Most Popular Books by Bruce Brooks

Featuring rare photos and drawings, this guide spans the architect''s work during a time of personal and professional setbacks, which only served to challenge his imagination, resulting in Tokyo''s Imperial Hotel and the concrete block houses in Los Angeles.

Nestled among the cactus thickets and dry washes of the Arizona desert lies an intriguing landscape of architectural experiments. Sometimes encompassing a paloverde tree or suspended many feet above the desert floor, these small dwellings, conceived by architecture students as alternatives to tents and dormitory rooms, embrace¿and in their own way, celebrate¿the natural, rugged terrain surrounding Frank Lloyd Wright¿s Taliesin West. The earliest shelters were created by adventurous apprentices at the Taliesin Fellowship, a school for architects established by Frank Lloyd Wright in the mid-1930s. After Wright¿s death, a more conventional school¿the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture¿was established, and the practice of designing and building a personal dwelling became a unique feature of the school¿s curriculum. Wright insisted that there would be no armchair architects at his school; apprentices would learn through hard work and first-hand experience. The response to this directive has been astonishingly creative. In addition to honing their design and drafting skills, students comb the desert for dwelling sites; consider the effects of extreme temperature change and winter rain; gather construction materials from surrounding hills and dry riverbeds; and thoroughly explore what Wright termed organic architecture. Collected in Under Arizona Skies are photographs and architectural plans of the most exemplary student shelters built at Taliesin West, as well as personal accounts written by Victor E. Sidy, Dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives.

Frank Lloyd Wright''s paradigm-shifting projects. This overview, based on TASCHEN''s previous monograph and unlimited access to the Frank Lloyd Wright archives, scours the length and breadth of Wright''s career to bring you all the gems of his genius in a compact edition.

The Bible contains many doublets: conflicting accounts of the same event. These are a challenge to faith: if the Bible is the Word of God, how can it differ from itself? It was proposed that the first five books of the Old Testament were formed from combining four source texts, each of them without contradictions. But scholars have argued endlessly over the details, and in any case, there are doublets in the other books of the Bible. How to deal with all of them? This book regards the Bible as words of men about God, and sees the doublets as evidence of growth over time, as an early opinion is superseded by a later one. On this view, the doublets are not the problem, they are the answer: they show the growth of doctrine and opinion as the Biblical centuries pass. That approach is supplemented by a new statistical test of stylistic difference, which can suggest, on objective grounds, which Biblical passages might be, and which could not be, by the same writer. Both Canaanite and Hebrew traditions are noticed, and tendencies common to all the antiquities, such as urbanization, law, and the new legal status of women, are given due attention.

Compilation by the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives of references to Thomas Jefferson by Frank Lloyd Wright given during his Sunday morning talks to the Taliesin Fellowship from 1951 through 1957, culled from over 300 tape transcripts of these talks. Includes correspondence dated October 20, 1994 and November 1, 1994 between Daniel P. Jordan, President of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, and Bruce B. Pfeiffer, Director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives on the connection between Jefferson and Wright.

"[This issue] highlight[s] the Pfeiffer residence with a first person account of its history written by its eminent resident Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer. Secondarily is an essay on the proliferation of non-rectilinear plan geometries by Wright and the home''s iterations and variations over the twenty-plus years after the initial Jester design."--from the introduction.