Their 160 letters from 1926-1958 covered a wide range of topics, including Wright's position on the history of American architecture and contemporary practice, their friends and rivals, the invention and spread of the International Style, and political events in Europe and the United States.".

Matching the texts the architects wrote with the buildings they were designing contemporaneously, he focuses on the language employed in discussing the subject to reveal the author-architects' distinct voices and points of view."--BOOK JACKET.

The first history of Frank Lloyd Wright's exhibitions of his own work—a practice central to his career More than one hundred exhibitions of Frank Lloyd Wright's work were mounted between 1894 and his death in 1959. Wright organized the majority of these exhibitions himself and viewed them as crucial to his self-presentation as his extensive writings. He used them to promote his designs, appeal to new viewers, and persuade his detractors. Wright on Exhibit presents the first history of this neglected aspect of the architect’s influential career. Drawing extensively from Wright’s unpublished correspondence, Kathryn Smith challenges the preconceived notion of Wright as a self-promoter who displayed his work in search of money, clients, and fame. She shows how he was an artist-architect projecting an avant-garde program, an innovator who expanded the palette of installation design as technology evolved, and a social activist driven to revolutionize society through design. While Wright’s earliest exhibitions were largely for other architects, by the 1930s he was creating public installations intended to inspire debate and change public perceptions about architecture. The nature of his exhibitions expanded with the times beyond models, drawings, and photographs to include more immersive tools such as slides, film, and even a full-scale structure built especially for his 1953 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. Placing Wright’s exhibitions side by side with his writings, Smith shows how integral these exhibitions were to his vision and sheds light on the broader discourse concerning architecture and modernism during the first half of the twentieth century. Wright on Exhibit features color renderings, photos, and plans, as well as a checklist of exhibitions and an illustrated catalog of extant and lost models made under Wright’s supervision.

"May be the best book on Wright ever written, with the exception of the master's own incomparable autobiography." — New York Times Book Review. This insightful study explores the principles of Wright's architectural philosophy, ideals, and methods. Includes over 120 photos, plans, and illustrations of Robie House, Fallingwater, Taliesin, and other masterworks.

In this exciting new book, David Michael Hertz demonstrates how three major artists - Frank Lloyd Wright, Wallace Stevens, and Charles Ives - were influenced by Emerson's nineteenth-century transcendentalism. By focusing on the relative statements of the artists themselves, Hertz shows that Emerson's belief that all things are in flux, including matter and spirit, had direct bearing on the form and content of their works. Hertz writes the book as a meditation on the condition of the artist in America, including biographical and historical information as well as his own interpretations of the three artists' works. In Part 1 he examines the emerging creative mind of the architect, poet, and composer, citing Emerson as the central figure who, through his essays, influenced each of them. By tracing their development as powerful and original thinkers, Hertz examines the processes that enabled them to become unique. In Part 2 he connects Emerson, Wright, Stevens, and Ives through a shared ideology, evident both in their critical statements and in their creative work. He shows how all three artists had specific documented knowledge of Emerson's major works. Their pragmatism, their preoccupation with the primacy of the senses, their predilection for analogy and loose metaphor, their dedication to individuality and self-reliance, and their eclecticism and conception of originality were shared traits and beliefs gleaned from Emerson. Hertz is the first writer to bring these four major American figures together in a single work. He makes it clear that Emersonianism reaches far into twentieth-century American culture and into the realms of art and music as well as literature. This book willinterest not only Emerson, Wright, Stevens, and Ives scholars but other individuals involved in the arts, the humanities, and interdisciplinary studies as well.