In this handsome book, esteemed architectural historian Neil Levine investigates for the first time the complex history of representation—the use and meaning of architectural signifiers—from the 18th through the 20th century. Using the lens of a continuous theoretical argument, Levine provides a detailed survey and critical analysis of major works by a host of modern architects, including Étienne-Louis Boullée, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Louis Kahn, Henri Labrouste, Augustus Welby Pugin, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, John Soane, Louis Sullivan, Mies van der Rohe, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, and Frank Lloyd Wright. 
Levine posits that all modern architects, much like visual artists, have had to grapple with issues of representation in their work. Interweaving influential examples from outside the scope of modern architecture, Levine traces the history of representation in architecture, and in writings on architecture, both within each architect’s oeuvre and throughout the centuries discussed. The book features previously unpublished images, many created for this publication, and it addresses a variety of specific cases while offering an original and panoramic view of the history of architecture. Beautifully written and accessible, Modern Architecture is destined to become a classic.

Modern Architecture: Representation and Reality

Arts & Photography

Levine, Neil

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

Neil Levine's study of the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, beginning with his work in Oak Park in the late 1880s and culminating in the construction of the Guggenheim museum in New York and the Marin County Civic Center in the 1950s, if the first comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the architect's entire career since the opening of the Wright Archives over a decade ago. The most celebrated and prolific of modern architects, Wright built more than four hundred buildings and designed at least twice as many more. The characteristic features of his work--the open plan, dynamic space, fragmented volumes, natural materials, and integral structure--established the basic way that we think about modern architecture. For a general audience, this engaging book provides an introduction to Wright's remarkable accomplishments, as seen against the background of his eventful and often tragic life. For the architect or the architectural historian, it will be an important source of new insights into the development of Wright's whole body of work. It integrates biographical and historical material in a chronologically ordered framework that makes sense of his enormously varied career, and it provides over four hundred illustrations running parallel to the text.
 Levine conveys the meanings of the continuities and changes that he sees I Wright's architecture and thought by focusing successive chapters on his most significant buildings, such as the Winslow House, Taliesin, Hollyhock House, Fallingwater, Tailsen west, and the Guggenheim Museum. A new understanding of the representational imagery and narrative structure of Wright's work, along with a much-needed reconsideration of its historical and contextual underpinnings, gives this study a unique place in the writings on Wright. In contrast to the emphasis a previous generation of critics and historians placed on Wright's earlier buildings, this book offers a broader perspective that sees Wright's later work as the culmination of his earlier efforts and the basis for a new understanding of the centrality of his career to the evolution of modern architecture as a whole.

The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright

Architecture

Princeton University Press

Biographies & Memoirs

A landmark book on the architect's designs for remaking the modern city
This is the first book devoted to Frank Lloyd Wright's designs for remaking the modern city. Stunningly comprehensive, The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright presents a radically new interpretation of the architect’s work and offers new and important perspectives on the history of modernism. Neil Levine places Wright’s projects, produced over more than fifty years, within their historical, cultural, and physical contexts, while relating them to the theory and practice of urbanism as it evolved over the twentieth century.
Levine overturns the conventional view of Wright as an architect who deplored the city and whose urban vision was limited to a utopian plan for a network of agrarian communities he called Broadacre City. Rather, Levine reveals Wright’s larger, more varied, interesting, and complex urbanism, demonstrated across the span of his lengthy career. Beginning with Wright’s plans from the late 1890s through the early 1910s for reforming residential urban neighborhoods, mainly in Chicago, and continuing through projects from the 1920s through the 1950s for commercial, mixed-use, civic, and cultural centers for Chicago, Madison, Washington, Pittsburgh, and Baghdad, Levine demonstrates Wright’s place among the leading contributors to the creation of the modern city. Wright’s often spectacular designs are shown to be those of an innovative precursor and creative participant in the world of ideas that shaped the modern metropolis.
Lavishly illustrated with drawings, plans, maps, and photographs, this book features the first extensive new photography of materials from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives. The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright will serve as one of the most important books on the architect for years to come.

The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright

    Wisconsin is the "Wright State," and it’s influence on the young Frank Lloyd Wright, both geographic and cultural, is carefully explored in this review of 50 of his Wisconsin projects. The book then uses those projects as case studies tracing the development of his remarkable career.Distributed for the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The Wright State: Frank Lloyd Wright in Wisconsin

Lipman, Jonathan

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Milwaukee Art Museum

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