Two Chicago architects and their clients

Unlike writers, painters, or composers, who can produce finished works of art in expectance of future recognition, the architect is dependent on the immediate availability of patrons and clients and is constrained by their needs, funds, and wishes. The study of these patrons and clients is a vital if often neglected part of architectural history. This book depicts the backgrounds, personalities, and attitudes of two groups of clients involved in the dramatic confrontation in Chicago around the turn of the century between Frank Lloyd Wright and one of the ablest of his conventional contemporaries, Howard Van Doren Shaw.