Frank Lloyd Wright: Letters to Architects

More than any others, the letters Frank Lloyd Wright wrote to architects speak from the heart. They reveal, from the inside out, what it means to be a genius struggling to reach out and touch his fellows. They proclaim, defend, and exalt his primary passion, Organic Architecture, and in the process reveal his very self. As might be expected his is a many-sided self. The correspondence with Louis H. Sullivan delineates the student-become-master, the master-become-admirer, the greatest American architect succeeding the greatest American architect. (A treasured find, the poignant Frank Lloyd Wright-Louis H. Sullivan correspondence, spanning the final five years of Sullivan\u27s life, has never before been available anywhere.) The letters to Oud, Mies, Saarinen, Raymond Hood, George Howe, Philip Johnson and the rest present a kaleidoscope of moods, witty, pliant, devastating, shifting with shifting circumstances, but at core always constant in their defense of the Organic Architecture that Frank Lloyd Wright believed in with all his heart. Equally various, but with hard-edged practical overtones, are the bread-and-butter letters to colleagues handling his mammoth one-man exhibition, 60 YEARS OF LIVING ARCHITECTURE. The letters to critics Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Lewis Mumford speak in a different voice, their accents broader so as to address the architectural profession as a whole. (The Frank Lloyd Wright-Howard Myers correspondence is different in another sense: it is simply beautiful!) Then at last triumph, even in the stronghold of the A.I.A., but always laced with caution, and thoughtfulness, and echoes of the struggle lasting over six long decades. Finally, playing across the total canvas, there are intimate asides, private talks, and public addresses that add special depth and color to the vivid self-portrait already painted by the letters. Like the buildings he shook from his sleeves in endless profusion, LETTERS TO ARCHITECTS is a virtually inexhaustible fund of riches, for the most gifted architect of our century had a mind, soul, and eloquence in perfect keeping with his creative genius.https://nsuworks.nova.edu/nsudigital_flwbooks/1130/thumbnail.jp