Word: wrights
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...JOHN B. WRIGHT...
...afternoon in 1890 the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan bustled into the office of his chief draftsman, Frank Lloyd Wright, and tossed onto the table his plans for a new building in St. Louis. "Look at it!" cried Sullivan triumphantly. "It's tall! Sullivan had good reason to boast: he had given form and logic to the skyscraper for the first time. A readable and richly illustrated new book called Architecture Today and Tomorrow (McGraw-Hill; $17.50) takes off from that boast to trace the rise of modern architecture-and the lively rebellion against it among the modernists themselves...
...result, there is a rare freshness about the book, a personal as well as professional intimacy. In between the more technical passages, it is good to get a glimpse of Frank Lloyd Wright swatting flies and crying, "Mies," "Breuer" or "Gropius" at every swat, or to hear France's Auguste Ferret acidly say of his onetime associate Le Corbusier, "He is a clerk. He will pass," while Wright gleefully agreed...
Less Was More . . . The first part of the book deals with the old masters-Sullivan, Ferret, Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Finland's Alvar Aalto. Some readers may question Jones's conclusion that Wright and not Le Corbusier was the greatest architect of their generation, or that Wright's corkscrew Guggenheim Museum is his best work. (Perhaps because Le Corbusier is the most inaccessible of architects, Jones's chapter on him lacks the luster of the others...
...Wright and Le Corbusier are not the pivotal figures of the book; instead, they are Mies van der Rohe and to a lesser degree Walter Gropius. Mies, declaring the doctrine of "less is more," gave modern architecture its greatest discipline and refinement-the spareness visible in glass and metal in any American city. And German-born Walter Gropius, with the artists, architects and craftsmen of his famed Bauhaus at Dessau in the '205, established the grammar of design suited to modern mass production. They made simplicity and austerity and a faithfulness to function the liberating marks of the International...