The first critical examination of the work of New York architect Leopold Eidlitz, America's first Jewish architect, founding member of the American Institute of Architects, and the first American to define a modern organic architecture, this book reveals his formidable influence.
For Eidlitz, born in Prague and trained in Prague and Vienna, the organic metaphor provided a means of rationally approaching design according to natural law, producing modern buildings that expressed the true democratic spirit of the age. In buildings like the New York State Capitol at Albany, the Tweed Courthouse and Temple Emanu-El in New York, and P. T. Barnum's mansion Iranistan, Eidlitz created a fusion of structure and ornament that defied the Gilded Age's aesthetic conventions. Combining German romanticism and American transcendentalism with a reform spirit inspired by the nineteenth-century Jewish reform movement, Eidlitz in his prolific writing sowed the seeds of modern American architectural theory, focusing on buildings as organisms that could evolve.
150 b/w photos, 8 color photos
