Letters to Architects

Letters to Architects presents letters addressed to architects practicing throughout the world, many of them contemporaries with Frank Lloyd Wright during the first half of the twentieth century. Taken as a whole, this selection of letters aims at revealing an underlying unity of purpose: the growth of his work and the unquestionable magnitude of influence it engendered in the world of architecture. The letters are organized into five sections. Section One presents the first publication ever to be made of the letters between Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis H. Sullivan. Section Two traces Wright's concern, through letters addressed to both European and American architects, that his work be understood as the cornerstone of an American Culture. In Section Three, correspondence has been selected to include three specific persons: Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Lewis Mumford, and Howard Myers. These men offered Wright a special forum from which he could speak to the profession as a whole, most particularly through the medium of publication. Section Four narrates, by means of letters to various architects concerned with the assembling and exhibition of the largest one man architectural exhibition ever to be produced, the details, trials, problems, and results of such a large undertaking. Section Five recounts the honors bestowed on Frank Lloyd Wright first in England, in 1941, and then in his own country, in 1949. It shows his concern for the profession of architecture in the moving address he gave at the occasion of his receiving the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects.