Customer Reviews

The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright

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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.

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!!!!

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.