Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Neil Levine's study of the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, beginning with his work in Oak Park in the late 1880s and culminating in the construction of the Guggenheim museum in New York and the Marin County Civic Center in the 1950s, if the first comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the architect's entire career since the opening of the Wright Archives over a decade ago. The most celebrated and prolific of modern architects, Wright built more than four hundred buildings and designed at least twice as many more. The characteristic features of his work--the open plan, dynamic space, fragmented volumes, natural materials, and integral structure--established the basic way that we think about modern architecture. For a general audience, this engaging book provides an introduction to Wright's remarkable accomplishments, as seen against the background of his eventful and often tragic life. For the architect or the architectural historian, it will be an important source of new insights into the development of Wright's whole body of work. It integrates biographical and historical material in a chronologically ordered framework that makes sense of his enormously varied career, and it provides over four hundred illustrations running parallel to the text.


Levine conveys the meanings of the continuities and changes that he sees I Wright's architecture and thought by focusing successive chapters on his most significant buildings, such as the Winslow House, Taliesin, Hollyhock House, Fallingwater, Tailsen west, and the Guggenheim Museum. A new understanding of the representational imagery and narrative structure of Wright's work, along with a much-needed reconsideration of its historical and contextual underpinnings, gives this study a unique place in the writings on Wright. In contrast to the emphasis a previous generation of critics and historians placed on Wright's earlier buildings, this book offers a broader perspective that sees Wright's later work as the culmination of his earlier efforts and the basis for a new understanding of the centrality of his career to the evolution of modern architecture as a whole.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Ch. I Beginnings of the Prairie House (p. 1)
• Ch. II Abstraction and Analysis in the Architecture of the Oak Park Years (p. 23)
• Ch. III Voluntary Exile in Fiesole (p. 59)
• Ch. IV The Story of Taliesin (p. 75)
• Ch. V Building against Nature on the Pacific Rim (p. 113)
• Ch. VI From Los Angeles to Lake Tahoe and Death Valley (p. 149)
• Ch. VII Writing An Autobiography, Reading the Arizona Desert (p. 191)
• Ch. VIII The Temporal Dimension of Fallingwater (p. 217)
• Ch. IX The Traces of Prehistory at Taliesin West (p. 255)
• Ch. X The Guggenheim Museum's Logic of Inversion (p. 299)
• Ch. XI Signs of Identity in an Increasingly One-Dimensional World (p. 365)
• Conclusion: Wright and His/story (p. 419)
• Notes (p. 435)
• Bibliographical Note (p. 505)
• List of Illustrations (p. 507)
• Index (p. 515)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This book is a monumental project aimed at describing, explaining, and evaluating Frank Lloyd Wright's life and work. Wright was both an architect and writer, and Levine (fine arts, Harvard Univ.) has synthesized both aspects in this historical analysis. Levine explains Wright's beliefs concerning the relationships among humans, architecture, and nature and how events in Wright's personal life changed those beliefs as the decades passed. The emphasis is definitely architectural, but there is ample information about Wright's personal life, his literary work, and reactions from critics to make this book qualify as a biography. The author goes through painstaking descriptions of nearly all of Wright's major works, and one wishes only that there were more photographs to illustrate the text. This book, rather than any extant Wright biography, is the source for those who want to know about the immensity and worth of the accomplishments of Frank Lloyd Wright. Recommended for public and academic libraries.‘Glenn Masuchika, Chaminade Univ. Lib., Honolulu (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

This first full-length, scholarly study of the life and work of America's (and probably the world's) greatest architect is a major publication, a benchmark study not only of Wright's career but of architectural history as well. It has been written over the past 20 years as a magnum opus by the Gleason Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard University, one of the most highly regarded architectural historians of our day. The bibliography on Wright is enormous but contains only one other full-length study, William Allin Storrer's Frank Lloyd Wright Companion (CH, May'94), a catalogue raisonne of Wright's built work, which does not address his importance as an artist. The standard study of Wright, Henry-Russell Hitchcock's In the Nature of Materials (1942), was published too early to consider Wright's important, late work of the 1940s and 1950s. Arthur Drexler, former curator of architecture at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, used to say that if one put all of the works of Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier on one side of a scale, Wright's would outweigh them in both quantity and quality. What is most rewarding and refreshing in this book is the fact that Levine has approached his subject matter relatively free of the historicist determinism that has affected most 20th-century architectural writing. Thus, he does not augment or diminish Wright's reputation as part of any tendentious ideological agenda such as modernism, nationalism, or conservatism. General; upper-division undergraduate; graduate; professional. P. Kaufman Boston Architectural Center

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Neil Levine teaches the history of modern architecture at Harvard University, where he is the Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Fine Arts