Built on a bluff near Racine, Wisconsin in 1906, the Thomas P. Hardy House is one of architect Frank Lloyd Wright's most admired residential buildings. In this volume, photojournalist Hertzberg combines text and pictures in a tour of this unusual home, which has come to be regarded as an icon of modern design. Hertzberg is also the author of Wright
Racine, Wisconsin, which celebrates its role as invention city, welcomed the architectural innovations of Frank Lloyd Wright and is now the site of many examples of Wright's designs of private homes and public structures. Hertzberg, photography director at the Racine Journal Times, has created a history of Wright's work in Racine using photograph
Inventing Kindergarten reconstructs the origins of the most successful system ever devised for teaching young children about art, design, mathematics, and natural history.
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.
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.
Marion Mahony Griffin (1871–1961) was an American architect and artist, one of the first licensed female architects in the world, designer for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Chicago studio, and an original member of the Prairie School of architecture. Largely heralded for her exquisite presentation drawings for both Wright and her husband, Walter Burley Griffin, Mahony was an adventurous designer in her own right, whose independent and highly original work attracted attention at a moment when architectural drawing and graphic illustration were becoming integral to the design process. This book examines new research into Mahony’s life and paints a vivid portrait of a woman’s place among the lives and productions of some of our most noted American architects. The essays included take us on an ambitious journey from Mahony’s origins in the Chicago suburbs, through her years as Wright’s right-hand woman and her bohemian life with her husband in Australia—whose new capital city, Canberra, she helped to plan—up until her golden years in the middle of the twentieth century. Filled with richly detailed analyses of Mahony’s works and including and populated by an international cast of characters, Marion Mahony Reconsidered greatly expands our knowledge of this talented, complex, and enigmatic modern architect.
Set in the post-Napoleonic years of the 1820s, "Standish" is a tale of two menNone man discovering his sexuality and the other struggling to overcome his traumatic past. Painting a picture of homosexuality in Georgian England, this is a love story of how the decisions of two men affect their journey through Europe and through life.
The imagined histories of twenty-five architectural drawings and models, told through reminiscences, stories, conversations, letters, and monologues. Even when an architectural drawing does not show any human figures, we can imagine many different characters just off the page: architects, artists, onlookers, clients, builders, developers, philanthropists—working, observing, admiring, arguing. In Stories from Architecture, Philippa Lewis captures some of these personalities through reminiscences, anecdotes, conversations, letters, and monologues that collectively offer the imagined histories of twenty-five architectural drawings. Some of these untold stories are factual, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s correspondence with a Wisconsin librarian regarding her $5,000 dream home, or letters written by the English architect John Nash to his irascible aristocratic client. Others recount a fictional, if credible, scenario by placing these drawings—and with them their characters—into their immediate social context. For instance, the dilemmas facing a Regency couple who are considering a move to a suburban villa; a request from the office of Richard Neutra for an assistant to measure Josef von Sternberg’s Rolls-Royce so that the director’s beloved vehicle might fit into the garage being designed by his architect; a teenager dreaming of a life away from parental supervision by gazing at a gadget-filled bachelor pad in Playboy magazine; even a policeman recording the ground plans of the house of a murder scene. The drawings, reproduced in color, are all sourced from the Drawing Matter collection in Somerset, UK, and are fascinating objects in themselves; but Lewis shifts our attention beyond the image to other possible histories that linger, invisible, beyond the page, and in the process animates not just a series of archival documents but the writing of architectural history.
Modern Schools: A Century of Design for Education is a comprehensive survey of modern K-12 schools from Frank Lloyd Wright to Morphosis an in-depth design study that explores the fundamental relationship between architecture, education, and the design of contemporary learning environments. Its focus is on the underlying design themes and characteristic features that support and enhance basic aspects of learning and, in the process, create an architectural expression that is both meaningful and lasting. The breadth of its scope includes influences of contemporary educational ideas and practices, related design concepts and strategies, and most importantly, the resulting impact of both on real environments for learning. This remarkable survey and project study the first of its kind is an essential and important sourcebook for architects, school planners, educators, and anyone else interested in contemporary school design. The body of work presented, which is international in scope, underscores the unique architectural potential of this important project type, and highlights design themes that remain fundamentally relevant for architects and designers today. Presentation material includes more than 900 contemporary and historical photographs, mostly in color, and more than 200 detailed architectural plans drawings of schools by many of the outstanding design architects of the modern era. Modern Schools: A Century of Design for Education features the work of more than 60 architects worldwide, including twentieth century masters Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, and Eliel and Eero Saarinen, as well as contemporaries such as Morphosis, Coop Himmel(b)lau, Behnisch & Partners, and Patkau Architects, among many others.