THE NATURAL HOUSE
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright: THE NATURAL HOUSE. New York: Horizon Press, 1954. First edition [with "/54" in the initial box on the front cover]. Quarto. Oatmeal cloth decorated in Cherokee red and black. Printed dust jacket. Endpapers printed in red. 223 pp. 116 black and white photographs, illustrations, diagrams, floorplans and elevations. Front pastedown lightly offset from the red block on the front free endpaper. Unclipped dust jacket with $6.50 price intact. Jacket lightly rubbed with a couple of faint scratches over authors’ portrait on rear panel, otherwise a nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
8.25 x 10.25 hardcover book with 224 pages and 116 black and white photographs, illustrations, diagrams, floorplans and elevations. [Sweeney 992]. “For more than a half century Frank Lloyd Wright has been the prophet of a new idea in architecture. It is called ‘organic architecture.’ It has spread throughout the world.” This is Frank Lloyd Wright’s treatise on designing the organic house of the future, with particular attention paid to his Usonian house projects and descriptions of a simplified version— the Usonian Automatic—“that the owners themselves can build with great economy and beauty.” “The Usonian house,” Wright proclaims, “aims to be a natural performance, one that is integral to site, to environment, to the life of the inhabitants, integral with the nature of the materials.”
"In our country the chief obstacle to any real solution of the moderate-cost house-problem is the fact that our people do not really know how to live, imagining their idiosyncrasies to be their "tastes," their prejudices to be their predilections and their ignorance to be virtue where any beauty of living is concerned." -- Frank Lloyd Wright
From the book: “ This book not only brings together for the first time Mr. Wright’s earlier writings onthehouse of moderate cost; it also contains a great deal of new material, never before published, which he has just written specifically to answer such important practical questions as: How can it be done with a limited budget? what kind of land and where/ What materials to use? What is the best kind of roof? etc.”
"I am certain that any approach to the new house . . . must be a pattern for more simple and, at the same time, more gracious living: new but suitable to living conditions as they might so well be in the country we live in today. This needed house of moderate cost must sometime face reality. Why not now? The houses built by the million . . . do no such thing. To me such houses are "escapist" houses, putting on some style or other, really having none. Style is important. A style is not. There is all the difference when we work with style and not for a style." -- Frank Lloyd Wright