C ole Porter once refuted a charge of name-dropping by asking, “How can it be name-dropping if those are the people one knows?” Dorothy Rodgers’ 1967 book, The House In My Head (Atheneum, hardcover, original cover price unknown) looks as if it’s designed to impress, but it describes a grand house that was thoroughly in keeping with the life its author had always lived. Ms. Rodgers was the wife of famed composer Richard Rodgers, and their 1965 urge to build a new country house in Fairfield, Connecticut coincided happily with the income they were deriving from a little film project called The Sound of Music. One architect (John Stonehill), eight thousand square feet, and Lord knows how much money later, the Rodgerses had themselves one of the finest and most distinctive contemporary houses in the Northeast. Ms. Rodgers details the project from its inception, through its design, building, decorating and moving-in stages. She is generous, telling the reader what was delightful about the process, and how and why. Yet she’s unsparing, telling what went wrong along the way and just who screwed up- even when the culprit was Dorothy Rodgers herself. The book’s color and black-and-white pictures (many by Ezra Stoller) show less of the building process than one could wish, but those showing the final result are stunning. Readers looking for Mid-Century furniture will be disappointed, because the furnishings were French Provincial, but the house more than makes up for it. A great deal of Dorothy Rodgers’ collection of modern art graced the place- holdings no private individual could amass today. Picasso, Alan Davie, Zao-Wou-Ki, Graham Sutherland, Raoul Dufy, Judith Brown and Giacomo Manzu are just some of the artists whose work made this timeless house something to remember.

What does a young married couple do when they’re just starting out, have no money, and can’t buy a building lot, only lease one? Why, they call in Frank Lloyd Wright to build them a masterpiece. In The Hanna House: The Client’s Report (Southern Illinois University Press, softcover; $30.00 through www.wrightcatalog.org) the late Paul and Jean Hanna tell just how they accomplished all that. The book takes the reader from their first tenuous 1936 meeting with their architect, to their 1970’s decision to donate the house to the owner of the land beneath it, Stanford University. Along the way were discussions and disagreements with Wright, problems with contractors, and a major remodeling of the house in 1957 that turned a former playroom space into a dream of a Mid-Century dining room, complete with a Wright-designed table surrounded by two dozen Danish chairs in teakwood. Much of the interest surrounding the Hanna House comes from its pioneering use of a 120-degree, hexagonal module; Wright’s use of it was so extensive the original beds were custom-made in elongated hexagon shapes. The Hannas profess perfect contentment with the unusual room shapes that resulted, but a 1957 sketch they did for Wright outlining their wants for the remodeling shows that they had not achieved complete understanding of the module after twenty years in the house. Photographs compliment the book’s timeline: black-and-white plates show the house’s first iteration, and a glorious burst of color photos by Ezra Stoller shows its glory days in the early 1960’s. Nobody can build a thing like this any more, but reading how it was done once- on a wing and a prayer- is one of the most entertaining sagas in all of modern residential architecture.

Anyone seeking a thorough, fast grounding in modern architecture would do well to pick up a copy of Peter Blake’s The Master Builders (W.W. Norton & Company, paperback, $17.95). Covering the careers and works of Le Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright in 421 pages is an ambitious program, but Blake manages it handily. More than a laundry list of accomplishments and buildings, the book delves into the theories and principles by which each architect was guided. Hundreds of black-and-white photos, plans and drawings show a vast range of projects built and unbuilt, including some, like Mies’ unrealized Resor House, hardly ever seen anywhere. Blake’s own architectural training and his editorship of Architectural Record serve both author and reader well; the most subtle and esoteric points of design are explained in terms easily comprehensible to the layman. Corbu is revealed as a master of form, Mies as a genius of structure and detail, and Wright as a pioneer of new, more open and flexible spaces. Yet each man’s work touched on each of the others’, and Blake’s study of the interrelationships, as well as the differences, between the three is fascinating reading. Refreshingly, the author does not focus merely on plan and elevation; structural principles are outlined here as well, giving greater understanding of why these architect’s buildings look and function as they do. The only problem with this little volume is its tiny format, which reduces a few of the photos to near-meaninglessness. It doesn’t matter- a first-rate architectural education is contained between the covers of this book, and the price cannot be beat.

Books reviewed in The Backlist are often out of print. Copies can be found through sources like eBay, Amazon’s used book service, or through Websites like Alibris. Prices mentioned in reviews were the cover price at time of publication; today’s market value for an out-of-print book may be higher than the original cover price.