Wright, Fallingwater, High Steel & American Summer Home

Frank Lloyd Wright: Chicago

Chicago and the suburb of Oak Park are home to the greatest concentration of Frank Lloyd Wright designed buildings in the world. 96 of Wright's structures, chronologically presented from the master architect's earliest designs through more modern structures, are explored in 450 gorgeous color photographs and lively essays, along with a separate appendix highlighting the beach houses on Lake Delavan. In 1887 Frank Lloyd Wright moved to Chicago and began his work as a draftsman, eventually starting his own firm in 1893. During his enormously productive Chicago years (1887-1909) Frank Lloyd Wright developed and refined the ideas that would form his Prairie Style.
Frank Lloyd Wright's Chicago is a comprehensive guide that features the buildings Frank Lloyd Wright designed during this 22-year period-culminating with the iconographic Robie House, built in 1909-as well as others designed and built later in his career.
Frank Lloyd Wright's Chicago by Thomas J. O'Gorman
ISBN: 1592231276

Fallingwater Rising

Fallingwater Rising is a biography not of a person but of the most famous house of the twentieth century. Scholars and the public have long extolled the house that Frank Lloyd Wright perched over a Pennsylvania waterfall in 1937, but the full story has never been told.
Fallingwater Rising is also a family drama, involving E. J. Kaufmann, his beautiful cousin/wife, Liliane, and their son, Edgar Jr., whose own role in the creation of Fallingwater and its ongoing reputation is central to the story. Involving such key figures of the 1930s as Frida Kahlo, Albert Einstein, Henry R. Luce, William Randolph Hearst, Ayn Rand, and Franklin Roosevelt, Fallingwater Rising shows us how E. J. Kaufmann's house became not just Wright's masterpiece but a fundamental icon of American life.
One of the pleasures of the book is its evocation of the upper-crust society of Pittsburgh - Carnegie, Frick, the Mellons - a society that was socially reactionary but luxury-loving and baronial in its tastes, hobbies, and sexual attitudes (E. J. Kaufmann had so many mistresses that his store issued them distinctive charge plates they could use without paying).
A major contribution to both architectural and social history.
Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House by Franklin Toker
ISBN: 1400040264

American Summer Home

In this intimate and poignant history of a sprawling century-old summer house on Cape Cod, George Howe Colt reveals not just one family's fascinating story but a vanishing way of life. Faced with the sale of the treasured house where he had spent forty-two summers, Colt returned for one last August with his wife and young children. The Big House, the author's loving tribute to his one-of-a-kind family home, interweaves glimpses of that elegiac final visit with memories of earlier summers spent at the house and of the equally idiosyncratic people who lived there over the course of five generations.
Built by Colt's great-grandfather one hundred years ago on a deserted Cape Cod peninsula, the house is a local landmark (neighboring children know it as the Ghost House): a four-story, eleven-bedroom jumble of gables, bays, sloped roofs, and dormers. The emotional home of the Colt family, the Big House has watched over five weddings, four divorces, and three deaths, along with countless anniversaries, birthday parties, nervous breakdowns, and love affairs. Beaten by wind and rain, insulated by seaweed, it is both romantic and run-down, a symbol of the faded glory of the Boston Brahmin aristocracy.
With a mixture of amusement and affection, Colt traces the rise and fall of this tragicomic social class while memorably capturing the essence of summer's ephemeral pleasures: sailing, tennis, fishing, rainy-day reading. Time seems to stand still in a summer house, and for the Colts the Big House always seemed an unchanging place in a changing world. But summer draws to a close, and the family must eventually say good-bye.
The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home by George Howe Colt
ISBN: 074324964X

High Steel

With the birth of the steel-frame skyscraper in the late nineteenth century came a new breed of man, as bold and untamed as any this country had ever known. These "cowboys of the skies," as one journalist called them, were the structural ironworkers who walked steel beams - no wider, often, than the face of a hardcover book - hundreds of feet above ground, to raise the soaring towers and vaulting bridges that so abruptly transformed America in the twentieth century.
Many early ironworkers were former sailors, new Americans of Irish and Scandinavian descent accustomed to climbing tall ships' masts and schooled in the arts of rigging. Others came from a small Mohawk Indian reservation on the banks of the St. Lawrence River or from a constellation of seaside towns in Newfoundland. What all had in common were fortitude, courage, and a short life expectancy. "We do not die," went an early ironworkers' motto. "We are killed."
High Steel is the stirring epic of these men and of the icons they built - and are building still. Shifting between past and present, Jim Rasenberger travels back to the earliest iron bridges and buildings of the nineteenth century; to the triumph of the Brooklyn Bridge and the 1907 tragedy of the Quebec Bridge, where seventy-five ironworkers, including thirty-three Mohawks, lost their lives in an instant; through New York's skyscraper boom of the late 1920s, when ironworkers were hailed as "industrial age heroes." All the while, Jim Rasenberger documents the lives of several contemporary ironworkers raising steel on a twenty-first-century skyscraper, the Time Warner building in New York City.
This is a fast-paced, bare-knuckled portrait of vivid personalities, containing episodes of startling violence (as when ironworkers dynamited the Los Angeles Times building in 1910) and exhilarating adventure. In the end, High Steel is also a moving account of brotherhood and family. Many of those working in the trade today descend from multigenerational dynasties of ironworkers. As they walk steel, they follow in the footsteps of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers. We've all had the experience of looking at a particularly awe-inspiring bridge or building and wondering, How did they do that? Jim Rasenberger asks - and answers - the question behind the question: What sort of person would willingly scale such heights, take such chances, face such danger? The result is a depiction of the American working class as it has seldom appeared in literature: strong, proud, autonomous, enduring, and utterly compelling.
High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline by Jim Rasenberger
ISBN: 0060004347

Stones of Florence

This is a unique tribute to Florence, combining history, artistic description, and social observation. A memorable portrait of the Florentine spirit and of those figures who exemplify this spirit, such as Dante, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Machiavelli.
The Stones of Florence by Mary McCarthy
ISBN: 0156027631

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