Between 1939 and 1941, architect Frank Lloyd Wright oversaw the construction of a house in the Arizona desert for artist Rose Pauson.

In April 1943, the house burned to the ground and this marvelous example of Wright’s work was lost.

Told in the form of more than fifty previously unpublished letters written between 1938 and 1943–alongside rare site photographs and Wright’s architectural drawings–Building the Pauson House: The Letters of Frank Lloyd Wright and Rose Pauson chronicles the design and construction of the house, as well as the architect-client relationship.
Although Wright and Pauson were friends, there are plenty of disagreements about the bills, design changes, and the copious leaks that riddled the finished project, as beautiful as it may have appeared.

A lover of written correspondence (letters!), I found Building the Pauson House fascinating. Beautifully laid out, it is a feast for the eyes and will be pored over for much longer than the evening it takes to read.

Building the Pauson House: The Letters of Frank Lloyd Wright and Rose Pauson

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P.S. If you click through the affiliate links in the book titles, you may notice a different cover. I like to see the cover that’s on the copy I read – and it’s usually different than Amazon.com because they display the American release, and I read the Canadian. Again, the links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.