Overview

"The Arts and Crafts movement, with its rejection of corner-cutting mass production technology, gave rise to an enthusiasm for fine art printing, and Chicago - where Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) practiced architecture early in his career - was a national centre for artisan books. With a skilled hand for elegant and complex design, Wright created ""The House Beautiful"" for the tiny Auvergne Press in the late 1890s; it was produced in an edition of just ninety copies. The book's text by Unitarian minister William Gannett proposed that spiritual, intellectual, societal, and corporeal health could be augmented by a properly designed and furnished home. Gannett's views dovetailed precisely with Wright's emerging theory of organic architecture, and ""The House Beautiful"", in consequence, became an early modernist duet of enlightened discourse and visionary design. Wright's complex, exacting drawings for the book surround Gannett's lyrical prose and introduce new chapters. Photography was one of Wright's interests, and his twelve nature studies published in the original 1897 edition are also reproduced here. Once available only to colleagues of Gannett, Wright, and Auvergne's publisher, William Winslow, ""The House Beautiful"" epitomizes the cutting edge of avant-garde design at the turn of the twentieth century."

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9780764937644

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"Paul Kruty is a professor of architectural history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the author of ""Frank Lloyd Wright and Midway Gardens"" and ""Walter Burley Griffin in America"", among other books."

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