Featured work
Residential
Avery Coonley
Arthur Heurtley
A. Goetsch & K. Winckler
Fallingwater House
George Barton House
I. N. Hagan House
John Storer
Frederick C. Robie
Taliesin West
Ward W. Willitts
Institutions
N/A
Towers
Price Tower
Commercial
Anderton Court Shop
Imperial Hotel & Annex
Museums
Guggenheim Museum
Places of worship
Annunciation Church
Beth Sholom Synagogue
Featured Books
Top 5 selling books
Frank Lloyd Wright's Houses
Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House
Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater: The House and Its History
Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House: The Illustrated Story of an Architectural Masterpiece
Frank Lloyd Wright's
Taliesin and Taliesin West
Fallingwater book
Fallingwater Rising : Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House Fallingwater Rising is a biography not of a person but of the most famous house of the twentieth century. 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. "Highly Recommended".
Frank Lloyd Wright's House on Kentuck Frank Lloyd Wright's
House on Kentuck Knob is splendidly written; simple, alive and
captivating. Donald Hoffmann draws the reader right into the
adventure of how Mr. and Mrs. Hagan acquired the site and got
Wright, by then a quirky octogenarian, to design the building.
Clearly the book, with all its illustrations, will be a steady
seller for visitors who combine visits to Falling Water and Kentuck
Knob. Donald Hoffmann served as art and architecture critic for the
Kansas City Star from 1965 to 1990, was assistant editor of The
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians from 1970 to
1972, and is the author of seven books on the architecture of Frank
Lloyd Wright, including Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water.
What he said
FLW quotes
On Architecture....
I never design a building before I've seen the site and met the
people who will be using it.
My building will last at least 300 years.
So flexible and simple as to be almost unbelievable.
If the paintings are too large, cut them in half! - When questioned
about the low ceilings in the Guggenheim Museum.
The sense of space within the reality of any building is a new
concept wherever Architecture is concerned. But it is essential
ancient principle just the same and is not only necessary now but
implied by the ideal of democracy itself.
Wherever human life is concerned, the unnatural stricture of
excessive verticality cannot stand against more natural
horizontality. - On skyscrapers.
Beautiful buildings are more than scientific. They are true
organisms, spiritually conceived; works of art, using the best
technology by inspiration rather than the idiosyncrasies of mere
taste or any averaging by the committee mind.
Architecture is that great living creative spirit which from
generation to generation, from age to age, proceeds, persists,
creates, according to the nature of man, and his circumstances as
they change That is architecture.
Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and
therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the
world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.
So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring
organic architecture to be the modern ideal and the teaching so much
needed if we are to see the whole of life, and to now serve the
whole of life, holding no ‘traditions’ essential to the great
TRADITION. Nor cherishing any preconceived form fixing upon us
either past, present or future, but—instead—exalting the simple laws
of common sense—or of super-sense if you prefer—determining form by
way of the nature of materials.
On Government....
Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of
better architecture.
Architectural features of true democratic ground-freedom would rise
naturally from topography, which means that buildings would all take
on the nature and character of the ground on which in endless
variety they would stand and be component part.
He was too good for the job. - When asked why he didn't vote for a
particular presidential candidate.
The dynamic ideal we call democracy, gradually growing up in the
human heart for two-thousand five hundred years, at least, has now
every opportunity to found the natural democratic state in these
United States of America by way of natural economic order and a
natural, or organic, architecture.
Again in America we erect temples but this time not so much to the
mystery of great terrestrial or cosmic forces as to the interior or
spirit-power of manhood as released by American democracy and its
sciences.
On Nature....
I'll bridge these hills with graceful arches.
The good building is not one that hurts the landscape, but one which
makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building
was built.
No house should ever be on any hill or on anything. It should be of
the hill, belonging to it, so hill and house could live together
each the happier for the other.
The outside of any building may now come inside and the inside go
outside, each seems as part of the other. Continuity, plasticity,
and all the new simplicity the imply have at last come home.
On Life....
...The next one. - When asked which was his favorite project.
It is a terrific thing to get a building built that has the
qualities of greatness in it.
Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men.
Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization
and therefore imminent downfall.
Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of
themselves.
having a good start, not only do I fully intend to be the greatest
architect who has yet lived, but fully intend to be the greatest
architect who will ever live. Yes, I intend to be the greatest
architect of all time.
Within less than a century the life of this city and of all the
United States will be utterly transformed. I believe that a great
deal of happiness is in store for the American of the twenty-first
century.