To coincide with the 50th anniversary of the completion of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and with Wright’s death in 1959, publishers are releasing books that celebrate Wright’s genius and legacy.
The companion book to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibit currently showing, Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward (Rizzoli New York, $75) catalogs the exhibition’s displays, which includes 64 of Wright’s projects, more than 200 of his drawings, and newly commissioned models and digital animations. Several Wright scholars have contributed essays illuminating the architect’s theories and his continuing relevance to contemporary design. Contributors include: Richard Cleary, professor and Page Southerland Page Fellow in Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture; Neil Levine, Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University; Mina Marefat, architect, architectural historian, urban designer, and principal of Design Research, Washington, D.C.; Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, director, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, Taliesin West; Joseph M. Siry, professor of art history at Wesleyan University; and Margo Stipe, curator and registrar of collections, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, Taliesin West.
Frank Lloyd Wright: American Master (Rizzoli New York, $30) features more than 350 new photographs of Wright’s work by Alan Weintraub, with text by architecture historian, preservation consultant, and author Kathryn Smith. Through Weintraub’s photos and Smith’s words, the book explores more than 100 of Wright’s projects from his early years through the end of his life.
In Frank Lloyd Wright: The Heroic Years—1920-1932 (Rizzoli New York, $60) author Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives and a Taliesin Fellow, reveals the many difficulties Wright faced in his personal and professional life between 1920 and 1932 and the ways in which he turned adversity into inspiration for some of his most brilliant and visionary work. The book features many rare or previously unseen photos and little-known drawings from this period, as well as material from Olgivanna Lloyd Wright’s unpublished biography and several letters by Wright himself.
The third in a three-volume monograph featuring all of Wright’s designs, Frank Lloyd Wright: Complete Works, Vol. 3 (Taschen, $200), written by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and edited by museum and exhibit designer Peter Gössel, documents Wright’s work in the period beginning after World War II. This volume surveys the architect’s organic “living architecture” and his concepts for the use of solar energy and curving, open spaces. Featured projects include the Guggenheim Museum, a high-rise tower in Bartlesville, Okla., the Beth Sholom Synagogue in Elkins Park, Pa., and many complex houses in which Wright explored alternative floor plans based on hexagons and intersecting angles.
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