Wright and New York

The Making of America's Architect

By: Anthony Alofsin

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Hardcover | 25 June 2019 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
352 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.95 x 16.74 x 2.5

Hardcover

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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.

Industry Reviews

"Anthony Alofsin's Wright and New York 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

"Revelatory."-Norman Weinstein, Architectural Record

"A painstaking research"-Luis Fernandez-Galiano, Arquitectura Viva

Finalist in the PROSE Awards Architecture and Urban Planning category, sponsored by the Association of American Publishers

"Anthony Alofsin engagingly examines Frank Lloyd Wright's previously unexplored relationship with New York City and the influence one had over the other. Illuminating an atmosphere of turbulent change and a burgeoning bohemian culture, this is the perfect book to read when navigating a city that seems, more than ever, a victim of heartless reconstruction."-Patti Smith

"A watershed investigation of Wright's life in the 1920s, when he landed, adrift, in New York. The city proved antagonistic, irresistibly so, and transformed him. Alofsin's erudition, compelling prose, and first-rate detective work will alter how you perceive both Wright and Manhattan."-Judith Dupre, New York Times bestselling author of Skyscrapers

"Alofsin chronicles the relationship between America's greatest architect and its greatest city with the precision of a detective, the perspective of a historian, and the flair of a novelist."-Thomas Mellins, author of New York 1930: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars

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