You can’t go wrong with Frank Lloyd Wright, especially this holiday season, with the Museum of Modern Art preparing to mount a big Wright show in February and publishers out with a couple of splendid books about America’s greatest architect.
Frank Lloyd Wright: The Masterworks (Rizzoli, $60) is a masterwork of a genre that might be called High Coffee Table. With text by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, editing by Pfeiffer and David Larkin and photography by Paul Rocheleau and Michael Freeman, “The Masterworks” weaves insightful prose, elegant graphics and superb color pictures into an organic whole of which Wright surely would have approved.
Presented chronologically are 38 buildings, from the architect’s home and studio in Oak Park to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. An oversize format allows for generous display of mostly new photographs, beckoning the reader into Wright’s flowing, light-filled interiors and capturing their dynamic relationship with the landscape.
Pfeiffer, currently director of archives for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., cuts through the cult of Wright-o-mania and reminds us why we are drawn to the architect in the first place: for his brilliant form-making, for the unity of his architecture with the decorative arts and for his humanistic use of the latest technology. He was a creative force almost without parallel.
Less slick but no less significant is The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion, by William Allin Storrer (University of Chicago Press, $75). This guidebook claims to cover every building the architect built, including such lesser-known examples of Wright’s oeuvre as the E-Z Shoe Polish Factory in the 3000 block of W. Carroll Ave. in Chicago.
It matters little if a structure or two eventually turns out to be missing from this oversize volume, whose scope includes more than 400 buildings. By bringing the full range of Wright’s work under one roof, this definitive guide makes a major contribution to the literature on Wright. Each chronologically arranged entry provides a floor plan, a photograph and a clearly written building description and history. Storrer has even cataloged Wright buildings by ZIP code.
Elsewhere, there are offerings to appeal to every taste, though not every budget. The bargain of the bunch is No Place Like Utopia: Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept, by Peter Blake (Knopf, $27.50). With the advantage of 20/20 hindsight and an insider’s perspective-Blake was a practicing architect and editor of the now-defunct Architectural Forum magazine-this autobiography piercingly examines the promise and pitfalls of the modern movement. Along the way, Blake, a master raconteur, unmasks some of modernism’s most prominent personalities, among them Le Corbusier, Wright and Philip Johnson.
America’s foremost architectural salon goes under the microscope in Philip Johnson: The Glass House, edited by David Whitney and Jeffrey Kipnis (Pantheon, $35). Fittingly, 19 essays by a cast of well-known architects and critics, including Johnson, are salon-like in character. Incisive in assessing the aesthetic significance of the Glass House and eight other structures on Johnson’s Connecticut estate, they have a good deal less to say about the relevance of these buildings to such practical issues as limited construction budgets and the need for energy-conserving “green” architecture.
Eminently practical for the urban designer and the urban activist is Great Streets, by Allan B. Jacobs (MIT Press, $50). In the manner of Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language,” which identifies design patterns that make towns and buildings habitable, Jacobs studies a host of great and once-great streets. His goal is to establish standards that make streets comfortable, safe and exciting-more, in short, than conduits for traffic.
Buildings of the District of Columbia, by Pamela Scott and Antoinette J. Lee (Oxford, $45) is part of a monumental series covering American architecture state by state (and district). This authoritative compendium at first stumbles with starchy prose but recovers with the breadth and depth of its survey of Washington. Chicagoans will be fascinated by Daniel Burnham’s role in the creation of the National Mall. Burnham helped persuade the Pennsylvania Railroad to agree to an off-Mall site for a new station. Thus Union Station was born.
Chicago Architecture and Design, by George A. Larson and Tribune contributor Jay Pridmore (Abrams, $49.50), is an informative survey of building design in the first city of American architecture. There are more probing books on the subject, but this is a primer with a plus: dozens of color pictures by Hedrich-Blessing, Chicago’s distinguished architectural photography studio.
One of the outside firms that made inroads on the Chicago skyscraper scene in the 1980s is profiled in Kohn Pedersen Fox: Architecture and Urbanism, 1986-1992, edited by Warren A. James, (Rizzoli, $65, $40 paper). This book documents and seeks to justify the firm’s shift from postmodern towers, such as 900 N. Michigan Ave. in Chicago, to skyscrapers with a more fragmented aesthetic, such as the DG Bank Building in Frankfurt, Germany.
The center of fragmented architecture can be found in Los Angeles, the ultimate fragmented metropolis where ethnic and racial tensions boiled over in the riots of 1992. In Heteropolis: Los Angeles, The Riots and the Strange Beauty of Hetero-Architecture (Academy Editions, $50, $35 paper), critic Charles Jencks ponders the Deconstructivist designs of Frank Gehry and other Los Angeles architects and postulates that their radical architectural forms are an apt expression of social heterogeneity. One wishes Jencks had ventured to riot-scarred South Central Los Angeles to test the validity of this purported design populism.
Michelangelo: Architect, by Giulio Carlo Argan and Bruno Contardi, (Abrams, $125) suggests that the creator of the Sistine Ceiling surpassed even Wright if one measures artistic achievement by brilliance in all three fields of the visual arts-architecture, sculpture and painting. The translated prose is leaden, but black-and-white photographs of such Mannerist masterworks as the Laurentian Library are for all time.
Paul R. Williams: A Legacy of Style (Rizzoli, $50), by Williams’ granddaughter Karen Hudson, solidly charts the prodigious, six-decade career of the African-American architect who played a leading role in the creation of such Southern California landmarks as the Beverly Hills Hotel and its famous Polo Lounge; the Jetson-like Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport; and the Palm Springs home of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Williams, the first African-American member of the American Institute of Architects, left more than a collection of elegantly-designed buildings. In overcoming racial prejudice, as this book demonstrates, his was a legacy of hope as well as style.
