Drawings and Plans of Frank Lloyd Wright: The Early Period (1893-1909)

By Frank Lloyd Wright

"I would much rather build than write about building, but when I am not building, I will write about building — or the significance of those buildings I have already built." — Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright built a body of works and drawings to illustrate and explain his work: collections of designs with commentary that temperamentally parallel that work: irascible, radical, powerful and dense, astonishing and simple in its clarity. One of his earliest published works illustrates the parallel, preserving  thought and design at a prophetic moment, shortly before Wright's genius and fame captured two continents and many converts. The Wasmuth portfolio of drawings (named after the original German publisher) is reproduced here from an extremely rare first edition (1910).
Wright's polemical preface indicates the importance he attached to the drawings and their publication: ". . . the work illustrated in this volume, with the exception of the work of Louis Sullivan, is the first consistent protest in bricks and mortar against this pitiful waste [academic, inorganic styles]. It is a serious attempt to formulate some industrial and aesthetic ideals that in a quiet, rational way will help to make a lovely thing of an American's home environment. . . ." "Home environment" for Wright was the Midwestern plain; these these drawings, perhaps his earliest experiments in organic design, partake of the Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin prairie with their emphasis on the horizontal ("the line of domesticity") and the environmental motif: "A beautiful elm standing near gave the suggestion for the mass of the building," Wright says of the Winslow house in River Forest, Illinois, a dwelling he cites as the first embodiment of many of his ideas. Elegant full-page architectural drawings and plans show Wright's atelier in Oak Park, Illinois, many homes, cottages, banks, a burial chapel, Unity Church temple, a concrete house designed for Ladies' Home Journal and numerous studies for buildings, treated as problems in design, that were never built.
The republication of this rare work gives access again to what has been called "the single most important collection of work published by Frank Lloyd Wright." Students of American architectural genius will find here the seeds of Wright's greatness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Oct 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9780486132341

Book preview

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Drawings and Plans of Frank Lloyd Wright

The Early Period (1893-1909)

Frank Lloyd Wright

Copyright © 1983 by Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

This Dover edition, first published in 1983, is a republication of the work‘originally published by Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin, in 1910 under the title Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright. The present edition omits the German translation of Wright’s introductory essay and the German list of plates. The plate headings have been adapted into English from the original German specially for this edition, and a glossary of the German terms found in the ground plans has been added. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the help of Mr. Scott Elliott of the Kelmscott Gallery, 410 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, III. 60605, in making material available for reproduction.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Wright, Frank Lloyd, 1867–1959.

Drawings and plans of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Originally published as: Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe. Berlin: E. Wasmuth, 1910. German text omitted.

1. Wright, Frank Lloyd, 1867–1959. I. Title.

NA737.W7A4 1983 720’.22’2 82-18229

9780486132341

Table of Contents

DOVER BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE

Title Page

Copyright Page

STUDIES AND EXECUTED BUILDINGS BY FRANK

Reviews for Drawings and Plans of Frank Lloyd Wright

[Yihan Xu · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

- Organic style is the harmony of architecture and natural feelings.
- Be true to fundamental conditions in line, form , and color.
- Picking form "ready-made" architecture, "people are architecturally clothed and sheltered".