His works—among them Taliesin North, Taliesin West, Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax buildings, the Guggenheim Museum—earned him a good measure of his fame, but his flamboyant personal life earned him the rest. Here Brendan Gill, a personal friend of Wright and his family, gives us not only the fullest, fairest, and most entertaining account of Wright to date, but also strips away the many masks the architect tirelessly constructed to fascinate his admirers and mislead his detractors. Enriched by hitherto unpublished letters and 300 photographs and drawings, this definitive biography makes Wright, in all his creativity, crankiness, and zest, fairly leap from its pages.

    

    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.When he got the commission to design the house, Wright was nearing seventy, his youth and his early fame long gone. It was the Depression, and Wright had no work in sight. Into his orbit stepped Edgar J. Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department-store mogul–“the smartest retailer in America”–and a philanthropist with the burning ambition to build a world-famous work of architecture. It was an unlikely collaboration: the Jewish merchant who had little concern for modern architecture and the brilliant modernist who was leery of Jews. But the two men collaborated to produce an extraordinary building of lasting architectural significance that brought international fame to them both and confirmed Wright’s position as the greatest architect of the twentieth century. Fallingwater Rising is also an enthralling family drama, involving 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 l930s 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 rich 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 (Kaufmann had so many mistresses that his store issued them distinctive charge plates they could use without paying). Franklin Toker has been studying Fallingwater for eighteen years. No one but he could have given us this compelling saga of the most famous private house in the world and the dramatic personal story of the fascinating people who made and used it.A major contribution to both architectural and social history.From the Hardcover edition.

    In entirely new photographs taken especially for this book by two leading architectural photographers under the direction of co-editor David Larkin, such internationally famous buildings as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Fallingwater and Wright's homes Taliesin, Taliesin West, and the Oak Park Home and Studio are seen afresh, benefiting from the photographers' special access. Several lesser-known residences, such as Auldbrass Plantation in South Carolina, an array of wooden buildings that is Wright's American alternative to antebellum architecture, the William H. Winslow house in River Forest, Illinois, one of the architect's earliest and most surprisingly decorative houses, and the Kenneth Laurent house in Rockford, Illinois, a masterful curvilinear design, are seen in full color and demonstrate dimensions of Wright's work less often seen before. Public buildings, such as the dramatic concrete, glass, and steel Marin County Civic Center and Beth Sholom Synagogue show Wright as engineering virtuoso as well as creative architect. In addition to these existing masterworks, only the most famous of which are open to the public, the book covers buildings that have been demolished, notably the Larkin Company Administration Building, Midway Gardens, and the Imperial Hotel, which are represented here by drawings and rich archival photographs. Each of the buildings is presented from conceptual sketch, plan, or drawing to finished masterwork, andeach is accompanied by an in-depth essay detailing the development of the work. Extensive quotes from Wright's writings, unpublished talks, and private letters to the clients give valuable insight into the architect's own thinking about each commission. Never before has Wright's architecture been presented so elaborately in one volume.

    Now, Ada Louise Huxtable, the Pulitzer Prize- winning architecture writer for "The Wall Street Journal"?and chief architecture critic for "The New York Times" for nearly twenty years?offers an outstanding look at the architect and the man. She explores the sources of his tumultuous and troubled life and his long career as master builder as well as his search for lasting, true love. Along the way, Huxtable introduces readers to Wright's masterpieces: Taliesin, rebuilt after tragedy and murder; the Imperial Hotel, one of the few structures left standing after Japan's catastrophic 1923 earthquake; and tranquil Fallingwater, to which millions have traveled to experience its quiet grace. Through the journey, Huxtable takes us not only into the mind of the man who drew the blueprints, but also into the very heart of the medium, which he changed forever. A story of great triumph and heartbreak, "Frank Lloyd Wright" is, like Wright's own creations, an expertly wrought tribute to a man whose genius lives on in the very landscape of American architecture.

    This book will be helpful for students who want to prepare within a short time, covering the whole syllabus and all compilations at one place.

    In superb graphic detail, with hundreds of plans, illustrations, and diagrams, this comprehensive resource presents and entire library's worth of essential design data for residential development.

    

    Appropriated, chewed up, mulled over, digested, contemplated, and contorted - gathering up along the way fashion, ecology, politics, and art - architectural concepts become veritable things unto themselves in the present tense. As astoundingly diverse as contemporary architecture is, most importantly it is a reflection of what's happening right now all over the world, in people's minds and in the global collective consciousness. The many faces of world architecture today make for a mind-expanding book. Here you'll find the most recent work of over 60 architects and firms, including familiar names such as O. Gehry, Meier, Ando, Foster, and Starck, as well as a host of newcomers sure to be the architecture-celebrities of future generations. Highlights include Jakob & MacFarlane's morphological Restaurant at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Diller & Scofidio's "Blur Building" proposal for the International Expo 2001 in Switzerland (an ovular structure suspended over a lake, encapsulated by a fine mist of water, creating the look of a cloud hovering over the lake), and Herzog & de Meuron's remarkable Tate Modern. Proving that contemporary architecture is not limited to physical building design, New York firm Asymptote's Guggenheim Virtual Museum is also included, a place where visitors can take a cyber-stroll through rooms that are designed to be "compelling spatial environments." Presented alphabetically by architect or firm, Architecture Now! can be used like a reference guide, with extensive photographs and illustrations, biographical and contact information for designers, and a careful selection of today's most influential architects.

    Changing the function of a word, or a room, can produce surprise and meaning. In How to Architect, Patt--an architect and the creator of a series of wildly popular online videos about architecture--presents the basics of architecture in A-Z form, starting with A is for Asymmetry (as seen in Chartres Cathedral and Frank Gehry), detouring through N is for Narrative, and ending with Z is for Zeal (a quality that successful architects tend to have, even in fiction--see The Fountainhead's architect-hero Howard Roark.)How to Architect is a book to guide you on the road to architecture. If you are just starting on that journey or thinking about becoming an architect, it is a place to begin. If you are already an architect and want to remind yourself of what drew you to the profession, it is a book of affirmation. And if you are just curious about what goes into the design and construction of buildings, this book tells you how architects think. Patt introduces each entry with a hand-drawn letter, and accompanies the text with illustrations that illuminate the concept discussed: a fallen Humpty Dumpty illustrates the perils of fragile egos; photographs of an X-Acto knife and other hand tools remind us of architecture's nondigital origins.How to Architect offers encouragement to aspiring architects but also mounts a defense of architecture as a profession--by calling out a defiant verb: architect!

    Scandalous affairs rage behind closed doors, broken hearts are tossed aside, fires rip through the wings of the house and paparazzi lie in wait outside the front door for the latest tragedy in this never-ending saga. This is the home of the great architect of the twentieth century, a man of extremes in both his work and his private life: at once a force of nature and an avalanche of need and emotion that sweeps aside everything in its path. Sharp, savage and subtle in equal measure, "The Women" plumbs the chaos, horrors and uncontainable passions of a formidable American icon.

    Unaccountably, the details of that shocking crime have been largely ignored by Wright’s legion of biographers—a historical and cultural gap that is finally addressed in William Drennan’s exhaustively researched Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders.     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 and "love cottage" for himself and his mistress (both married at the time to others).      Conceived as the apotheosis of Wright’s prairie house style, the original Taliesin would stand in all its isolated glory for only a few months before the bloody slayings that rocked the nation and reduced the structure itself to a smoking hull.     Supplying both a gripping mystery story and an authoritative portrait of the artist as a young man, Drennan wades through the myths surrounding Wright and the massacre, casting fresh light on the formulation of Wright’s architectural ideology and the cataclysmic effects that the Taliesin murders exerted on the fabled architect and on his subsequent designs. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Association

    It also contains the easy to follow instructions on how to analyze and compute the structural design of critical building parts such as: reinforced concrete slabs, beams, columns and footings. There are also simple designs and floor plans for a variety of building types to be found in this book.BUILDING DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION should be of interest to architects, engineers, contractors, developers and allied professionals who are engaged in building design, planning and construction. Students and graduates reviewing for the board examinations for architects and engineers would find in this book valuable practical knowledge to supplement the theories learned in their classrooms.Project owners studying this book would appreciate and get a clear understanding of how their envisioned pet project, which sprang only from a mere idea - is transformed slowly step-by-step - into concrete form.Explanations and instructions in BUILDING DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION are conveyed in direct and simple language for easy understanding even by the layman. Plans and drawings are clearly presented, to be easily interpreted by construction workers.

    I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives. In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America’s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney’s profound influence on Wright. Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan’s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah’s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel’s stunning conclusion. Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.

    Back to basics guide to improve your knowledge of and practice of photography.Topics include camera and lens types, lighting, exposure, composition and image editing.