Scientific American

Although it has long been accepted that America’s most famous architect was influenced by Japanese culture, the nature of Frank Lloyd Wright’s debt to Japan has remained unclear. This book argues that Japan had a more profound impact on Wright’s approach to design, and in particular on his notion of the organic, than has previously been acknowledged. It suggests that the influence of Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908), the leading American authority on Japanese art at the turn of the 20th century -- who also happened to be the cousin of Wright’s first employer in Chicago, the Shingle Style architect Joseph Silsbee (1848-1913) -- was pivotal in bringing together what would become Wright’s twin passions of Japanese art and the organic whole.Building on the success of the original book, which won the 1994 American Institute of Architects’ International Architectural Monograph Award, this revised and expanded edition contains new sections on the Western image of Japan as other, the question of cultural appropriation, and Wright’s translation of Japanese building forms into his own architectural language.