The House Beautiful: A Book Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright Book

The Arts and Crafts movement, with its rejection of corner-cutting mass production technology, gave rise to an enthusiasm for fine art printing, and Chicago—where Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) practiced architecture early in his career—was a national center for artisan books. With a skilled hand for elegant design, Wright created The House Beautiful for the tiny Auvergne Press in the late 1890s; it was produced in an edition of just ninety copies. The book's author, the distinguished Unitarian minister William Gannett, proposed that spiritual, intellectual, societal, and corporeal health could be augmented by a properly designed and furnished home. Gannett's views dovetailed precisely with Wright's emerging theory of organic architecture, and The House Beautiful in consequence, became an early-modernist duet of enlightened prose and visionary design.

This book's complex, exacting drawings--nine of which are in the archives of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, at Taliesin West—surround Gannett's lyrical prose and introduce new chapters (Photography was one of Wright's interests, and twelve of his nature studies appeared in the book, as they do in this edition). Once available only to colleagues of Gannett, Wright, and Auvergne's publisher, William Winslow, The House Beautiful epitomizes the cutting edge of avant-garde design, circa 1897.