhaus school and its leading practitioners, his total immersion in the design and construction of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, his romance with concrete, his efforts to develop the practical 'Usonian homes,' and much else. It is also an enlightening summary of the facts and forces which influenced the history of American architecture. Written with affection and admiration, and enhanced with over 300 photographs — many never before published — Years with Frank Lloyd Wright offers an unusually candid portrait of the brilliant, eccentric genius who charted a new course for modern architecture."
Houses of the West

Elisabeth Kendall Thompson

"What makes a house a 'Wester' house? Highly prized by both architects and home-owners, the 'Western' house has been admired, adopted, adapted, emulated, even imitated, from coast to coast for a long time. But what exactly is a 'Western' house? Could almost any one of the millions of residences dotting the West be called one? Is it a house of a certain architectural style? Of a certain size? Built of certain materials?

The answer is, of course, no. The Western houses you'll be exploring in these pages are a breed apart, a breed of infinite variety. Today, more than ever, Americans contemplating either buying a home or having one custom-designed are finding themselves strongly attracted to the fresh, free quality of this particular kind of house. Born in America's West, it is a house that seeks an intimate relationship to site an lifestyle. Timelessly contemporary, this kind of house derives from no historic style. Its design bows to no set of rules. It is characterized by no specific forms. It calls for no preconceived details. Joining with the landscape, it is careful not to despoil the landscape. And, although it makes use of materials found in its locality, it does so out of choice and common sense, rather than out of any dictates of style. It is, in every sense of word, free. It is a house not merely in the West but of the West.

Joyfully culled from Architectural Record's rich treasury, these contemporary Western residences - 41 of them having been chosen recently as Record Houses - bring you a unique body of ready design ideas and an almost inexhaustible fund of practical solutions to design and site problems. The volume's 410 superb photographs (of which many are full page and 16 in full color), together with 131 plans and other drawings and diagrams, show details of exteriors, interiors, and sites. From them, architects and clients, builders, developers, and prospective buyers can find concrete visual expression for their ideas and notions. Questions relating to taste and preference, need and pocket-book, can be clarified and often finalized.

The volume takes you inside and around a sparkling galaxy of homes of the West. You'll explore vacation houses at the beach 'married' to water, sand, and sky. Vacation houses in the woods, in the mountains, and on open sites - growing out of bedrock, nestling into trees, hugging bare slopes, on cliffside ledges, on poles, and on slopes almost too steep to build upon. And vacation houses for year-round use. (There is concrete house on a rocky ridge with a 60-foot diameter living room part indoors and part outdoors!) You'll see suburban and town houses on hilly and on flat sites. Houses making miraculous use of small and/or odd-shaped sites, houses surrounding huge central spaces, houses built for earthquake resistance. Single- and multi-level houses, multi-family complexes, and multi-activity and multi-mood houses.

Whether elegant or modest, large or small, costly or inexpensive - each is possessed of simplicity, integrity, lack of pretense, and perfect harmony with the natural environment. Each permits the precise degree of informality desired by the people who live in it. Each respo0nds boldly and sensitively to personality, to the use of which it will be put, and to the inalienable rights of the land on which it stands. You will find the volume a source of discovery and delight."
Earth Sheltered Housing Design: Guidelines, Examples, and References

University of Minnesota Underground Space Center

"Before the use of fossil fuels was commonplace man often turned to the earth for protection from the elements and extremes of climate. Now, with fuel supplies dwindling and fuel prices rapidly rising, it is time to reconsider the benefits of habitation below the earth's surface.

This book of guidelines offers homeowners and architects a comfortable and economic approach to underground housing based on modern construction techniques. It provides plans, details, and photographs of existing examples of earth sheltered houses from around the country, and shows how to design homes using such low cost natural resource- and energy-saving systems as layers of soil insulation and passive solar heating. Many of the homes illustrate how the designs can be adapted to take advantage of specific natural surroundings.

Avoiding the use of technical language whenever possible, the authors give clear-cut explanations of energy performance in earth sheltered houses, as well as helpful hints on selecting materials and equipment. The reader will find basic information on warm climate and cold climate designs, including detailed coverage of plans, site selection, waterproofing and insulation, as well as zoning codes and other public policy issues that relate to underground construction. Essential advice is given on systems which provide maximum protection from wind chill, unwanted infiltration, and direct heat loss. All the facts are here on creating a durable, low maintenance structure that is not only economical, but also as comfortable as a conventional home. Detailed appendices offer precise information on financing, building codes, and product information."
Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater: The House and Its History

Donald Hoffmann

"'As everyone knows,' Frank Lloyd Wright said, 'we live in economic, aesthetic and moral chaos, for the reason that American life has achieved no organic form.'

Organic form was Wright's credo, and its most splendid embodiment is Fallingwater. Fallingwater, the private dwelling which juts directly over a waterfall at Bear Run in western Pennsylvania, is the boldest and most personal architectural statement of Wright's mature years. When Life magazine featured it on its inside front cover (January 17, 1938), Wright wrote the owner, Pittsburgh merchant Edgar Kauffmann, to proclaim the opening of a new era in architecture.

This account covers the history of the picturesque Bear Run site and the Kauffmann family's involvement with it; the germination of a vision in Wright's mind; and the day-to-day planning, construction, alterations and cost overruns. Pre-eminent is the domineering personality of Wright, and his intimate, occasionally stormy relations with Edgar Kauffmann, called by contemporaries 'a true merchant prince.' Although Kauffmann supported and believed in Wright, the Pittsburgh retailer had his own ideas about the summer house he wanted, and the building of Fallingwater is studded with confrontations over aesthetics and structure. At one point, after Kauffmann complained of a critical engineering report, Wright told him to send the plans for Fallingwater back to Taliesin, 'since [Kauffmann] did not deserve the house.' Kauffmann apologized, and construction was began.

FALLINGWATER studies in detail the architectural innovations brought to fruition at Bear Run: the cantilevered construction, the ingenious integration with the majestic waterfall, the cascading staircases, organic use of ornament, and the problematic, ultimately triumphant us of reinforced concrete. Donald Hoffmann, author of two previous books on architecture, has based his text on interviews with Wright's apprentices and research into letters, plans and documents comprising the Bear Run papers, now on deposit in the Avery Architectural Library at Columbia University.

100 beautifully reproduced photographs, preliminary drawings, sketches and plans illustrate the history of Fallingwater. The site is pictured before, during, and after construction, with attention focused on the gradual growth of line and proportion. FRANK LLOYD WRITH'S FALLINGWATER is a complete record of the birth, growth and maturity of an architectural idea."
Wind Power For Your Home

George Sullivan

"The First Complete Guide that tells How to Make the Wind's Energy Work for You."

Excerpt from Description:

"WIND POWER FOR YOUR HOME explains in detail how to exploit this most inexhaustible of all energy sources. The typical wind-driven power system is not inexpensive. But this book shows you how to evaluate the wind speeds in your area so you can determine the size and type of system that will best suit your needs."
A Treasury of Contemporary Houses

Walter F. Wagner Jr

"A TREASURY OF CONTEMPORARY HOUSES reflects the abiding interest of Mr. Wagner and Architectural Record in the achievements of important houses. The designs illustrated and discussed in this book include numerous variations in plan, form, and character. All provide new perspectives on the ways in which architecture can complement the personalities of today's homeowners."
The Architectural Record Book of Vacation Houses

Architectural Record

Book Jacket Synopsis:

"62 of today's most exciting vacation houses are presented in this new edition of America's leading idea book on leisure home design. Included are wooded hideaways, lakeside cabins, county cottages, meadow-framed farmhouses, studios by the sea, slopeside chalets, dune nests, and much more. Each house has appeared in Architectural Record, the country's leading architecture magazine, and 43 have been Record House Award winners between 1970 and 1976.

All the latest trends in vacation house design are represented , including the impact of greater ecological awareness, changing economic situations, and greater interest in recreational areas. For each house, exterior and interior photographs (both black/white and full color) are provided, along with site and floor plans and complete cost range data.

For both prospective owners and architects, this is an invaluable source of inspiration and practical information."
Places for People: Hotels, Motels, Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Community Recreation Facilities, Camps, Parks, Plazas, Playgrounds

Jeanne M. Davern

"A compendium of case studies showing successful solutions to problems faced by designers and developers in the construction of leisure facilities. Culled from the pages of Architectural Record." - Google Books
The World of Frank Lloyd Wright

Akihisa Masuda and Masami Tanigawa

In House Description:

[Japanese book containing both full color and black and white photos of Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural work.]
Global Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright - Pfeiffer Chapel, Florida Southern College Lakeland, Florida

Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and Yukio Futagawa

This edition of Global Architecture features photographs and renderings of Frank Lloyd Wright's Pfeiffer Chapel in Lakeland, Florida. Numerous photographs show exterior and interior spaces from many different angles as well as drawings. Text is in both English and Japanese.
Interiors 3rd Book of Offices

John Pile

"This definitive, practical sourcebook documents, in both pictures and text, the most recent and relevant developments in current office planning and design in America today. Any questions you may have about office landscaping and open planning are answered, and all types of office spaces - from reception areas through the general offices to the private office and the executive floor - are fully illustrated.

In the Introduction, John Pile, an authority on interior design, discusses the importance of office spaces as centers of communication and organization as well as the relationship of architectural form to interior space. He goes on to survey the history of office design from the conventional style of the forties to Bürolandschaft or office landscape solutions of the seventies, covering such topics as the effect of the computer and the client-designer relationship. Then, twelve recent major projects, showing a representative range of both conventional design and landscape planning, are presented in a case studies section. Such examples as the Weyerhaeuser Company in Tacoma, Washington, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Boston City Hall, and the Arco Chemical Company in Houston are critically examined to show successful solutions to actual design problems. Chapters on office furniture and fixtures as well as standards for such things as energy and safety requirements conclude this comprehensive evaluation of the state of the art of office design.

A reference for architects, designers, and planners, this book is equally useful for executives and managers concerned with providing suitable office facilities for their organizations. In fact, anyone concerned with the modern office environment will find this required reading."
The Architect as Developer

John Portman and Jonathan Barnett

Excerpt From Book Jacket:

"Has any architect-anywhere-made more of an imprint on the urban scene during the last ten years than John Portman of Atlanta? Starting with his revolutionary Atlanta Regency hotel, whose 23-story lobby attracted worldwide attentions, he has created new kinds of urban environments not only for hotels but in multi-million-dollar downtown developments for San Francisco, Detroit, Los Angeles, and his native Atlanta. Portman is not just an architect for these buildings; in many cases he is the real estate developer as well. His buildings are highly respected as architecture; at the same time he is able to beat the real estate developer at his own game. His projects succeed in the marketplace and have set new standards for hotels, office buildings, merchandise marts, and city center designs."
Great Houses for View Sites, Beach Sites, Sites in the Woods, Meadow Sites, Small Sites, Sloping Sites, Steep Sites, and Flat Sites

Walter F. Wagner

This collection of sixty-eight exceptional idea-filled houses was selected from the thousands of homes that have appeared in the pages of Architectural Record, the country's leading architectural magazine. It illustrates the important relationship of a house to its site, explains how and why houses must be related differently to different sites, and shows how this relationship results in better and more livable homes.

A rich source of design ideas for anyone interested in good contemporary houses, this volume was especially compiled to be a practical and helpful guide to the prospective home buyer, purchaser of a building site, or owner of an individually designed custom house.
The Modern Fireplace

Jacques Debaigts

"The numerators examples in this book have been selected to show on the one hand the different shapes of modern fireplaces, while providing for all those interested a wide international choice; and secondly to show successful examples of the integration of the fireplace into a modern interior. This book, lavish in illustration and full of ideas, will be an indispensable reference for all architects and for private house-owners, as well, who want to have a fireplace built or alter an existing one. 98 color illustrations. 69 illustrations in black and white heliogravure. 76 plans and 14 figures. "
Global Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright - Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City N.Y. 1943-59 Marin County Civic Center, California 1957-1970

Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and Yukio Futagawa

This edition of Global Architecture features photographs and renderings of Frank Lloyd Wright's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, NY as well as his Marin County Civic Center in California. Numerous photographs show exterior and interior spaces from many different angles as well as drawings. Text is in both English and Japanese.
Apartments, Townhouses & Condominiums

Elisabeth Kendall Thompson

"In an age when land is at a premium and multi-unit housing is on the increase, this valuable collection culled from the vast resources of Architectural Record fills a vital need by offering he best examples of apartments, townhouses, and condominiums. The 83 projects selected for this timely book show a variety of building types - from high- and low-rise apartment buildings to entire villages of attached single-family townhouses. Selected from all parts of the United States, these projects represent a treasury of stimulating ideas and solutions to problems for architects, landscape architects, planners, developers, and all who have a stake in multi-unit housing."
Studies and executed buildings (Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von)

Frank Lloyd Wright

"A facsimile of the treatise that secured Wright's reputation in Europe, this elegant volume includes plans and drawings of all his projects up to 1910. In the 'Prairie houses,' vaguely preColumbian forms, adaptations of Japan's light-paneled architecture and intricate wooden moldings are fused into the style Wright termed 'organic,' even though his buildings of this period seldom made direct references to nature. The monumental Larkin Building and Unity Temple, at once abstract and classical, were experiments in what he called a 'democratic' vernacular. In the introductory essay, Wright proclaims his contempt for the recent past and embraces the International Style. Europeans were entranced by his abstraction, yet it is his wayward individualism that shines through in the sketches. Printed on cream stock in sepia inks, the album is for connoisseurs and serious students."