Price Tower Arts Center
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Reading Group

Want to socialize with other intellectuals?  Join the Reading Group!

This free ninety-minute book discussion engages all participants. Attendees are expected to have completed each selection prior to attending and bring questions.  Books are available in The Wright Place museum store.  Join exciting reading discussions in these upcoming sessions....

Time: 6:30pm.  Cost: Free

PART 1: January 6, 2009 – Price Tower Reading Group DiscussionFallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E.J. Kaufmann, and America’s Most Extraordinary House by Franklin Toker (Knopf, 2005). 

PART 2: March 3, 2009 - Price Tower Reading Group Discussion
Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E.J. Kaufmann, and America’s Most Extraordinary House by Franklin Toker (Knopf, Fallingwater Rising2005). Fallingwater Rising is the biography of the most famous American house of the twentieth century--Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, culled from hundreds of interviews, letters, and contemporary references by an internationally recognized specialist in the history of architecture.

When he got the commission to design the house, in 1934, Wright was nearing 70. He was living in professional isolation, his early fame long gone. Like so many Depression-era Americans, he had no new work in sight. Into his orbit stepped Edgar Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department-store mogul and philanthropist with the burning ambition to build a world-famous work of architecture.

It was an unlikely collaboration: the Jewish merchant who had no lasting concern for modern architecture and the brilliant modernist who was paranoid about Jews--among many fictive enemies. But the two men produced an extraordinary building of lasting architectural significance that brought international fame to them both, and gained Wright the status of the greatest architect of the twentieth century.

FALLINGWATER RISING continues to gain readers all around the world. It was cited as runner-up for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, administered jointly by the journalism programs of Harvard and Columbia universities (the judges were the highly distinguished Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times; author Sylvia Nasar of "A Beautiful Mind"; and James Fallows of The Atlantic).
The hardcover volume is now in its fourth printing, and Knopf has issued a paperback volume, identical to the original but with scores of updates in the text, at a cost of $25.

Franklin Toker has been speaking on the book, or on related issues, to audiences at New York's Metropolitan Museum, in Philadelphia, and in Florida, with talks being organized for Boston and other American cities and in Poland and Italy. Contact him at ftoker@pitt.edu if you would like to organize such a talk.

Also, private book clubs around the country are increasingly using FALLINGWATER RISING for discussion, particularly now that it is in paperback. See the new section on STUDY GUIDE QUESTIONS for a dozen discussion points that may be helpful to you. Or contact Toker for specific questions, like "What got you started on this book?"

Finally, interest is growing in foreign editions of FALLINGWATER. A Chinese edition is in the early stages of commitment, but so far only vague comments from the two countries that ought to be most interested: Japan and Germany. Please contact the author if you have any leads in either of those countries.
 
Fallingwater Rising is an enthralling work that goes far beyond architecture to depict the United States in one of its most desperate eras. Involving key figures of the 1930s like Frida Kahlo, Henry R. Luce, William Randolph Hearst, Albert Einstein, Ayn Rand, and President Franklin Roosevelt, Fallingwater's story shows us how Kaufmann's house became not just Wright's masterpiece but a fundamental icon of American life. Here is popular history at its best.

Fallingwater Rising asks three basic questions:

  • By what process did Wright create the design?
  • What drove Kaufmann, an architectural conservative, to suddenly embrace such a radical and risky project?
  • And why, having together created one of the most important houses of the twentieth century, could Wright and Kaufmann never build anything again?

For eighteen years Franklin Toker sought answers to these and many other questions. He interviewed three of the apprentices who worked with Wright in the 1930s; met or corresponded with Kaufmann's lawyer and such business associates as Stanley Marcus; and quizzed dozens of Kaufmann friends and relatives. Toker located the Pennsylvania Supreme Court papers that document how Kaufmann took control of the family department store and got the capital to build Fallingwater. He decoded undetected references to Fallingwater and the Kaufmanns in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.

Toker's study demystifies Wright and Fallingwater, but leads us to appreciate both as never before. (Source: http://www.franklintoker.com/)

 

 To join this group, contact Scott Perkins at 918.336.4949 x112.