1st Edition

On Frank Lloyd Wright's Concrete Adobe Irving Gill, Rudolph Schindler and the American Southwest

By Donald Leslie Johnson Copyright 2013
258 Pages
by Routledge

260 Pages
by Routledge

258 Pages
by Routledge

During the years 1919 into 1925 Frank Lloyd Wright worked on four houses and a kindergarten located in metropolitan Los Angeles using concrete blocks as the main building material. The construction system has been described by Wright and others as ’uniquely molded’, ’woven like a textile fabric’ and perceived as ground breaking, truly modern, unprecedented. Many have attempted to uphold these... Read more
Contents: Preface; introduction; Questions, events ... and precast concrete; The buildings; The Taylors and the Griffins; Tiles and blocks; Wright’s fiction; Historians’ fiction; Irving Gill, regionalism and concrete adobe; Closure ... Schindler and resurgence; Appendices; References; Index.

Biography

Donald Leslie Johnson

’Don Johnson is an authority on Frank Lloyd Wright. He is also an experienced architectural historian who takes nothing for granted, and tenaciously goes back to basics - the original documents, the buildings themselves, and their historical context - when investigating tendentious historical claims. This challenging study of Wright’s five concrete block houses deals with what was perhaps a minor phase in Wright’s prodigious output, but Johnson’s highly original conclusions have very wide implications for our understanding of architectural mythology, the regional architecture of the south-west, and the character and reputation of Frank Lloyd Wright himself.’ Gilbert Herbert, Technion: Israel Institute of Technology, Israel