Frank Lloyd Wright - Hollyhock House and Olive Hill

This book documents, for the first time, one of the largest and most important commissions of Frank Lloyd Wright's career. Between 1914 and 1924 Wright designed an entire theater community for art patron Aline Barnsdall on her thirty-six-acre Hollywood site, called Olive Hill. Although Wright designed fourteen projects for the Barnsdall estate, only one, Hollyhock House, now a museum owned by the City of Los Angeles, has been widely published. Hollyhock and another house/studio were the only buildings on the site to be completed, but all the projects are extremely important because they bridge the period between the early, well known Oak Park era of the Prairie Houses and Wright's "modern" work after 1936. This chapter in his career--except for his involvement in another huge project, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo--is virtually unknown.

Supported by unpublished drawings, photographs, correspondence, documents, and interviews from a variety of public and private sources, this volume is the product of ten years of research by architectural historian Kathryn Smith.