Yesterday I mentioned Joseph Siry’s new book on the Beth Sholom Synagogue. Wesleyan University has posted a brief interview with Dr. Siry on his book and his work on Wright.
Jan 242012
Jan 232012
News of another single-site book: Beth Sholom Synagogue: Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Religious Architecture by Joseph M. Siry.
It’s both hefty (736 pages) and expensive ($65), but , according to this review in The Jewish Daily Forward, comprehensive (mostly, the review points out that Wright’s possible anti-Semitism is ignored) and carefully builds up the context for one of Wright’s last commissions:
Following a brief introduction, Siry spends the first half of his book laying out the larger biographical and architectural contexts for Wright’s design. He explains how the architect’s Unitarian religious background led him to develop a respectful attitude toward Judaism. He discusses how Wright’s experience working at the Chicago firm of Adler Sullivan exposed him to innovative synagogue designs at the turn of the century, most notably the comparatively modern Kehilath Anshe Ma’ariv, which opened in 1891.
And he shows how the architect’s designs for a series of Christian churches and chapels between the late 1920s and early ’40s helped Wright develop his own unique solution to the central architectural question of how to make a modern construction that would signify a denominational ideal.
The author, Joseph Siry, is an architectural historian and professor at Wesleyan University. He’s previously written books on Unity Temple, the Auditorium Building and the Carson, Pirie Scott Building.
Mark Hertzberg’s site has a review of a new book, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Walter V. Davidson House: An Examination of a Buffalo Home and its Cousins from Coast to Coast (available from Graycliff directly). The author, Patrick Mahoney, is an architect and the founding member of the Graycliff Conservancy, the organization that first saved and then restored Darwin Martin’s Wright-designed Summer estate on Lake Erie.
I haven’t yet seen the book, but I’d trust Mark’s review; as an author and photographer, Mark knows the potential of a Wright book as well as anyone and as a professional journalist, he has trained eye for the strengths and weaknesses of non-fiction work.
I’ve said before, the best category of books on Wright is the site-specific book. His career is too long and varied to easily characterize from the whole; his talents and originality are best seen in the particular, not the aggregate. (and Hertzberg knows a good site-specific book when he sees one — he’s written a few himself).
Dec 082011
The Freeman house, owned today by the University of Southern California, was designed by Wright in 1924 in a dramatic (and problematic) location in the Hollywood Hills. The original clients lived in the house until their deaths in the 1980s.
This book is a case study on the preservation of an important work of modern architecture. The story of the Freeman House, and of the attempt to save it, entails almost all of the provocative issues that make historic preservation as a field so fascinating, technologically and theoretically complex, and politically charged.
Saving Wright chronicles the ongoing struggle to save Wright’s Freeman House in the Hollywood Hills, the setting for fascinating people and events but deeply flawed from the time it was built ninety-five years ago. The Freeman House was an experiment born out of Frank Lloyd Wright’s polemical vision of a new kind of architecture for the middle class, for modern America, and, in particular, for the Los Angeles foothills. Its design and construction were difficult, thus, along with many poor decisions, planting within a beautiful work of architecture the seeds of its own destruction.
Sep 012011
Frank Lloyd Wright Designs: The Sketches, Plans and Drawings will be released in October.
ArtInfo has a small slideshow of images from the book.
Written by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and presented by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation:
The first major presentation in decades of the visionary drawings of the artist-architect and master designer. Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect of vast and unprecedented vision, whose work is not only still admired by the critics and carefully studied by historians but is also widely beloved. Comfortable spaces, humanly scaled, with extraordinary attention to detail-as seen in a range of architectural forms-are at the center of Wright’s enduring appeal. This vision and attention is nowhere more evident than in the drawings. It has been said that had Wright left us only drawings, and not his buildings as well, he would still be celebrated for his brilliant artistry, and this is borne out here. Even more significant, and shown here as never before, are the magical first moments of invention and inspiration-Wright’s earliest sketches, some never before published-which offer unique insight into the mind of the master architect. Frank Lloyd Wright Designs is the most important and comprehensive book to be published on the drawings, designs, conceptual sketches, elevations, and plans of Wright, with particular emphasis on the development of certain important projects. It includes the best-known and beloved projects-like Fallingwater, The Coonley House, Midway Gardens, the Guggenheim, the Imperial Hotel-as well as a range of intriguing, unfamiliar, and previously unpublished drawings by Wright.
Apr 102011
Blair Kamin reported this week that the Ryerson & Burnham Library at the Art Institute of Chicago has added more than 5,000 images from the magazine Inland Architect to its on-line resources. Inland Architect was an important magazine published in Chicago from the late 19th Century and it charted the development of architecture not just in Chicago, but across the midwest.
The complete collection from the Inland Architect can be seen here.
The image collection can be easily browsed, with filters for architects, location and specific collection (for example, here’s the Frank Lloyd Wright search).
Aside from the new addition of the Inland Architect, there is a tremendous amount of fascinating material that has long been available on-line from the libraries of the Art Institute. Here’s a more specific search for Wright’s work in River Forest. Also on-line is the extraordinarily rare Marion Mahony Griffin’s _The Magic of America (read this from Lynn Becker for why this is a big deal) and so is “Without Bounds or Limits: An Online Exhibition of the Plan of Chicago”.
The site rewards aimless poking around (try searching for “Columbian Exhibition”); you could easily loose an entire afternoon on the site.
Mar 252011
Newly published is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin: Illustrated by Vintage Postcards, by architect Randolph Henning. The book covers the earlier Taliesins, the ones lost decades ago to fire and Wright’s tinkering. Most of the postcards come from the author’s personal collection, so most of the images have never been published before.
Mark Hertzberg, on his site, Wright in Racine, has a review of the book. Ron McCrea, who has his own book on Taliesin coming out later this year, also reviews the book here.
Some of Henning’s collection will be part the exhibit of postcards at Taliesin running from April 28 through May 29. This exhibit includes historic postcards of 66 Wright buildings. Also beginning April 28 is a Centennial exhibit highlighting the history and development of Taliesin. Both events are part of the slate of special events commemorating Taliesin’s 100th year .
PrairieMod Reviews Two Books
Books, Chicago, Louis Sullivan
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Mar 072011
PrairieMod has reviews of two new books, both from Pomegranate.
One is a single-site book, Building the Pauson House: The Letters of Frank Lloyd Wright and Rose Pauson, of particular interest since the Pauson house was lost to fire nearly seventy years ago. Other other book is the newest by Patrick F. Cannon and James Caufield (the authors of Hometown Architect , Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple and Prairie Metropolis ), Louis Sullivan: Creating a New American Architecture.
With a great selection of images, the PrairieMod post gives a good feel for the content of each book.
The Atlantic reviews the Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan. Applaud the exposure it gives the book, but skip the review (it’s superficial, contains a back-handed smack at both Sullivan and Wright, and concludes with some uninformed happytalk) but do go to the slideshow of images from the book — an opportunity to see Nickel’s photos should never be missed, and these are particularly well chosen.
Better, though only slightly relevant to Wright and Sullivan, is a related article “How Skyscrapers Can Save the City”. Chicago get short shrift in the article — but since The Atlantic is an East Coast magazine, clearly that’s because they’re still pissed that Daniel Burnham designed their best skyscraper.
Feb 112011
Metropolis magazine has a remembrance of Edgar Tafel , written by Debra Pickrel, former board member of the The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and author of Frank Lloyd Wright in New York. A fellow New Yorker, she knew Tafel well and her piece is full of warm, personal memories of Wright’s extraordinary apprentice.
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