Bruce Brooks PfeifferRecensioni

Nice selection of buildings.

This handsome coffee table book consists of nearly forty Wright buildings, most of them​ still standing at the time of publication. A few, such as the Larkin Building and Midway Gardens, no longer exist, but the remaining buildings were documented with brand new photos. The text by Wright scholar Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer is fairly lengthy (especially when compared to William Allin Storrer's catalog of Wright's buildings), so there is much to learn about the architect's many "masterworks" all in one place.

A must have for any FLW fan. I am simply in awe of all of the sketches, plans, and background in this book.

If there is a heaven, then Frank Lloyd Wright is busy designing homes for the god and angels. It constantly amazes me that this man who was born in the heart of Wisconsin could have designed what can only be called Livable Art.

He was the first architect to take the location of the building into consideration while he designed it. Wright not only designed the house, but he also mandated what kind of furniture should be in it and then realized that mandate by designing it. He would have been comfortable in a loft since his houses were very often built in such a way that the walls created all the separation needed. Living rooms merged with bedrooms, and dining rooms segued into living rooms.

When we look through his designs (both those that were built and those for which the engineering has not yet caught up), we see motifs and construction details that are now common, but did not exist before Wright picked up his pen. And let us also remember that, when a great earthquake destroyed practically every building in Japan in the early 1920s, his hotel remained standing. This is an amazing feat given that research into making buildings resistant to moving earth did not begin until 30 years after the architect died.

I live in Madison, Wisconsin, less than 40 miles from where he spent his childhood and to which he returned as a husband and father. He lost his family near here, but changed that grief into new designs. He legacy still lives in the first Usonian church ever created -- a place that makes one feel tiny in contrast to the god worshiped there. And many other buildings, designed by his followers and students dot the city.

This book doesn't look at all of Wright's designs, only at those which the author considers to be Wright's masterworks.But it took 300 pages to cover this small number of his designs. Paging through it, looking at the beauty he created, can refresh one's head and soul.

Very well illustrated and documented overview of life and designs by Frank Lloyd Wright in the years 1920-1930. Also a chapter on earlier designs. The text stays very close to describing the life as told by FLW himself. There is hardly any theoretical or critical scope outside FLW universe.
Many presentation drawings, a lot as spread over two pages. Contemporary photographies by Weintraub in one chapter all other photographies are near the date of completion or during construction.

A small illustrated book about the shelters built by students at Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture school in Arizona. I like Frank Lloyd Wright's work without being too knowledgeable about it, and this introduced me to a new aspect of his work in his teaching. Like all Pomegranate books I have seen, this is very well produced, and demonstrated how all the shelters seemed to draw something from Wright's work while being individual to their creators.

An elegant little book published by Pomegranate discussing the apprentice shelters made and lived in by the students of Frank Lloyds West's School af Architecture. Only 71 pages but full of pictures and plans.
The 'shelters' themselves must be close to marginal in function even in the desert (they would be fair weather shelters in many places and would be useless in the weeks of horizonal rain of Scotland and many would probably disintegrate in a heavy duty wind) but are often extra-ordinarily beautiful works of art.. Well written text and gorgeous photographs .

Gorgeous, if tiny. I love this series, and wish mostly that the illustrations could be larger to do more justice to the topic. As a Wright aficionado, I'm a sucker for anything to do with his sense of architecture and design.

This lovely, small book focuses on one of the more interesting aspects of a Taliesin education: Virtually all students build their own housing out in the desert surrounding the campus. These small structures - considered far preferable to dwelling in the monastic dormitory - are a testament to the imagination and skill of the students. Some of the dwellings are presented as first built, while others as they have been altered over time by successive occupants (students will often move into a shelter built by a former student, and modify it to meet their own needs). The book is small, not coffee-table sized, but the photography is gorgeous. It is refreshing to read about Taliesin but to have the focus on something other than Wright himself.

LibraryThing Early Reviewers, Oct 2011

Oops - an overdue review! This is about the student village at Frank Lloyd Wright's Arizona workshop and architecture teaching institute. A quick read, mainly consisting of pictures, it's very interesting, with plans and information on the use and development of the shelters that students were asked to plan and build for themselves as part of their architectural education.

In 1937, Frank Lloyd Wright established the Taliesin Fellowship on Maricopa Mesa in Arizona. Young apprentices who joined the school lived and worked in the remote desert. Initially each young man was given a white, ten-by-ten-foot sheepherder tent, but eventually a program was developed where an apprentice was expected to live in the tent for a required period of time and then could go on to build a more permanent structure. Under Arizona Skies introduces the reader to these individual dwellings through vivid images, floor plans, elevations and informative text. The structures are dynamic, intimate, uplifting and seem to me to be a symbol of the determination, independence and innovation of the Fellowship school. This is a thoroughly charming book and a quick and satisfying read.

This is a charming small book which shows off some of the many innovative desert dwellings constructed by students at the Taliesin West site in the Arizona desert. The text introduction is well written and serves as a good primer for the pages that follow. I would have preferred a little more text to accompany the sparse descriptions of each construction, and possibly some input from the apprentices responsible for them, but overall it is a delightfully presented representation of what can be achieved with minimal resources in a harsh environment.

The photography is excellent, but it would have been nice to have the book published in a larger format - although understandably the publisher and the budget available dictate such things. The illustrations of the design plans though were in the main just a little too small and inadequate to really satisfy my curiosity. Overall a really nice publication which will be of interest to anyone interested in architecture or contemporary design.

This is a beautiful little book of a scant seventy pages or so, which informs us about a little known aspect in the education of budding architects at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture at Taliesin West in Arizona.

When Wright established his school in the Arizona desert in 1937, students lived in ten by ten foot tents while they acquired the skills of their profession. Over time, the tents morphed into somewhat more elaborate shelters which the students were required to build with small stipends and the generous donations of materials from local builders and suppliers, and lots of sweat equity.

The book documents a number of these shelters, from the beginnings of the school to the present time. They are beautiful examples of innovative, spare and functional architecture. Numerous color photographs illustrate the structures, aided by floor plans and architectural renderings.

If one has an interest in architecture, or good design in general, this is a must for ones library.

This is a gem of a little book. It explores the often overlooked aspect that the Taliesen apprentices built their own desert shelters as part of their education. I found this book enlightening, especially in concert with the current trend of design/build education programs, and it leaves one to ponder the importance of hands on architecture. The book provides an good overview but not too much depth and is an great introduction, which is elaborated with a verbal and pictoral history on a handful of shelters from 1937 to present, each including photographs, a plan drawing and section drawing.½

Under Arizona Skies is a delightful little book about self-built student structures at Taliesin West, architect Frank Lloyd Wright's home and school located in northeast Scottsdale, AZ. Compiled and written by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Director of Archives, and Dean Victor E. Sidy, the little volume, barely seven inches square (and one quarter inch thick ... a full half-inch if you include hardcover thickness), the book contains a total of 72 pages, 10 only of which are of text. This slim volume is primarily a picture-book, which is very nearly ideal, as it's the student structures which we wish to see and explore.

The several structures illustrated here are of astonishing variety, considering their main purpose is a simple one: to provide a place to toss a sleeping bag at night, as the apprentices live and work in the main campus during the day. An outgrowth of Frank Lloyd Wright's desert winter camp, the student shelters began as simple four-sided commercially produced sheepherder's tents, in this case originally erected on ten-foot square concrete slabs. Over the years (nearly 75 years, now, since 1938) the structures have evolved into something quite different: deliberate, creative essays and explorations in the art and science of site, structure, space, and materials: raw, student solutions to problems peculiar to their open desert setting, everything disciplined primarily by the individual apprentice's often strictly limited budget.

One problem in the choice of lodging, which most Taliesin apprentices have to face at one time or other, is the existence of desert wildlife, such as the various species of rattlesnake, but, especially, the native, pesky, pack-rat (the Arizona woodrat ... Neotoma Devis), which creature has the uncanny habit of taking advantage of every new opportunity. More than once has a student arrived at his "tent" at night, only to be painfully impaled on a ball of cholla, carefully placed in a quiet corner by these intrepid intruders.

Recently students have devised structures meant to minimize or eliminate this hazard ... witness the sheepherder's tent pictured on the cover, which is hung over the desert from a tall steel support embedded deep within a concrete bastion. Other structures have been built up off the desert floor. Indeed, one structure spans a deep desert wash ... not once, but twice!

All this is well-enough, as the process of design and construction of student housing has been somewhat systematized since the early days, when the rule was the simple, inexpensive, 4-sided tent, most of which were constructed at a time when few apprentices had access to or took advantage of outside resources. Several new advantages outlined in the text have helped give rise to strikingly new, clever and unique structures, some of which are surprisingly sophisticated and well-built. It's not certain, however, that all of these new structures properly balance the various limitations which gave rise to form. Though all designs are worthy of praise, one or two seem to swing just a bit far out in "left-field". But never mind ... as the book illustrates ... the only "tent" which has prevailed from first to last are those of the sheepherder.

Plans help illustrate the structures. However, as they are apparently computer-generated, these plans and elevation lack a certain clarity. It's sometimes difficult to connect line to form and photograph. The text itself is cut to the bone ... which is surprising, as an earlier, far more informative version of this subject was published in 2007 in the Taliesin Quarterly: Spring 2007, Volume 18, No.2. The reader can only assume the publisher's rigid format dictated the compass of the book .

It should be noted that during the mid-fifties Wright, himself, designed an apprentice tent in the form of a tetrahedron ... a three-walled "tentrahedron" with a built in canvas floor. Ten-feet in length on each of its six sides, this tent could be completely zipped-up to prevent the intrusion of unwanted creatures. Unfortunately, as the years passed, this unique one-of-a-kind design became more and more expensive to produce, and no more than two were ever constructed. Though the photo of one of Wright's tents is not identified in the book, an early version of the "tentrahedon" is pictured at the lower right of page 9, while a simple plan showing their layout, complete with terraces, is illustrated on page 16.

Wright frequently devised new forms for living, and clients often faced the problem of hauling their old furniture into an uncompromising structure of uncommon geometric shape ... circle, triangle, hexagon, and the like, and the disparity between the two competing forms ... structure and furniture ... could often be jarring, which prompted Wright to design much of his own furniture.

Here a confession: For a number of years I had the privilege of calling one of Wright's 3-walled tents "home". It might be instructive for me to briefly discuss the problem of living, or sleeping, at least, in a small, triangular tent. At the time the other inhabitant of a similar 3-walled structure had built himself a purely conventional rectangular bed-frame, which he pushed against the far wall of his tent. His solution seemed to me a somewhat clumsy compromise, so I sat down at my draughting board, penciled in the plan of my new tent, then struck a straight line from one of the three corners to the middle of the opposite side, which formed two identically sized right-triangles.

I then drew to scale a 4 x 8 sheet of 3/4" plywood, with the intent of cutting the sheet to fit into one of the right-triangles ... the one opposite the entrance, which bisected one triangular wall. Of course the plywood was not large enough to fill the entire span, but there was just enough "waste" to assemble two small triangles to fill in the missing spaces, both of which (one, an equilateral triangle at the far corner), served as small tables. Raised up off the floor on 2 x 4's this sleeping platform seemed to me to be far more appropriate than that of the conventional rectangle, and, as the platform was ten feet long, the odd shape was no problem, ergonomically. With the canvas door open, the complete ensemble "looked" much more appropriate. It was simple and direct, with each part organically related to Wright's basic "idea". A good lesson in design. I've never lived quite so grandly.

I found this book interesting, but, as some of the other reviewers have mentioned, it lacked much depth. I was hoping to hear about what inspired the students to build their individual structures and how the works of Frank Lloyd Wright had influenced their designs. The photos were beautiful and most of the shelters were interesting to peruse, but honestly, this seemed to be more of a coffee table book than a book to really inform the reader about anything in particular. That being said, I did thoroughly enjoy reading this book. I spent several hours just looking at the structures and trying to envision what the students did when they designed the small shelters. Also, as usual, I was impressed with Pomegranate's handling of the book and how much care they took in getting it to us in pristine condition. I have yet to find one of the Wright books published by Pomegranate Press that I didn't immediately fall in love with.

A well put together book that unfortunately doesn't have much depth and clearly exhibits the work of FLW's students, not the master himself. Recreated sections describing the buildings are added as supplementary graphics but serve to confuse more than explain the structures. These graphics also include absurd break-dancing people which distract from what could have been a surperb treatise on an interesting aspect of life at Taliesin West. I look forward to a more scholarly follow-up in this series.

This is a fascinating little book and the title describes it exactly. It's mostly pictures and plans of the shelters with descriptions of the kind you want to go back and look at again, trying to imagine living in them.

Small and perfectly formed this is a bite sized look at the buildings designed by students of the Frank LLoyd Wright school of architecture. Frank LLoyd started his unorthodox school in mid 1930s and found a beautiful spot in the Arizona desert for his students to work, live and build their own accommodation. It's been going for a while now and there are some fascinating buildings, this book has selection of them, some gorgeous pictures and interesting historic snippets. I really didn't want it to end, I could have viewed many more examples and being greedy I would of loved more interviews with students on what it was like.

A great, beautiful book that does exactly what it sets out to do. Recommended.

I hate to sound like a cheap advert, but the first thing that strikes the reader about this book is that its publishers care about it. It is a love child, not something thrown together for monetary gain. The book comes shrink wrapped; now, I know that some people might chide Pomegranate for wasting the earth's resources, but I got a pristine copy, not something with bashed corners and marks from being in a dusty corner. This is a book that deserves to be around for a hundred years, not read and discarded.

The feeling of quality continues when one examines the contents. The book is about Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West home which he built with the express design of using the desert as a training ground for architects. The students initially live in tents and, during their stay, build living accommodation in the desert. As the book points out, this makes the student perform a triumvirate of roles; designer, builder and client. Surely, there can be little better way to become an architect: how many times have you looked at some monstrosity and thought how different it might have looked, were the designer to have lived therein?

The book is lavishly illustrated with colour pictures, anyone of which could be framed and hung as a work of art. A sketch design and a taught narrative give the reader all that they need to know about each of the dwellings.

This is asuperb book and I have decided that, were I to be lucky enough to win the lottery (and this would take considerable luck, because I do not enter same!), the first thing that I would buy is not a new car, a foreign holiday or jewellery, but the entire back catalogue of these wonderful tomes (and NO, I am not getting paid to say that). It is a pleasure to handle an object which must give so much pride to everyone involved in its production. I need six, possibly seven stars to do it justice.

This thin volume from Pomegranate press is the latest addition to books on Frank Lloyd Wright’s legacy. Instead of focusing on the work of Wright himself, it instead lets us take a peak into a program that he started in Arizona, Taliesin West, and the work that some of the students have created there. This book is jam packed with beautiful photographs and architectural plans of some of the small buildings created by the students that they lived in during their time in the program.

My one complaint about the book is that I wish they had put more written information in about the program at Taliesin West (and how it’s still ongoing) and about the artists themselves. I would love to know what inspired these artists to create the structures they did, what process they went through to plan and build, and just to get a better sense of them.

Even though the $25 price tag seems a bit high for such a slim volume, the book is literally packed with gorgeous photographs that capture these buildings beautifully. A worthwhile addition for any fan of Frank Lloyd Wright.

This little book, "Under Arizona Skies", is a welcome addition the the growing library of publications on Frank Lloyd Wright -- his life, his work and his legacy -- that have become a small industry over the past few decades. The Arizona venture, a relatively late piece of the Wright saga, is nicely documented in this slim little volume.

The very familiar structure of Taliesin West and it's contemporaneous buildings from the late twenties and the thirties are described and shown at the beginning of the book. But it is the later structures, the ephemeral shelters designed and built by Taliesin students and apprentices in more recent years that are the most interesting architectural works here. Much of this work has not often been published. Designed and built as early as 1938 and as late as 2010, these little buildings trace the evolution of Wright's design philosophy down to the present day. With the exception of John Lautner, these designers will not be household names. But their work is interesting nonetheless. The three essays at the front of the book give the historical background and context to the work contained in this book.

The vintage photos of Taliesin and the other early Wright buildings form the basis for the more recent photographs of the later structures. Supplementing the photos of the desert shelters are a series of architectural drawings and plans which are useful in interpreting the structures. These drawings would have been even more useful had they been better labelled as to scale and room-by-room function.

Anyone interested in Wright's work, and especially the influence he continues to have more that half a century after his death, will enjoy this study. The extensive acknowledgements page at the end offers leads to those wishing to do further research on their own.

This is a great book providing just the right amount of historical background and images of small yet innovative structures. I only wished there were more selections to look at and read about and maybe a little more information on the architecture and insides of the structures.½

Superb collection of plans, photographs, and drawings of all buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Readers must be careful, however, as plans illustrating each building are not necessarily the exact plan of the structure as built.

Reissued as a larger Taschen 25th anniversary edition with a different cover, they managed to trick me into a re-buy. I only wished somebody had found the time to actually, well, read the book since 1991. The text still features nonsense such as "masculine virility" and incomplete sentences. The parallel translations are mixed: The French translation is ok, the German one terrible (It's main fault is forcing the German text into the English sentence structure, an awkward procedure normally restricted to machine-translations. Strangely for a book written by an expert, the book lacks focus and direction. A novice is completely lost amid the chronological selection of works and their criteria of inclusion.

The only redeeming features are Wright's wonderful plans and photographs of his buildings, as well as the book's cheap price.½