Frank Lloyd Wright, Kiley, Le Corbusier & Olmsted

Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography

The widely admired biographer of Bernard Berenson and of Kenneth Clark gives us now a complete and complex portrait of an American titan, Frank Lloyd Wright. Meryle Secrest shows us Frank Lloyd Wright in full scale - the brilliant, outrageous, fascinating man; the giant who changed modern architecture; the standard-bearer for the new, quintessentially American vision; the artist who never, during a seventy-year career, abandoned his principles of design; the radical, the Bohemian - the visionary who was one of the central figures of twentieth-century American culture, society and politics. We see Frank Lloyd Wright's Midwestern boyhood - the son of a Harvard-educated preacher/musician/circuit rider, his seven-year apprenticeship with the great Louis Sullivan, his three marriages - the first at twenty-one to a Chicago society woman and dutiful wife; the second to a woman slightly mad; the third to a fiercely independent woman: an acolyte of Gurdjieff, a dancer, a woman who was Wright's counterpart and peer.
We see Wright's evolution from impeccably dressed young architect, living in the right suburb, cultivating rich clients, to true bohemian living by his own rules. Meryle Secrest follows the course of Wright's struggle against all that was middlebrow in America - his opposition to the architectural trend that resulted in "coffin-like houses and topless towers" and his insistence on expressing the unique in human experience. We see Wright creating his famous and seminal houses, among them the Winslow house he designed at age twenty-seven, his long-dreamed-of Taliesin (when it burned to the ground, set blaze by an insane servant, Wright rebuilt it on the same spot), the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (the only building left standing after the 1923 earthquake), the famous Fallingwater, the mammoth and idiosyncratic Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Meryle Secrest is the first biographer to have full access to the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives.
Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography by Meryle Secrest
University of Chicago Press, 1998

Dan Kiley: The Complete Works of America's Master Landscape Architect

Dan Kiley is probably the most important international landscape architect of the twentieth century. For over sixty years and in more than a thousand projects, he has transformed the landscapes of private houses, public institutions, and vast urban spaces into magnificent places of natural beauty. Adhering rigorously to his lifelong tenet that the actions of humans are integral to the natural environment in which we live, he has influenced generations of landscape designers and heightened the public's awareness and appreciation of our man-made surroundings. In September 1997 Kiley was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the highest honor that can be bestowed upon an artist in the United States. Produced with his close collaboration, this is the definitive book on the man and his oeuvre, from his early and now-mature projects to his most recent work. Kiley sets out his beliefs and working practices in an introduction that draws together decades of experience and a deep knowledge of nature and plants. At the heart of the book are his most significant projects, grouped chronologically and by the themes that have shaped his career. Each work features extensive photographs and plans, as well as special sketches by Kiley, and lucid and highly personal texts give the history, ideas, and specifics behind each scheme. An extensive reference section with an illustrated chronology and bibliography rounds out the book.
Dan Kiley: The Complete Works of America's Master Landscape Architect by Jane Amidon
Little, Brown & Company, 1999

Le Corbusier: Architect, Painter, Poet

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, was a pioneer of modern architecture. He focused his seemingly unlimited creative energy on diverse media and fields of endeavor: architecture, city planning, drawing, painting, sculpture, and tapestry design. Visit his revolutionary buildings and read about the controversies stirred up by this maverick's provocative works and pronouncements.
Le Corbusier: Architect, Painter, Poet by Jean Jenger
Harry N. Abrams, 1996

Capital Losses: A Cultural History of Washington's Destroyed Buildings

Before the passage of critical preservation legislation in 1978, the Nation's Capital lost an irreplaceable assembly of architecturally and culturally significant buildings. Wanton destruction in the name of progress - particularly in the decades immediately following World War II - resulted in a legacy forever lost, a cultural heritage destroyed by the wrecker's ball.
In originally documenting 252 of these historic losses, the publication of Capital Losses a quarter century ago created a clarion call for preservationists. By reminding us of things lost, James Goode's magisterial and poignant study represented a comprehensive call for action, a mandate for responsible stewardship of the architectural legacy of Washington, D.C. In the decades since, rising public awareness and the passage of the Historic District and Historic Landmark Protection Act in 1978 have slowed the pace of thoughtless destruction. But as this completely new and updated edition of Capital Losses demonstrates, vigilance remains the watchword, especially as pressures for urban growth continue to intensify.
Capital Losses reveals the Washington that was and how it became what it is today. This updated edition includes eighteen more treasures lost - among them Rhodes Tavern and Valley View - and ninety additional historic photographs. The 270 buildings featured here range from the earliest Georgian plantation house to the latest art deco commercial structure and include private houses, hotels, apartment houses, office and government buildings, schools, hospitals, churches, and fire stations.
Both the familiar public Washington of official landmarks and the private city of residential neighborhoods are paid tribute in this volume, dedicated to the vanished. A foreword by noted architectural historian Richard Longstreth brings the preservation story up to the present.
Capital Losses: A Cultural History of Washington's Destroyed Buildings by James M. Goode and Richard Longstreth
Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003

Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape

A man of passionate vision and drive, Frederick Law Olmsted defined and named the profession of landscape architecture and designed America's most beloved parks and landscapes of the past century - New York's Central Park, Brooklyn's Prospect Park, the U.S. Capitol grounds, the Biltmore Estate, and many others.
During a remarkable forty-year career that began in the mid-1800s, Olmsted created the first park systems, urban greenways, and suburban residential communities in this country. He was a pivotal figure in the movement to create and preserve natural parks such as Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Niagara Falls; and he contributed to the design of many academic campuses, including Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
Today there is a resurgence of interest in Olmsted's work and legacy in both the United States and Europe. This timely volume, following the format of Rizzoli's successful Masterworks series, presents the breadth of Olmsted's work in expansive, beautiful color photographs by Paul Rocheleau, who conceived this book. The engaging text illuminates Olmsted's role as an indefatigable administrator and social reformer, a man who slept a scant few hours each night and rallied around causes ranging from anti-slavery to sanitary regulation. Olmsted's career reflected a deep concern for fostering community and using the restorative effects of natural scenery to counteract the debilitating forces of the modern city.
Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape by Charles E. Beveridge and David Larkin
Universe Publishing, 1998

Haussmann: His Life and Times and the Making of Modern Paris

In 1853, Napoleon III appointed to the Paris city hall an administrator who had already proved himself in a number of provincial posts, most notably at Bordeaux, and whose name would come to symbolize the modernization of Paris. In barely fifteen years, Baron Haussmann completed the enormous task entrusted to him by the emperor: to transform an unruly capital into a prestigious metropolis.
Dozens of building sites were opened in the streets of the capital; thousands of houses were pulled down; wide straight boulevards were cut through the city with blocks of apartments built alongside them; new theatres and churches sprang up along with public gardens; water, sewage, and gas systems were modernized.
Mr. Michel Carmona has exhaustively examined the historical record and has written a superb biography that will be welcomed by all who have savored the avenues, parks, public buildings, monuments, and byways of the City of Light. Haussman will be a treasure too for architects, urban planners, and those readers who are interested in the life of great cities. Haussmann: His Life and Times and the Making of Modern Paris by Michel Carmona
Ivan R. Dee, 2002

More information

Architecture Main Page