Frank Lloyd Wright Architecture and Space

by Peter Blake

In this story," as Frank Lloyd Wright once said, "I am God." As the lawgiver of modern architecture, he had been compared to Moses. — This great pioneer, who was twenty years ahead of Europe, was perhaps the last of the true Americans. Taking his cues from Sullivan and the skyscrapers of the Chicago School, he introduced -- with the horizontal lines of his Prairie house -- a new domestic architecture for the wide lands. With his Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, which stood firm through the 1923 earthquake, and later with the unorthodox Johnson Wax building, he demonstrated an original genius for structure. In aesthetic terms few architects have known how to interlock spaces and masses with the kind of poetry he has built into the Kaufmann house, above its waterfall, and few have come much nearer to "continuous, plastic structure" than Wright did, when almost ninety, with the new Guggenheim Museum. Like the companion Pelican books on Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, this study of a bold, flamboyant, but tragic figure is taken from Peter Blake's "The Master Builders," which was "strongly recommended...for both lay and professional consumption" by the "Architects' Journal."

Genres: Architecture, Biography

Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

Reviews

[Mark H · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although written by the then editor of Architectural Review, this is a fairly easy read, with short chapters. An overview of Wright’s philosophies of design, his best known projects, his influential designs (even though they weren’t built) and his long turbulent life and varying fortunes. Too lightly illustrated, but an excellent, concise biography.