Choice Review

With the support of more than 200 superb color photographs, Legler makes clear that scholars have argued well: Frank Lloyd Wright worked among a dozen or so major talents in Silsbee's and Sullivan's offices, in his own, and among his Chicago peers. The "New School of the Midwest" produced many great houses, such as the John S. Van Bergen stunner shown here or the better known batch by Purcell, Feick, and Elmslie. Marion Mahoney, here on her own, looks as architecturally able as her details and renderings for Wright and Walter Burley Griffin might have us hope. Griffin's barely known Iowa houses appear in punchy splendor. And a monumental Barry Byrne holds a surprising interior by the artist Alfonso Ianelli that shows a Dutch modernist sensibility even though this house, too, is firmly planted in Iowa. It and a brilliant William Drummond building challenge our notions that only Europeans could propel the Prairie School's weighted abstractions into weightless modernism. Prairie Style's text does not grapple with the historical problems the photographs reveal but does record the warmth current owners feel for these great houses. And if it takes a silly title to sell the book widely, so be it--anything to bring such treasures to light. General readers; upper-division undergraduates through professionals. E. Weiss; Tulane University