Drawings and Plans of Frank Lloyd Wright: The Early Period (1893-1909)

'I would much rather build than write about building, but when I am not building, I will write about building -- or the significance of those buildings I have already built.' -- Frank Lloyd Wright Frank Lloyd Wright built a body of works and drawings to illustrate and explain his work: collections of designs with commentary that temperamentally parallel that work: irascible, radical, powerful and dense, astonishing and simple in its clarity. One of his earliest published works illustrates the parallel, preserving thought and design at a prophetic moment, shortly before Wright's genius and fame captured two continents and many converts. The Wasmuth portfolio of drawings (named after the original German publisher) is reproduced here from an extremely rare first edition (1910). Wright's polemical preface indicates the importance he attached to the drawings and their publication: '. . . the work illustrated in this volume, with the exception of the work of Louis Sullivan, is the first