The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright [Hardcover]

Neil Levine (Author), Frank Lloyd Wright (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1996

This study of the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, beginning with his work in Oak Park in the late 1880s and culminating in the construction of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Marin County Civic Centre in the 1950s, is an analysis of the architect's entire career since the opening of the Wright Archives over a decade ago. Wright built more than 400 buildings and designed at least twice as many more. The characteristic features of his work - the open plan, dynamic space, fragmented volumes, natural materials, and integral structure-established the basic way that we think about modern architecture. For a general audience, this book provides an introduction to Wright's remarkable accomplishments, as seen against the background of his eventful and often tragic life. For the architect or the architectural historian, it should be a source of new insights into the development of Wright's whole body of work. It integrates biographical and historical material in a chronologically ordered framework that makes sense of his enormously varied career, and it provides over four hundred illustrations running parallel to the text. Levine conveys the meanings of the continuities and changes that he sees in Wright's architecture and thought by focusing successive chapters on his most significant buildings, such as the Winslow House, Taliesin, Hollyhock House, Fallingwater, Taliesin West, and the Guggenheim Museum. A new understanding of the representational imagery and narrative structure of Wright's work, along with a reconsideration of its historical and contextual underpinnings, gives this study a place in the writings on Wright. In contrast to the emphasis a previous generation of critics and historians placed on Wright's earlier buildings, this book offers a broader perspective that sees Wright's later work as the culmination of his earlier efforts and the basis for a new understanding of the centrality of his career to the evolution of modem architecture as a whole.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This book is a monumental project aimed at describing, explaining, and evaluating Frank Lloyd Wright's life and work. Wright was both an architect and writer, and Levine (fine arts, Harvard Univ.) has synthesized both aspects in this historical analysis. Levine explains Wright's beliefs concerning the relationships among humans, architecture, and nature and how events in Wright's personal life changed those beliefs as the decades passed. The emphasis is definitely architectural, but there is ample information about Wright's personal life, his literary work, and reactions from critics to make this book qualify as a biography. The author goes through painstaking descriptions of nearly all of Wright's major works, and one wishes only that there were more photographs to illustrate the text. This book, rather than any extant Wright biography, is the source for those who want to know about the immensity and worth of the accomplishments of Frank Lloyd Wright. Recommended for public and academic libraries.?Glenn Masuchika, Chaminade Univ. Lib., Honolulu
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Scrupulously researched, elegantly written (with a refreshing lack of jargon), beautifully illustrated and designed . . . the book is a feast for eye and mind, challenging assumptions and deepening understanding on almost every page. . . . Wright's ability to translate the poetic essence of a place into form was unrivaled, and no one has explored it with more insight than Levine. -- The Architects' Journal

A major publication, a benchmark study not only of Wright's career but of architectural history as well. . . . A magnum opus by one of the most highly regarded architectural historians of our day. -- Choice

He [Wright] created beauty, a serene beauty of space--new, undemocratic and unapologetic--a beauty springing from the deepest resonance of man and nature. The strength of Levine's book is that he explains exactly how and why he did it, with a wealth of illustration. -- Joe Berridge, Toronto Globe & Mail

A monumental project. . . This book, rather than any extant Wright biography, is the source for those who want to know about the immensity and worth of the accomplishments of Frank Lloyd Wright. -- Library Journal

Wright's personal history was extraordinary by any standards, and it is the great strength of Neil Levine's book that he manages to correlate the developments in Wright's architecture with the events in his life, without being sentimental or over-reverent. -- Andrew Ballantyne, The Times Literary Supplement --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr; 1ST edition (March 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691033714
• ISBN-13: 978-0691033716
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 9.7 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,496,873 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The world's greatest living architect (his own words), April 18, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Hardcover)

This splendidly illustrated book is written by an expert about the fascinating architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. It is in a way a well-digested synthesis of the work of a generation of scholars studying on Wright during the past twenty years. The table of contents ( as above) gives a good idea of the importance of this book. Wright remains the most popular and most celebrated architect of this century. The man who created Fallingwater, was also a humorist. By the 1950s, when Wright was in his eighties, his preference for "honest arrogance" over what he called "hypocritical humility" had reached legendary proportions. A story in LOOK magazine in 1957, two years before he died, reported that he "agreed on the witness stand that he was the world's greatest living architect." When his wife protested, saying, "Frank, you should be more modest," Wright replied: " You forget, Olgivanna, I was under oath." One of the challenges that makes the study of Wright so fascinating and yet so problematic is the sheer span of time involved. His career started well before the turn of the century and ended in 1959, just prior the election of John F. Kennedy. Nature was Wright's constant preoccupation and the way he abstracted and represented it in his architecture will be the underlying theme of this book. Wright always argued that he would be the Dante of the twentieth century who would return architecture to its place of prominence in the hierarchy of arts and restore its capacity to move souls and influence minds. This book will move your soul and influence your mind, and I strongly recommend its acquisition. Jan A. Mortelmans.

23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars REALLY BAD PICTURED !!!, March 11, 1999

By 

J. Moura (Portugal) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Hardcover)

This book is a very good way to show who was Frank lloyd Wright because Neil Levine did it very well. But this book has really bad pictures, white and black they are insuficiant in quality and quantity. Because of this, this book in my opinion is too expensive for reality!!!!

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Complete, Refreshing, and thought provoking., September 28, 1998

By 

Bill Willers ([e-mail]) (Sonoma, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Paperback)

Neil Levine has captured Wright's complex creative life in a scholarly and truely thought provoking study. For anyone intrested in more than the typical cursory look at Wright, this book provides a compelling look inside the creative process underlying Wright's architecture and life. Levine takes the connecting architectural threads of Wright's work and weaves them into this complete tapistry of Wright's work and life.