Papers presented at a symposium; organized, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House, by the Dept. of Art of the University of Chicago, and held Oct. 1984.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"These distinguished essays, noteworthy for the independence and originality of their individual voices and for the complementary perspectives of their varied approaches, offer fresh and provocative interpretations of Wright's achievement. The work of the early Prairie School years is reexamined alongside the dwellings of the later decades, which were designed after the architect abandoned the flat streets of suburban Oak Park and the machine-made world of the city for the rolling, untouched hills of his Welsh ancestors' Wisconsin homestead. These studies present seldom seen sides of Frank Lloyd Wright: the astute businessman; the collector of Japanese prints; the professional practitioner seeking to impose control on his medium in a way that might unite architects in a cooperative effort. But all is not calculation and construction in his work; we are encouraged to see Wright's contribution in terms of another, almost contradictory, characteristic as well: the architect's persistent fascination with unspoiled nature, the pastoral theme that penetrated American life and letters of the late nineteenth century. The Nature of Frank Lloyd Wright places the professional alongside the projects; it describes the conventions and constraints of architectural practice at the turn of the century as it illuminates the prolific and often poetic characteristics of Wright's buildings. Wright, whether planting flowers on a vanishing prairie, constructing craters in the desert, or recreating the remains of eroded landscapes, provided us with buildings that give renewed life to the American myth of Nature as a constant regenerator of both forms and values." --,Dust Jacket.

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