Frank Lloyd Wright, les maisons

Seventy years of activity and a remarkable capacity to renew himself, one could resume Frank Lloyd Wright’s in this manner. He is the most famous American architect of the XXth century. A thick, very complete book -hence very difficult to manipulate!- lists all the individual houses he designed, from 1889 when he was a young partner of Louis Sullivan in Chicago, to 1959. From the shingle houses with slanted roofs to the large horizontal homes in the Prairy, from the "cabins" fit into nature to the "American" or prefabricated homes, how many forms and ideas! Concrete, glass and steel, as well as bricks, stone and wood. The architect is at the crossroads of rural tradition and technologic progress. For his funeral, it seems he had requested a cart with wheels with air chambers...A few icons, adapted to the different biotopes of a continent, keep his legend alive: in the North, the famous House of cascades and the Taliesin West in Scottsdale, in the heat of Arizona.

• Frank Lloyd Wright, the houses, by Alan Hess, photos by Alan Weintraub, Le Chêne 2006, ISBN-2842776593, 544 p. 65€