A Bold Experiment
A trove of insights into and images of an important, little-known Frank Lloyd Wright building
 
The house that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for Frederick C. and Katherine G. Bogk in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1916 occupies a unique position in Wright’s career: it is the only fully realized house designed in the teens that demonstrates his fascination with Primitivism, the use of non-Western sources as an inspiration for modern design. This book traces Wright’s exploration alongside the stories of an immigrant family’s rise and Milwaukee’s emergence as a vibrant city. It also documents the interiors, relatively unchanged for over a century, that represent Wright’s approach to total design.
 
Written by two eminent architectural historians and Wright scholars, Anthony Alofsin and Richard L. Cleary, this book offers new insight into the evolution of Wright’s design process during the least understood decade of his career. The book draws on a fascinating cache of unpublished letters, photographs, drawings, and documents in the private archive of the Elsner family, who owned the house from 1955 to 2023. The book also features new photography of the Bogk House by Alexander Vertikoff, renowned for his use of natural light.
 
Distributed for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Burnham Block, Inc.