Three Books on Frank Lloyd Wright
In celebration of the architect's 150th birthday, RECORD reviews three new books on Frank Lloyd Wright's life and work:
- The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Iconoclastic Masterpiece, by Francesco Dal Co
- An Organic Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy, by Frank Lloyd Wright, with a new introduction by Andrew Saint
- Travels with Frank Lloyd Wright: The First Global Architect, by Gwyn Lloyd Jones
Scroll through the slideshow below to read a mini-review of each.
Three New Books on Frank Lloyd Wright
The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Iconoclastic Masterpiece, by Francesco Dal Co. Yale University Press, July 2017, 184 pages, $30.
In updating his book, published in Italy in 2004, on New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Francesco Dal Co offers an absorbing history and technical analysis behind the design of the landmark structure. Accounts of the 17-year process, from Wright’s receiving the commission to the building’s completion in 1959, offer insights into the architect and his clients—from the first director of the museum, the supportive and adventurous Hilla Rebay, to her successor, James Johnson Sweeney, who didn’t think Wright’s daring scheme was so hot for displaying art. (Many artists agreed, even avant-garde designer Frederick Kiesler, who liked spirals.) Robert Moses, a distant cousin of Wright (!) and political powerhouse, helped with city code approvals, while structural engineer Tomaso Trombetti came up with the solution for the cantilevering upward spiral of concrete ramps and galleries. Dal Co could have offered more about Kiesler’s spicy pro/con reaction to the Gugg, published in his journals, rather than the ponderings about culture by intellectual heavyweights Marcel Detienne, Walter Benjamin, and Hans Georg Gadamer that are included.
Three New Books on Frank Lloyd Wright
An Organic Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy, by Frank Lloyd Wright, with a new introduction by Andrew Saint. Lund Humphries, 108 pages, May 2017, $25.
The reprint of four lectures Wright gave in 1939 at the Royal Institute of British Architects explores his organic principles based on an “architecture of nature, for nature.” In a Q&A with the politely inquisitive audience, Wright dismisses Michelangelo and Renaissance architecture’s “grandomania.”
Three New Books on Frank Lloyd Wright
Travels with Frank Lloyd Wright: The First Global Architect, by Gwyn Lloyd Jones. Lund Humphries, 192 pages, April 2017, $59.95.
Gwyn Lloyd Jones, an architect living in London and Wales, has followed in the footsteps of Frank Lloyd Wright to Japan, Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, where he often lectured and sought commissions. The author looks up works influenced by the master, such as those by Willem Dudok, Robert Mallet-Stevens, and Carlo Scarpa, and others designed long after Wright’s death. The conversational style is fine but lacks a tight editorial hand.