Years With Frank Lloyd Wright; Apprentice to Genius

New York: Dover Publications, Inc, 1985. First Dover Edition [stated], presumed first printing thus. Trade paperback. Good. The format is approximately 8.25 inches by 11 inches. iv, [2], 228, [4] pages. Illustrated front cover. Illustrations (all black and white--some in original 1979 McGraw-Hill publication were in color). Selected Frank Lloyd Wright buildings open to the public. Index. Some cover wear. Edgar A. Tafel (March 12, 1912 - January 18, 2011) was an American architect, best known as a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright. Tafel was born in New York City and moved to New Jersey with his dressmaking parents. He was educated at the Ferrer Center and Colony, the Walden School in Manhattan, and New York University. Tafel began his career as an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin along with Wesley Peters, John "Jack" Howe and Abram Dombar, among others. Tafel was considered the "unofficial guardian of the Frank Lloyd Wright School", despite the rift that had developed between Tafel and his mentor when Tafel, after 9 years, left Taliesin to pursue his own work. Tafel worked on several of Wright's most famous projects including Fallingwater, Wingspread, and the Johnson Wax Headquarters. After WWII, he opened his own architectural office in New York City. One of his best known works as a solo practitioner is the Mellin Macnab Building for the First Presbyterian Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Tafel's design combined Prairie School influences with the Gothic style of the sanctuary, and the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission called it "a fine example of contemporary design ... used intelligently, to bring a much needed contemporary building into harmony with a neighborhood." From the special vantage point of a former apprentice who for nine years lived and worked under "the fury and wrath of genius," Edgar Tafel presents a wonderfully revealing portrait of America's greatest architect. Unpredictable, cantankerous, a striking figure with white hair, cape and cane, Frank Lloyd Wright was an individualistic spirit who delighted in acting out his own myth. Here is an intimate view of the many moods of Wright the man, warts and all, the inspired teacher, and the creative visionary, by a devoted student who came to know him as few others have. Now a successful architect in his own right, Tafel takes us back to 1932 and the early years of the Taliesin Fellowship when a group of promising young apprentices gathered in Spring Green, Wisconsin, to be near the 65-year-old master and work at his elbow. We are privy to the incredible richness and diversity of Wright's thinking, his passion for artistic truth and devotion to the cause of architecture, his unfailing creative surges, as well as to his eccentricities and fascinating details about life at Taliesin. We see genius at close range as he designs the most famous house of the twentieth century. Fallingwater, the magnificent Johnson Wax Building and Wingspread; as he ceaselessly tinkers with his designs, all the while proclaiming his organic theories of architecture; as he badgers, bullies, awes and inspires a generation of young architects. Tafel's memoir provides us with a rare view of the man who considered his chief mission in life to create a genuinely American architecture and style of living, wholly personal and original. Here are illuminating anecdotes about his Prairie house and Oak Park periods, his disdain for the Bauhaus school and its leading practitioners, his total immersion in the design and construction of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, his romance with concrete, his efforts to develop the practical "Usonian homes," and much else. It is also an enlightening summary of the facts and forces which influenced the history of American architecture. Written with affection and admiration, and enhanced with over 300 photographs, many never before published. Years with Frank Lloyd Wright offers an unusually candid portrait of the brilliant, eccentric genius who charted a new course for modern architecture.