Anthony Alofsin

This dazzling dual portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright and early 20th-century New York reveals the city's role in establishing the career of America's most famous architect.

Wright and New York

Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

Terence Riley

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation

From the turn of the century until his death in 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright produced projects that defined and redefined the American architectural vision. This book, accompanying a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, is the most comprehensive appraisal of his achievements ever assembled. 466 illustrations, 190 in full color.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect

New definition to the little-known work Wright produced during this period, which he describes as Wright's primitivist phase. He traces this influence in his art through Wright's explorations of primitivist sources, innovations in sculpture, and an intensification of the architect's use of ornament. Less tangible, but as important, was Wright's view of himself, his art, and society, and Alofsin uncovers the European impact on the architect's image of himself as a.

A Study of Influence

Frank Lloyd Wright--the Lost Years, 1910-1922

A dazzling dual portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright and early twentieth-century New York, revealing the city’s role in establishing the career of America’s most famous architect “Traces the transitive relationship of the architect and the city, as well as the genesis of the bohemian culture of the East Village."—Patti Smith, New York Times Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) took his first major trip to New York in 1909, fleeing a failed marriage and artistic stagnation. He returned a decade later, his personal life and architectural career again in crisis. Booming 1920s New York served as a refuge, but it also challenged him and resurrected his career. The city connected Wright with important clients and commissions that would harness his creative energy and define his role in modern architecture, even as the stock market crash took its toll on his benefactors. Wright denounced New York as an “unlivable prison” even as he reveled in its culture. The city became an urban foil for Wright’s work in the desert and in the “organic architecture” he promoted as an alternative to American Art Deco and the International Style. New York became a major protagonist at the end of Wright’s life, as he spent his final years at the Plaza Hotel working on the Guggenheim Museum, the building that would cement his legacy. Anthony Alofsin has broken new ground by mining the recently opened Wright archives held by Columbia University and the Museum of Modern Art. His foundational research provides a crucial and innovative understanding of Wright’s life, his career, and the conditions that enabled his success. The result is at once a stunning biography and a glittering portrait of early twentieth-century Manhattan.

The Making of America's Architect

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: THE LOST YEARS, 1910-1922 is a landmark study that reconstructs Wright's early travels to Europe, provides the definitive history of his famous Wasmuth publications, and introduces an experimental Primitivist phase in the architect's work that followed his “First Golden Age.” Challenging conventional assumptions about influence, this pioneering work also reveals for the first time Wright's interest in feminism that grew from his relationship with Mamah Borthwick, his doomed lover, and shows how contact with Europe in 1909-10 stimulated Wright to expand his design process and revolutionize his methods of making ornament. It reconstructs Wright's travels in Europe and his return to America.Totally original and based on unpublished archival materials, this readable book is a landmark in studies on Frank Lloyd Wright and a significant contribution to the history of modern architecture.

The Lost Years, 1910-1922 : a Study of Influence

The canonical inventors of International Style have long dominated studies of modern European architecture. But in this text, Anthony Alofsin broadens this scope by exploring the rich yet overlooked architecture of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor states.

Anthony Alofsin

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