Frank Lloyd Wright Versus America The 1930s Nineteen Hundred And Thirties

Recounts Wright's life and career during the thirties, discusses the founding of the Taliesin Fellowship, and assesses his influence on other architects

A cultural icon who defined the twentieth-century American landscape, Frank Lloyd Wright has been studied from what seems to be every possible angle. While many books focus on his works, torrid personal life, or both, few solely consider his professional persona, as a man enmeshed in a web of prominent public figures and political ideas. In this new biography, Robert McCarter distills Wright’s life and work into a concise account that explores the beliefs and relationships so powerfully reflected in his architectural works. McCarter examines here how Wright aspired to influence America’s evolving democratic society by the challenges his buildings posed to traditional views of private and public space. He investigates Wright’s relationships with key leaders of art, industry, and society, and how their views came to have concrete significance in Wright’s work and writings. Wright argued that architecture should be the “background or framework” for daily life, not the “object,” and McCarter dissects how and why he aspired to this and other ideals, such as his belief in the ethical duty of architects to improve society and culture. A penetrating study of the foremost pioneer in modern architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright offers a fascinating biographical chronicle that reveals the principles and relationships at the base of Wright’s production.

The story of the evolution of the urban freeway, the competing visions that informed it, and the emerging alternatives for more sustainable urban transportation. Urban freeways often cut through the heart of a city, destroying neighborhoods, displacing residents, and reconfiguring street maps. These massive infrastructure projects, costing billions of dollars in transportation funds, have been shaped for the last half century by the ideas of highway engineers, urban planners, landscape architects, and architects—with highway engineers playing the leading role. In Changing Lanes, Joseph DiMento and Cliff Ellis describe the evolution of the urban freeway in the United States, from its rural parkway precursors through the construction of the interstate highway system to emerging alternatives for more sustainable urban transportation. DiMento and Ellis describe controversies that arose over urban freeway construction, focusing on three cases: Syracuse, which early on embraced freeways through its center; Los Angeles, which rejected some routes and then built I-105, the most expensive urban road of its time; and Memphis, which blocked the construction of I-40 through its core. Finally, they consider the emerging urban highway removal movement and other innovative efforts by cities to re-envision urban transportation.

"Modern concepts concerning an organic architecture, from the work of Frank Lloyd Wright" on lining-papers.

For his critics and biographers, the 1930s have always been the most challenging period of Frank Lloyd Wright's career. This account uses the architect's long-inaccessable archives at Taliesin West to provide a balanced evaluation of Wright in the 1930s. It separates Wright's design activities from his self-promotion and places his philosophy of individualism within the context of the times.

New Deal Book Award 2022 Honourable Mention Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater explores the relationship between the economic tumult in the United States in the 1930s, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the construction of his most famous house, Fallingwater. The book reinterprets the history of this iconic building, recognizing it as a Depression-era monument that stands as a testimony to what an American architect could achieve with the right site, client, and circumstance, even in desperate economic circumstances. Using newly available resources, author Catherine W. Zipf examines Wright’s work before and after Fallingwater to show how it was influenced by the economic climate, public architectural projects of the Great Depression, and America’s changing relationship with Modernist style and technology. Including over 50 black-and-white images, this book will be of great interest to students, historians, and researchers of art, architecture, and Frank Lloyd Wright.