Product Review

Early on, Frank Lloyd Wright knew he would be an architect. His overriding goal was to create a Democratic American Architecture. But first he had to create an American Architecture. Born in Bear Valley, Wisconsin, raised in nearby Richland Center, he spent time in Massachusetts before settling in central Wisconsin. His architectural career began in Chicago, ended in Arizona. He created Prairie architecture, which was American, then Usonian architecture, which was Democratic American. This book covers his work to 1910, while Frank Lloyd Wright: Designing Democratic America, covers 1911 to the end of Wright’s long life. When Mr. Wright died, he had lived the entire second half of the nation’s existence. William Allin Storrer worked with the dean of American architectural historians, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, author of In the Nature of Materials (the first and still important work about Wright’s architecture) in the production of The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, A Complete Catalog. Over a dinner to celebrate completion of the research in Hitchcock’s archive, Hitchcock commented that there were still houses out there that nobody knew about: “Wright would drive me through Evanston, River Forest and Oak Park, and Hyde Park” confided he. “Every so often Wright would point to a building and say, ‘I built that, but nobody’ll ever know.’“ This book reveals several works about which “nobody’ll ever know,” works now believed to have been by Wright or by Wright in collaboration with another architect. It is the story of Wright’s achieving half of his goal, an American Architecture, in his Prairie era homes.