Synopses & Reviews
One of the famed architect's earliest published works, the Wasmuth drawings capture Wright's first great experiments in organic design and thought. These 100 plates were reproduced from a rare 1910 first edition. The full-page illustrations depict plans for homes, banks, cottages, offices, temples, and Wright's own studio. Introduction and annotations by Wright.
Synopsis
Complete Wasmuth drawings, reproduced from a rare 1910 edition, feature Wright's early experiments in organic design. Includes 100 plates of public and private buildings from Oak Park period, plus Wright's Introduction and annotations.
Synopsis
"I would much rather build than write about building, but when Iam not building, I will write about building or the significance of those buildings Ihave already built." Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright built a body of works and drawings to illustrate and explain his work: collections of designs with commentary that temperamentally parallel that work: irascible, radical, powerful and dense, astonishing and simple in its clarity. One of his earliest published works illustrates the parallel, preserving thought and design ata prophetic moment, shortly before Wright's genius andfame captured two continents and many converts. The Wasmuth portfolio of drawings (named after the original German publisher) isreproduced here from an extremely rare first edition (1910).
Wright's polemical preface indicates the importance he attached to the drawings and their publication: ." . . the work illustrated in this volume, with the exceptionof the work of Louis Sullivan, is the first consistent protest in bricks and mortar against this pitiful waste academic, inorganic styles]. It is a serious attempt to formulate some industrial and aesthetic ideals that in a quiet, rational way will help to make a lovely thing of an American's home environment. . . ." "Home environment" for Wright was the Midwestern plain; these these drawings, perhaps his earliest experiments in organic design, partakeof the Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin prairie with their emphasis on the horizontal ("the line of domesticity") and the environmental motif: "A beautiful elm standing near gave the suggestion for the mass of the building," Wright says of the Winslow house in River Forest, Illinois, a dwelling he cites as the first embodiment of many of his ideas. Elegant full-page architectural drawings and plansshow Wright's atelier in Oak Park, Illinois, many homes, cottages, banks, a burial chapel, Unity Church temple, a concrete house designed for Ladies' Home Journal and numerous studies for buildings, treated as problems in design, that were never built.
The republication of this rare work gives access again to what has been called "the single most important collection of work published by Frank Lloyd Wright." Students of American architectural genius will find here the seeds of Wright's greatness.
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