Frank Lloyd Wright

This monograph explores the underlying themes and principles of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture. It examines the consistent and systematic qualities underlying all of Wright's designs. The text's chronological presentation, which emphasizes key designs and those related to them thematically, is paralleled by an examination of the development of three primary principles, simultaneously active in Wright's work, and singled out by him as being of fundamental importance in his understanding of architecture. First, Wright's development of concepts and methods for making architectural space; how these ideas derived from his designs for interior spaces and their experience; and how in Wright's architecture the occupant's movement (position) was critical to the experience of the spatial order (composition). Secondly, Wright's development of concepts and methods for ordering space through the manner of its construction; how this order determined his search for "the nature of materials" and structures. The author then considers the third aspect of Wright's designs: the architect's development of concepts and methods for establishing the relationship between his architecture and the landscape; and how he designed buildings where landscape, interior space and construction materials are woven together to become the setting for the repeated rituals of daily life.

Of all the books that have appeared in the last 10 years on Frank Lloyd Wright and his architecture, this is the one that will last. It is in all ways comprehensive: its text is as organized and complete as a set of blueprints; its striking pictures of projects as small as the modest Usonian houses or as grand as the Guggenheim Museum are arranged in order by the visual information they reveal about each project; and even its copyediting is noticeably coherent, with dates just where one expects such details to be, in the first picture captions for each project. The book as a whole is so carefully conceived that, reading it, one knows exactly where to look for any particular bit of history. And while, for casual readers, the essays may offer too much to digest at first, Robert McCarter's prose is agile and passionate. "Wright understood buildings to be the background or framework for human existence," he writes. "Architecture gave dignity to daily life." --Margaret Moorman