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  Frank Lloyd Wright: America's Greatest Architect

  Herbert Jacobs

  A stormy genius, idolized by his devoted students and followers but misunderstood and often mistrusted by those too conventional to follow his swift imagination, Frank Lloyd Wright was the leading force in the development of modern architecture. Obliged again and again to fight against personal and professional adversities that would have discouraged or even finished a lesser man, he emerged - triumphant - into the most fruitful period of his life when he was in his eighties.

  in his objective study by a Wisconsin journalist who knew the famous architect personally and who followed his career for a quarter of a century, Frank Lloyd Wright emerges complete in his integrity. The vision and vitality, the gaiety, the indomitable will to design homes and public buildings for Americans in a new fashion that would truly and beautifully enlarge our own way of life, all these qualities that set him apart are caught in this remarkable portrait. Wright comes alive both as a vulnerable human being and as a man whose impress on modern architecture, her and abroad, will reach far into the future.

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  Contemporary Japanese Houses

  Kiyoshi Seike and Charles S. Terry

  "With the possible exception of woodblock prints, no phase of Japanese civilization has been so much admired or so frequently emulated as Japanese architecture, and particularly Japanese residential architecture. Though there have been periods in which Occidental writers and critics have been inclined to dismiss the traditional Japanese house as a flimsy creation of wood and paper, leading Western architects of the past six or seven decades have been almost unanimous in acclaiming its simplicity, its logical organization, its functionality, its openness, its flowing space, and its beautiful textures. The influence of the Japanese house has been especially strong in the United States, where it was a determining factor in the formation of such popular types as the bungalow and the ranch house, not to speak of the individual styles of such diverse architects as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Richard Neutra.

  Over the past hundred years or so, the Japanese house, for its part, has been buffeted by Western influences. Though it was rather quick to adopt certain practical features of Western houses - glass window panes, electric lighting, modern sanitary facilities, and so on - until the Second World War, it remained surprisingly conservative in over-all style. The reasons suggested by the authors of this book is that despite the rapid Westernization of Japan in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Japanese home life, centered about a well-entrenched family system, failed to changed radically.

  During the war and for several years afterward, Japanese architecture went to eclipse and when, in the early 1950's, Japan began to recover from her wounds, Japanese architects found themselves faced with the task of building for a society that had already changed much and was still changing rapidly. The family system was breaking down; the status of women was rising; the country was undergoing a rapid urbanization; there was a new emphasis on individual liberty and privacy. In the succeeding years, a second industrial revolution has changed the Japanese way of life perhaps even more than these social developments by causing a general rise in the living standard and by making available a wide variety of consumers' goods, including household equipment.

  All of these developments have meant a new challenge to Japanese architects, and the purpose of this book is to show how they have gone about meeting it on the residential front. The authors have selected seventeen recent houses that they regard as exemplary of contemporary trends in the house design and have furnished a discussion of each house. To the discussions have been added luxuriously detailed illustrations, many in color, together with floor plans and, when necessary, elevations or drawings of details.

  The book is aimed not merely at revealing architectural excellence, but at showing in graphic form how architects have met specific problems and situations that exist in Japan today. It will be valued not only by architects, who will find it rich with new ideas, but by house owners looking for ways to make their own houses more beautiful. It will also serve as documentary proof that for all the outward alterations, many of the architectural principles the world has long admired in Japanese houses are still alive today."

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  Architecture: Man in Possession of his Earth

  Iovanna Lloyd Wright and Frank Lloyd Wright

  "Frank Lloyd Wright is generally considered the greatest architect of the twentieth century – the greatest architect that America has ever produced....Now Doubleday & Company offers a profusely and handsomely illustrated book, Architecture: Man in Possession of His Earth, which was Frank Lloyd Wright's last testament to the art he did so much to perfect. In it he explains architecture in terms of its basic, common materials....As he introduces stone, brick, wood...Wright creates a vivid picture of the evolution of these materials, what they made possible for architecture, and how he used them....[I]t is a demonstration by example of what Frank Lloyd Wright believed."

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  Masters of World Architecture: Le Corbusier

  Francoise Choay

  "Over 80 pages of reproductions including photographs and drawings."

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  Masters of World Architecture: Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

  Arthur Drexler

  From the Back Cover: "LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE was born in Aachen, Germany in 1886. His father was a mason and owned a small stone-cutting shop where as a young boy Mies learned the elements of masonry construction. He received no formal architectural training, but was apprenticed as a draftsman and designer of classical stucco ornament in local architectural offices. Later he went to Berlin and from 1908 to 1911 he worked for Peter Behrens, opening his own architectural office in 1912. After the First World War, Mies, supporting avant-garde art movements and publications, emerged as a strongly original architect. Some of his most daring projects, the glass skyscrapers among them, date from this period in the early 1920's. Later as an official of the Deutscher Werkbund he directed the important Stuttgart Exposition of 1927, in which the most notable European architects participated. His German Pavilion for the Barcelona Exposition of 1929 would have assured him lasting fame if he had never built anything else. He became director of the Bauhaus in 1930 by closed it three years later because of the unfavorable cultural climate in Germany, the reason also why he departed in 1938 to become a permanent resident of the United States. Here he became head of the architectural department of the Illinois Institute of Technology and planned his first extensive project: a new campus for the Institute. Many of the buildings have now been completed. Also in Chicago he has built a spectacular series of glass-wall steel-frame apartment skyscrapers fronting Lake Michigan. The Farnsworth House of 1950, his first private-house commission in the United States, demonstrating his structural ideas on a domestic scale, has occasioned extensive discussion in architectural circles. His Seagram Building is one of the finest examples of a skyscraper in New York or anywhere else. Since his retirement from the Illinois Institute of Technology he has devoted full time to his private architectural practice."

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  Masters of World Architecture: Eric Mendelsohn

  Wolf Von Eckardt

  "Over 80 pages of reproductions including photographs, plans and drawings."

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  Masters of World Architecture: Walter Gropius

  James Marston Fitch

  "Over 80 pages of reproductions including photographs, plans and drawings."

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  Masters of World Architecture: Alvar Aalto

  Frederick Gutheim

  "Over 80 pages of reproductions including photographs, plans and drawings."

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  Masters of World Architecture: Pier Luigi Nervi

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  "Over 80 pages of reproductions including photographs, plans and drawings."

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  Masters of World Architecture: Richard Neutra

  Esther McCoy

  "Over 80 pages of reproductions including photographs, plans, and drawings."

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  Masters of World Architecture: Oscar Niemeyer

  Stamo Papadaki

  "Over 80 pages of reproductions including photographs, plans, and drawings."

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  The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright

  The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

  Book Excerpt:

  "The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the collection it houses are a memorial to my uncle, Solomon R. Guggenheim, industrialist, philanthropist and patron of the arts.

  More than sixteen years ago he commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design an original building for the display of the growing collection of contemporary art which he had bequeathed to the public. In creating the building this inspired American architect again demonstrated his genius. In composition, in beauty and in majesty, the building will long live among the architectural treasures of man.

  This book is about that building. In it are illuminating statements by a man whose architectural genius knew no bounds. He struggled for the right to create as he saw fit, and this struggle has become legendary."

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  Frank Lloyd Wright Writings and Buildings

  Frank Lloyd Wright, Edgar Kaufmann, and Ben Raeburn

  "FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: WRITINGS AND BUILDINGS presents through Wright's own words and works a survey of his achievement as a major figure of twentieth-century architecture. The text is complemented by more than 150 illustrations (a rich abundance of drawings, photographs, plans, and sketches) and the first complete list of Wright's executed buildings from 1893-1959, keyed to a map of the United States."

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  Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910: The First Golden Age

  Grant Carpenter Manson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock

  "The story--personal and professional--of one of the greatest architects who ever lived is here told by the man whom Frank Lloyd Wright once introduced as "Grant Manson, who knows more about me than I do." This volume takes the reader up to 1910, a turning point in Wright's life as an architect and as an individual. Wright's accomplishment by 1910 was considerable; he had already enjoyed what to many people would have been a full career. Most outstanding perhaps was his conception and evolution of the Prairie House, an expression of organic architecture that was the result of many factors: Wright's resourceful Welsh forebears, his Midwest background, his experience with Lyman Silsbee and Louis Sullivan, his interest in Japanese art, and especially his native genius. During the same period Wright also set many precedents for nonresidential architecture, including Unity Church and the Larkin Building. These buildings--residential and nonresidential--plus the unexecuted projects shown add up to a new understanding of Wright's mentality. Grant Carpenter Manson first met Mr. Wright in 1939 while preparing his Harvard doctoral thesis, but his influence reaches back to Mr. Manson's childhood. He fell in love with the Husser House at the age of six and has been faithful ever since."

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  Frank Lloyd Wright: The Living City

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  "Looking back over the world of living architecture created by Frank Lloyd Wright in the past sixty-five years, we now know how prophetic his vision is. Every year we see new evidences of his radiant influence bringing a humane spirit into architecture around the earth.

  Each of his buildings has risen into the future, prefiguring for us a truly democratic life in which every individual will one day live in pride of individuality. Why not soon - in fact, now? - asks Frank Lloyd Wright; and shows how it is indeed possible for us. Now.

  For THE LIVING CITY is another startling act of prophecy. This matter of immediate concern to us and to our children, the nature of the coming city, has been a matter of continuous concern - and inspired work - for the world's greatest architect for fifty years. And in this book he has crystallized that thought and embodied that unparalleled experience."

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  A Testament

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  "The world's greatest architect is here to be seen working at the height of his creative power, illuminating with wisdom and imaginative vitality the very issues of modern life which are fundamental to our existence, And he gives us at last his own story of a lifetime of experience, distilling the essence of his eventful life and his work in a book of unprecedented range and fascination."

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  An American Architecture

  Edgar Kauffmann and Frank Lloyd Wright

  "Frank Lloyd Wright is now universally regarded as one of history's great men - the man who has liberated architecture, the man whose work is changing the face of the earth.

  His building designs - for dwellings and skyscrapers, industrial plants and housing projects, hotels and theatres - have enriched the world beyond measure; hardly a structure is now built anywhere that does not in some way bear the mark of his genius. And "organic architecture," the phrase long used by Mr. Wright to characterize his work, has now become a familiar term throughout the world.

  However different each of his works is from any other, however unique in beauty and originality, they have all grown out of certain basic principles. Organic architecture - natural to the time and place for which it is designed, natural to the man for whom it is built - is in fact an architecture of basic principles.

  Precisely what these principles are; what each one means; their relation to one another and just how they have been expressed in the many hundreds of his buildings - these challenging elements of his work, articulated by Frank Lloyd Wright in over sixty years of creative activity, are only now beginning to be understood.

  Because it makes these principles clear at last, AN AMERICAN ARCHITECUTRE will be regarded as one of the most important books by the world's greatest architect. And because on page after page it effects, in an astonishing way, a true marriage of picture to text and text to picture, it is an irresistibly fascinating book.

  Ranging over a lifetime of building and writing, informal talks and lectures, every chapter is devoted to a major aspect of his work. As Mr. Wright reveals the principles that together make up the structure of organic architecture, each one is illuminated by an abundance of clarifying illustrations.

  It includes informal sketches of works from his early beginnings to the present day, original drawings never before published, plans of projects finished and not yet built, closeups of materials used, photographs of buildings both in actual construction and completed.

  An epoch-making talk on his revolutionary destruction of the box is interwoven with drawings to illustrate each point as he describes his first liberation of space to be lived in. Throughout the book, the reader virtually hears the artist thinking and witness him at work.

  Never has any book given us such insight, intimate and profound, into the work of the master builder, prophet of a great architecture as the basis of a great and enduring culture of the future."

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  Frank Lloyd Wright's Glass Designs

  Carla Lind

  Frank Lloyd Wright's Glass Designs explores the many facets of Wright's work with this "magical material" - from his world-renowned art glass designs to glass mosaics, prism glass, and innovations such as tubular glass and invisible joints in plate glass windows. For Wright, glass broke down the barrier between outside ad inside and allowed him to frame views of nature, his constant inspiration. It provided protection from the elements while it presented another means to integrate ornament within a building.

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  The Natural House

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Book Jacket Excerpt:

  "When Frank Lloyd Wright turns his attention to one of the most important personal problems now facing practically everyone in our society - it is a time for rejoicing.

  The world's greatest architect here meets the urgent problem of suitable shelter for The Family in a democracy, in a magnificent and - as was to be expected - challenging book. Here, presented at last in full detail, is the natural house.

  The moderate cost houses described in this book and profusely illustrated with 116 photographs, plans and drawings, are houses - of infinite variety for people of limited means - in which living has become for their owners a purposeful new adventure in freedom and dignity.

  Mr. Wright tells the story of the world famous 'Usonian' houses, so that we now see, in text and illustrations, how they have evolved from original conception to final execution.

  He has also written a step-by-step description of the 'Usonian Automatic,' explaining just how that remarkable house is built - a simplified method of construction so devised that the owners themselves can build it with great economy and beauty. For this purpose, there are, in addition to Mr. Wright's text, special photographs and drawings of the method and materials, showing clearly how the Usonian Automatic is built.

  For more than a half century Frank Lloyd Wright has been the prophet of a new idea in architecture. It is called 'organic architecture.' It has spread throughout the world. Its liberating influence now appears - or semblances of it appear - nearly every structure being built.

  During this period of incomparable achievement, there has been a profoundly mistaken notion that Mr. Wright has built only for the rich. This book is convincing evidence of the error of that notion...."

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  Frank Lloyd Wright: The Future of Architecture

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  "THE FUTURE OF ARCHITECTURE will be happily welcomed, by those familiar with the life and work of the greatest living architect, as one of the most important books of our time.

  To the growing number of readers and students throughout the world now eagerly becoming acquainted with Frank Lloyd Wright's vast achievement, this volume, containing his major statements on architecture during the past quarter century, will serve as an indispensable survey.

  it begins with the long, widely discussed "Conversation" (1953) in which Mr. Wright, at the height of his career, explains his aims and contributions in architecture. By gesture and example as he talks, he here brings home to us in the most graphic and exciting way the essence of his masterwork which has dominated the world of architecture in the twentieth century.

  This section, uniquely illustrated with his buildings and the gestures of his hands running parallel with the accompanying text, renders his concepts of an organic architecture vividly alive. Even for those who have had the experience of seeing or moving about in his buildings, Mr. Wright creative imagination becomes manifest in a meaningful new way.

  THE FUTURE OF ARCHITECTURE also brings together, for the first time within the covers of one volume, several rare works originally published in separate editions which have been unavailable and in intense demand for years: Modern Architecture - The Princeton Lectures, The Chicago Lectures, Some Aspects of The Past and Present of Architecture, and The Future of Architecture; all complete.

  And in a challenging document, invaluable to every student of creative building, Mr. Wright defines in 1953 the Language of Organic Architecture as he has employed it throughout a lifetime of work.

  With this definitive volume the reader get a new sense of architecture, not merely as one phase of our life concerned with shelter and comfort, but as basic, organic necessity for a true democracy.

  THE FUTURE OF ARCHITECTURE is illustrated throughout with photographs of Mr. Wright's epoch-making buildings."

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  Frank Lloyd Wright: 60 Years of Living Architecture

  Werner M. Moser

  "8.25 x 11.75 uncommon softcover book with 100 pages and approx. 150 illustrations, some in color and full-color fold-outs of Broadacre City and Fallingwater. Includes six essays by Wright and two by Moser. The cover alone is worth the price of admission. Beautifully printed in Switzerland."

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  In The Nature of Materials: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright 1887-1941

  Henry-Russell Hitchcock

  "This is the definitive study of Frank Lloyd Wright and his work, an eloquent summation of an outstanding career that spanned nearly seventy years of American architectural history.

  Writing with warmth and penetrating intelligence, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, America's leading architectural expert, explores Wright's distinctive approach to the design and construction of homes, civic centers, housing projects, country clubs, and office buildings—emphasizing throughout Wright's skillful use of materials to create harmony between structure and environment.

  Hitchcock covers each of the major phases in Wright's first fifty years as an architect: the apprenticeship with J.L. Selsbee; the movement toward maturity with 'Lieber Meister' Sullivan, and the links with Richardson, the "prairie" architecture of the early 1900s and the non-domestic work of the same period which exerted so great an influence upon the development of modern European architecture; the textile block housing and cantilevered skyscraper projects of the early ‘20s; the creative hiatus of the late ‘20s and early ‘30s; and the projects of the Depression years, interrupted in 1942 by World War II.

  More than 400 illustrations are presented in chronological order in a format Wright himself designed, revealing an endless assortment of shapes, materials and structural ornament that indicate the scope and focus of Wright's genius. Accompanying the photographs, plans, and perspectives is Hitchcock's perceptive commentary, linking each building to a particular phase in Wright's development and showing how in each case the architect forged the elements of materials, mass, space, and ornament into a powerful visual statement.

  Hitchcock also contributes a list of the architect's completed projects through 1941, and, in a new foreword specially prepared for this Da Capo edition, assesses Wright's major projects during the last two decades of his life."

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  Kindergarten Chats on Architecture, Education and Democracy

  Louis H. Sullivan and Claude F. Bragdon

  "Kindergarten Charts, little known to this generation but timely to all epochs, can truthfully be said to have been the work of a master far in advance of his time. These 'Chats,' based on truth and honesty, yet written with a vigorous, readable alternation of witty satire and sincere understanding, are so pertinent today that we as a student organization express a measure of the insight, courage and pioneering spirit which Sullivan taught, when we bring to light this work of an unappreciated genius."

  -SCARAB

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  Frank Lloyd Wright--American System-Built Homes in Milwaukee

  Shirley du Fresne McArthur

  "This manuscript represents the extended collection of historical materials gathered in preparation for a nomination to the National Register of Historic Places of the American System-Built Homes in Milwaukee. A study, first estimated to take only three or four months, extended as collateral research was undertaken to establish an historical background supportive of Frank Lloyd Wright's association with the homes including other Prairie School architecture introduced by the same working team in Milwaukee County. The nature of the relationship of Wright had been minimized in a number of writings over the past decades."

  - Shirley du Fresne McArthur