An American Architecture

Frank Lloyd Wright is now universally regarded as one of history\u27s great men - the man who has liberated architecture, the man whose work is changing the face of the earth. His building designs - for dwellings and skyscrapers, industrial plants and housing projects, hotels and theatres - have enriched the world beyond measure; hardly a structure is now built anywhere that does not in some way bear the mark of his genius. And organic architecture, the phrase long used by Mr. Wright to characterize his work, has now become a familiar term throughout the world. However different each of his works is from any other, however unique in beauty and originality, they have all grown out of certain basic principles. Organic architecture - natural to the time and place for which it is designed, natural to the man for whom it is built - is in fact an architecture of basic principles. Precisely what these principles are; what each one means; their relation to one another and just how they have been expressed in the many hundreds of his buildings - these challenging elements of his work, articulated by Frank Lloyd Wright in over sixty years of creative activity, are only now beginning to be understood. Because it makes these principles clear at last, AN AMERICAN ARCHITECUTRE will be regarded as one of the most important books by the world\u27s greatest architect. And because on page after page it effects, in an astonishing way, a true marriage of picture to text and text to picture, it is an irresistibly fascinating book. Ranging over a lifetime of building and writing, informal talks and lectures, every chapter is devoted to a major aspect of his work. As Mr. Wright reveals the principles that together make up the structure of organic architecture, each one is illuminated by an abundance of clarifying illustrations. It includes informal sketches of works from his early beginnings to the present day, original drawings never before published, plans of projects finished and not yet built, closeups of materials used, photographs of buildings both in actual construction and completed. An epoch-making talk on his revolutionary destruction of the box is interwoven with drawings to illustrate each point as he describes his first liberation of space to be lived in. Throughout the book, the reader virtually hears the artist thinking and witness him at work. Never has any book given us such insight, intimate and profound, into the work of the master builder, prophet of a great architecture as the basis of a great and enduring culture of the future.https://nsuworks.nova.edu/nsudigital_flwbooks/1035/thumbnail.jp