Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760–1834) regarded the Précis of the Lectures on Architecture (1802–5) and its companion volume, the Graphic Portion (1821), as both a basic course for future civil engineers and a treatise. Focusing the practice of architecture on utilitarian and economic values, he assailed the rationale behind classical architectural training: beauty, proportionality, and symbolism. His formal systematization of plans, elevations, and sections transformed architectural design into a selective modular typology in which symmetry and simple geometrical forms prevailed. His emphasis on pragmatic values, to the exclusion of metaphysical concerns, represented architecture as a closed system that subjected its own formal language to logical processes. Now published in English for the first time, the Précis and the Graphic Portion are classics of architectural education.

A reissue in the Frank Lloyd Wright 150th anniversary year of the series of lectures which the celebrated American architect gave in London in 1939 and which outline his core philosophy of 'organic architecture'. In May 1939, the celebrated American architect Frank Lloyd Wright visited London and gave four lectures at the Royal Institute of British Architects. The meetings were hailed at the time as the most remarkable events of recent architectural affairs in England, and the lectures were published as An Organic Architecture in September 1939 by Lund Humphries. The texts remain an important expression of the architect's core philosophy and are being reissued now in a new edition to commemorate the 150th anniversary in 2017 of Frank Lloyd Wright's birth. In the lectures, Frank Lloyd Wright discusses several of his recent projects, including his Usonian houses, his homes and studios at Taliesin, Wisconsin and Arizona, Fallingwater and the Johnson administration building. His charismatic, flamboyant character and hugely creative intelligence leap to life from the pages as he looks to the 'Future', both in terms of the then-imminent Second World War and his vision for cities. This new edition includes an insightful new essay by esteemed architectural historian, Professor Andrew Saint, which sets the lectures within context and highlights their continued resonance and appeal

Modern Architecture is a landmark text--the first book in which America's greatest architect put forth the principles of a fundamentally new, organic architecture that would reject the trappings of historical styles while avoiding the geometric abstraction of the machine aesthetic advocated by contemporary European modernists. One of the most important documents in the development of modern architecture and the career of Frank Lloyd Wright, Modern Architecture is a provocative and profound polemic against America's architectural eclecticism, commercial skyscrapers, and misguided urban planning. The book is also a work of savvy self-promotion, in which Wright not only advanced his own concept of an organic architecture but also framed it as having anticipated by decades--and bettered--what he saw as the reductive modernism of his European counterparts. Based on the 1931 original, for which Wright supplied the cover illustration, this beautiful edition includes a new introduction that puts Modern Architecture in its broader architectural, historical, and intellectual context for the first time. The subjects of these lively lectures--from "Machinery, Materials and Men" to "The Tyranny of the Skyscraper" and "The City"--move from a general statement of the conditions of modern culture to particular applications in the fields of architecture and urbanism at ever broadening scales. Wright's vision in Modern Architecture is ultimately to equate the truly modern with romanticism, imagination, beauty, and nature--all of which he connects with an underlying sense of American democratic freedom and individualism.