franklloydwright.tercenim.comFrank Lloyd Wright's Prairie houses, Fallingwater, stained glass

Frank Lloyd Wright Home Books Links Fallingwater Photos Books Links Stained Glass Photos Ennis House Coonley Playhouse Martin House Dana-Thomas House Others Books Links Westcott House Changes History Alterations Renovation Exterior South East North West Interior Books Links Author What’s new on my sites - Advanced Site Search Translate One year subscription: The definitive design magazine, Architectural Digest takes you inside the world’s most beautiful homes. With stunning photography and the best writers, it is the premier interior design magazine, featuring classic and contemporary styles. Your subscription includes the annual special issues: Before & After and Designers Own Homes . Essential to the profession for more than 110 years, Architectural Record provides a compelling editorial mix of design ideas and trends, building science, business and professional strategies, exploration of key issues, new products and computer-aided practice. Monthly. Dwell is the first and only magazine to explore both the interiors and the exteriors of modern home design in a stylish, yet accessible way. Written for young, intelligent consumers, dwell helps people shape their own living spaces in ways that express beauty, simplicity, comfort, and new sense of openness. The architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style houses have always fascinated me. The long, low look, the dramatic spaces, and the attention to detail really make them jump out at me. Several years ago, my wife and I spend a long weekend in Oak Park, Illinois . That Chicago suburb is where Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) had many of his prairie style house designs built, as well as his own home and studio . There is a great visitor’s center there that provided us with maps and lots of information. We really enjoyed the tour of his home and studio . My favorite feature was the octagonal home office with wraparound seating and bookcases. We were also able to walk and drive around to see dozens of other houses by Frank Lloyd Wright or in similar style. The Robie House was closed when we were there, but we got to walk around the exterior. It really is a totally different experience from reading about it or seeing pictures of it. If you have any interest in prairie style architecture, I strongly recommend visiting Oak Park and Chicago. Although there can be no doubt that he was a great architect, he was very arrogant and often ignored the advice of engineers. That led to long-term structural problems with many of his buildings. Some of that was due to his use of what were cutting-edge techniques and building technologies at the time. The best practices for their use had not yet been determined. For example, Wright was a pioneer in the use of large amounts of concrete long before it was known that rebar or mesh was needed to strengthen concrete. As a consequence, many of the walls and terraces he designed crumbled over time. In some cases, he simply didn’t design structures with sufficient support, using too few or too small beams, causing his buildings to "settle" far more than the should have. Sometimes he would make changes to the functional or aesthetic parts of a design without making adjustments to the structural design needed to accomodate them. His houses are also notorious for leaky roofs. Fiberglass insulation and double pane windows didn’t come along until much later, so his houses also tended to be somewhat drafty. Context is important; his most famous houses were created before electricity was commonly available in residences. Wright designed all of the landscaping and the furniture for his houses, which often took cues from the existing landscape for their designs. Some of the furniture designs were quite inventive, with features such as built-in lighting and having parts that could fold or swivel out of the way when not needed. He is credited with designing one of the first reclining chairs. Unfortunately, his designs did not acknowledge that people have spines that curve; his chairs tended to have completely straight backs with no cushions and must have been terribly uncomfortable. I put together a set of web pages to celebrate Frank Lloyd Wright’s stained glass works, which are also a long-time favorite of mine. I also have a page about Fallingwater , his incredible house in a waterfall in Western Pennsylvania and a set of pages about the Westcott House , the only Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie style house in Ohio. I also provide links to sites far more authoritative than mine could ever be, as well as relevant books and other related items. I hope you enjoy looking around. Frank Lloyd Wright Books and DVD’s The following are links to general interest materials about Frank Lloyd Wright. For information specific to Prairie Style architecture, please check here . 384 page hardcover. Horan’s ambitious first novel is a fictionalization of the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, best known as the woman who wrecked Frank Lloyd Wright’s first marriage. Despite the title, this is not a romance, but a portrayal of an independent, educated woman at odds with the restrictions of the early 20th century. Frank and Mamah, both married and with children, met when Mamah’s husband, Edwin, commissioned Frank to design a house. Their affair became the stuff of headlines when they left their families to live and travel together. They eventually settled in Wisconsin, where they were hounded by a scandal-hungry press, with tragic repercussions. Horan puts considerable effort into recreating Frank’s vibrant, overwhelming personality, but her primary interest is in Mamah, who pursued her intellectual interests and love for Frank at great personal cost. 230 page hardcover. The most pivotal and yet least understood event of Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated life involves the brutal murders in 1914 of seven adults and children dear to the architect and the destruction by fire of Taliesin, his landmark residence near Spring Green, Wisconsin. In response to the scandal generated by his open affair with the proto-feminist and free love advocate Mamah Borthwick Cheney, Wright had begun to build Taliesin as a refuge for himself and his mistress (both married at the time to others). The original Taliesin would last for only a few months before the bloody slayings that rocked the nation and reduced the structure itself to a smoking hull. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography 652 page paperback. In this superb, subtle, demythologizing biography of Wright (1869-1959), we meet a shrewd yet gullible architect who fostered a view of himself as a misunderstood, embattled genius, a narcissist who unconsciously courted catastrophe while blaming the vengeful hand of fate as he overcame accidents, bankruptcy, lawsuits and hounding by his morphine-addicted second wife. Drawing on a trove of letters, Secrest (Salvador Dali) traces Wright’s "secret conviction of worthlessness" to the contradictory influences of his freethinking, erratic Welsh mother and his jealous, spendthrift father, a New England minister. She discusses the dynamics of the architect’s three marriages, recounts his clashes with Louis Sullivan and Lewis Mumford, and digs beneath his "quasi-mystical Celtic beliefs" to pinpoint the multiple influences on his fervent quest for an organic architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture 456 page paperback. A complete biography based on a wide range of previously untapped primary sources, covering Wright’s private life, architecture, and role in American society, culture, and politics. Views Wright’s buildings as biographical as well as social statements, analyzing his work by type, category, and individual structure. Examines Wright’s struggle to develop a new artistic statement, his dramatic personal life, and his political and economic ideas, including those on cities, energy conservation, cooperative home building, and environmental preservation. Includes over 150 illustrations (photographs, floor plans, and...