Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) seems to be as popular now as at any time during his life.  The phenomenon interests me, and I wonder why. One obvious answer is that he had a flamboyant life which makes for titillating biography, but what about the essence of his work and ideas?

If you like architecture or Wright, what would you say are the reasons for this broad interest in  him?

What is a Room?

December 12th, 2010

The room.  What is a room?  I temporarily occupy the pink room of the Lewis’s house at 54 rue Renan in Tréguier.  I know this is a room. It has space for many activities.  The furnishings contribute to the life of the room.  A comfortable double bed and two side tables, each with a lamp, are located on the north wall, which has a locking entry door.  Behind each lamp hangs a small framed painting.  This ensemble allows lounging and reading in bed.  A small sofa sits at the foot of the bed.  Crimson-raspberry in color, it faces a fireplace with a simple mantle.  Between the fireplace and the bed lie a rug and a camphor chest that has brass corners.  On the chest is a pile of books.  This grouping provides a place to read and watch the fire.  A desk with ceramic lamp and fabric shade extends perpendicular to the south wall.  A drawer in the desk contains pencils, pens, cords, and a change purse.  This is a place for writing.

 

Frank Lloyd Wright:  A Golden Anniversary?

Anthony Alofsin © 2010

            “…Wright still stands alone as the American modern Architect in relation to the achievements of his own generation abroad, and even of most of the next except for Le Corbusier. A hundred years after his birth, however, we may most properly see him as belonging now to the past, if in a rank to which only the greatest have ever attained. No longer is he a contemporary figure, no longer the subject of controversy as he was as regards the Guggenheim Museum down to the day of his death, but an architect for the ages.” 

 

 

 

These days it is difficult to think of Frank Lloyd Wright as other than a star architect and commercial box office hit.  The Guggenheim museum broke some of its own attendance records with its recent exhibition,  and an endless supply of books cater to the public’s interest in pictures of his work and sensational accounts of his life.  This review looks at a manifestations of the phenomenon, two books that focus on a tragic moment in Wright’s life.

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Anthony Alofsin, Ph.D., AIA

Award-winning artist and architect, author and art historian, Anthony Alofsin is internationally recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and as an expert on modern architecture.

Architecture

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His journey has taken him to the mountains of New Mexico, the desert of Arizona, the urban heart of San Francisco, a contemplative family island retreat in Rhode Island, the rotting and mysterious Villa Trice in Austin, with a final look back at a childhood in Memphis.This book gives us the exuberance and creativity of youth and love yet it adds with unusual honesty the sense that experience does not simply exist in the present, but carries at the same time the weight of its past and the foreshadowing of its future, that the fullness of life contains many opposite particles.

"...a pure pleasure... written with such delicacy, such a lightness of touch. I could not have enjoyed it more."

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Latest book: Frank Lloyd Wright, Art Collector

         

In Frank Lloyd Wright, Art Collector, Anthony Alofsin presents the first catalogue raisonné of the thirty-two prints and one original drawing that constitute Wright’s Secessionist print collection.  Alofsin explores Wright’s encounters with German and Austrian art before his travels to Europe; the fluid definition of modern art around 1909; and the complex context for Wright’s acquiring his collection while in Europe. This book, with its original research, puts into a new light a range of artists, some famous, others unknown, who sought to express, like Wright, their own rebellion against academic traditions.

 

            A unique contribution to the history of modern art, Frank Lloyd Wright, Art Collector offers stunningly original insights into the master’s artistic taste, as well as to a group of progressive artists whose work has been undeservedly overlooked in conventional histories of modernism.

 

Order your copy at University of Texas Press http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/alofra.html