Among architects and preservationists, the writings of Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) have long been considered major resources. They inspired a generation of American architects, including Frank Furness, John Wellborn Root, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1894, the critic Montgomery Schuyler observed that Viollet-le-Duc's books "have had the strongest influence on this generation of readers." But for the past century, all but one of his works have been out of print in English. These readings carefully selected from the entire range of Viollet-le-Duc's work make available the historical insights and practical principles of one of the most imaginative, and inspiring architectural theorists of the modern era. M.F. Hearn has culled from Viollet-le-Duc's books on architecture the passages in which his major ideas about the theory of architecture are most cogently expressed.Hearn has arranged and interplated the readings in a sequence of topics covering Viollet-le-Duc's views on the architecture of the past, his convictions about the education of architects, his philosophy of method, principles of design, and his guidelines for restoration. The selections are introduced by a biographical essay connected by interpretive commentaries, and followed by a biographical note.

Painstakingly researched and illuminating account of the making of the Fred C. Robie home. Revealing family documents, excerpts from a 1958 interview with Fred Robie, and 160 black-and-white illustrations.

The first authoritative and illustrated survey of the life and work of one Chicago's most acclaimed architects and preservationists, John Vinci is a comprehensive and richly illustrated guide that readers interested in architecture, urban design, and historic preservation will prize.

As the first comprehensive encyclopedic survey of Western architectural theory from Vitruvius to the present, this book is an essential resource for architects, students, teachers, historians, and theorists. Using only original sources, Kruft has undertaken the monumental task of researching, organizing, and analyzing the significant statements put forth by architectural theorists over the last two thousand years. The result is a text that is authoritative and complete, easy to read without being reductive.

Chicago's first skyscrapers are famous for projecting the city's modernity around the world. But what did they mean at home, to the Chicagoans who designed and built them, worked inside their walls, and gazed up at their façades? Answering this multifaceted question, Chicago 1890 reveals that early skyscrapers offered hotly debated solutions to the city's toughest problems and, in the process, fostered an urban culture that spread across the country. An ambitious reinterpretation of the works of Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and John Wellborn Root, this volume uses their towering achievements as a lens through which to view late nineteenth-century urban history. Joanna Merwood-Salisbury sheds new light on many of Chicago's defining events--including violent building trade strikes, the Haymarket bombing, the World's Columbian Exposition, and Burnham's Plan of Chicago--by situating the Masonic Temple, the Monadnock Building, and the Reliance Building at the center of the city's cultural and political crosscurrents. While architects and property owners saw these pioneering structures as manifestations of a robust American identity, immigrant laborers and social reformers viewed them as symbols of capitalism's inequity. Illuminated by rich material from the period's popular press and professional journals, Merwood-Salisbury's chronicle of this contentious history reveals that the skyscraper's vaunted status was never as inevitable as today's skylines suggest.