Hometown Architect - The Complete Buildings of FLW in Oak Park and River Forest, Illinois

Published in cooperation with the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust, Hometown Architect presents twenty-seven Wright homes, and Unity Temple, documenting one of the architect's most influential periods of his career. The last chapter surveys eight "lost, altered, and possibly Wright" homes. More than ninety photographs of the buildings' exteriors and interiors are accompanied by descriptive captions, while introductory text to each chapter details the story behind each commission, addressing Wright's relationships with his clients, the importance of each building in Wright's oeuvre, and the characteristics that make each house unique. Even if you have not had the good fortune to see these buildings firsthand, the textual and photographic tours comprising this book will make you feel as though you have.
Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple - A Good Time Place

Unity Temple of Oak Park, Illinois, was considered a modern masterwork from the moment it was completed in 1908. Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) sought to produce a structure as dynamic as the congregation that would occupy it, finding inspiration in the liberal nature of Unitarian thought when creating the groundbreaking design. Wright's use of reinforced concrete was revolutionary for the time, making Unity Temple the first concrete monolith in the world. Inside, warm, inviting hues complement the red oak trim, and skylights and high clerestory art-glass windows fill the space with natural light. The building, which continues to serve its original purpose as a meeting-house for worshipers, is also admired for its superb acoustics. Wright was extremely proud of his design and wrote extensively about it in his autobiography.
Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple: A Good Time Place provides an intimate tour of one of Wright's most beloved buildings. Architectural historian Patrick F. Cannon discusses the history of Unity Temple, from Wright's design proposals to its value today as a National Historic Landmark. More than forty-five artful color photographs by James Caulfield, along with historical photographs and floor plans, are featured, accompanied by Cannon's descriptive captions. This book celebrates the ingenuity of a master architect whose vision is evident in every element of Unity Temple.
Prairie Metropolis - Chicago and the Birth of a New American Home

Louis H. Sullivan, one of America's most influential architects, strove to develop a purely American architectural vision, and his ideas led his student Frank Lloyd Wright, and Wright's contemporaries, to develop the Prairie School. Wright's strongly horizontal designs, with low-hipped or flat roofs, bands of art-glass windows, and open interior planning, now number among the most respected domestic buildings in the country. The designs of William Drummond, John Van Bergen, and Walter Burley Griffin had much in common with Wright's, but other architects, such as George W. Maher, Robert Spencer, and Tallmadge & Watson, developed their own interpretations of the Prairie house, adding such decorative elements as columns and mosaic fireplace surrounds, or favoring more conventional entrances with clearly defined rooms.
The Prairie style fell out of vogue largely before the onset of World War I, though John Van Bergen continued to build the houses into the 1920s, and Wright's famous Wingspread in Racine, Wisconsin, was built in 1937. Recently there has been a Prairie revival in keeping with a renewed interest in the Arts and Crafts aesthetic. But the houses conceived by these early-twentieth-century architects stand as icons of American ingenuity.
Prairie Metropolis: Chicago and the Birth of a New American Home offers brief biographies of a dozen architects, with vivid and inviting color photographs of exteriors and interiors designed by each. The 160 photographs by James Caulfield offer a multi-home tour of exquisite taste, while succinct captions by Patrick F. Cannon draw our attention to the details of each home's construction and design.
Louis Sullivan - Creating a New American Architecture

On the eve of the twentieth century, Chicago was rapidly outgrowing its borders. Architect Louis Henry Sullivan (American, 18561924) answered the demand for more office space, theaters, department stores, and financial centers by pioneering what would become an essential model for city life: the skyscraper. Blending Art Nouveau complexity with geometric elegance, Sullivan's tall buildings included Chicagos Auditorium Building, the largest building in the world when it was completed in 1889. Sullivan's design was heralded as the Wonder of the Agea title equally fitting for the architect himself.
Louis Sullivan's designs stand today as leading exemplars of Chicago School architecture. Even Frank Lloyd Wright, a former assistant to Sullivan, would later refer to him as his Lieber Meister, or beloved master. Sullivan brought to his practice a conviction that ornamentation should arise naturally from a building's overall design, restating, in a large or small way, themes expressed in the structure as a whole. Having spent much of his career in a late Victorian world that bristled with busy, fussy ornament for ornament's sake, Sullivan refuted the fashionable style with the now famous dictum Form follows function. This break from tradition is perhaps most evident in Sullivan's strides to reimagine the commercial space from America's earliest skyscrapers to the small-town banks that populated the architect's commissions in the second half of his career.
In Louis Sullivan: Creating a New American Architecture, nearly two hundred photographs with descriptive captions document Sullivan's genius for modern design. Patrick Cannon introduces each chapter with key biographical information and discusses the influences that shaped Sullivan's illustrious career. Rare historical photographs chronicle those buildings that, sadly, have since been destroyed, while James Caulfield's contemporary photography captures Sullivan's existing Chicago buildings and many other structures in eastern and midwestern cities that are of equal importance in the architect's oeuvre.
The Space Within - Inside Great Chicago Buildings
