Lisa D. Schrenk is associate professor of architectural history at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Building a Century of Progress: The Architecture of Chicago's 1933-34 World's Fair and was the education director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation from 1988 to 1992.
In this magnificent offering, Schrenk takes a remarkably detailed look at Frank Lloyd Wright's Oak Park Studio in Chicago. . . . Architecture buffs won't want to miss this extraordinary monograph. * Publishers Weekly * Schrenk has written an ambitious and meticulously researched book. One of its greatest achievements is the vivid evocation of life within the studio by populating it with Wright and his family members, employees, consultants, and clients. The Oak Park Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright is accessible enough for any general reader yet informative enough for specialists in the field. It is a valuable contribution to the study of Wright's career. * Richard Cleary, University of Texas at Austin * Schrenk's comprehensive text not only chronicles and reconstructs the genesis and continuing transformation of Wright's home and studio in Oak Park, but also equally innovatively identifies the members of the dynamic coterie that worked there. She reveals those talented women and men to have been far more than, as conventional wisdom would have it, mechanistic 'apprentices to genius.' Navigating her way through legend, she recognizes the vital role their many hands played in enabling Wright to launch his phenomenal career. Schrenk's encyclopedic volume is nothing short of an indispensable reference on Wright's celebrated laboratory, as both an architectural artifact and incubator of modern American architecture. * Christopher Vernon, University of Western Australia * Frank Lloyd Wright said he shook his designs out of his sleeve. In this remarkable and informative new book, Schrenk shows what Wright had up his sleeve at his Oak Park Studio-a talented team of architects, artists, and designers who helped him produce a masterpiece a year. * Kevin Harrington, Emeritus, Illinois Institute of Technology *