The Architecture of Barry Byrne: Taking the Prairie School to Europe

by Vincent Michael

 

Barry Byrne (1883–1967) was a radical architect who sought basic principles as fervently as his mentor Frank Lloyd Wright and his inspiration Louis Sullivan, forging an individual style with taut planar skins enveloping modern space plans. In 1922 he designed the first modern Catholic church building, St. Thomas the Apostle in Chicago, and in 1924 he traveled to Europe where he met Mies, Mendelsohn, Oud, and other modernist architects there. He was the only Prairie School architect to build in Europe, designing the concrete Church of Christ the King, built in 1928–31 in Cork, Ireland. A dedicated modernist and progressive Catholic, Byrne concentrated for much of his career on Catholic churches and schools throughout North America, many of them now considered landmarks.

 

This book charts the entire length of Byrne's work, highlighting its distinctive features while discussing the cultural conditions that kept Byrne in the shadows of his more famous contemporaries. Illustrated by more than one hundred photographs and drawings, this biography explores the interplay of influences and impulses--individualism and communalism, modernism and tradition, pragmatism and faith--enduring throughout Byrne's life and work.

226 pages, Hardcover

First published May 15, 2013

Reviews

[Nicholas Kalogeresis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most of Wright's apprentices have hardly been written about and so it did for Barry Byrne until now. It was good to learn about Byrne!s varied commissions, from churches to houses to seminaries. Certainly he excelled at churches, some quite bold, many quite beautiful. But what I learned the most is that he was a unique Modernist that stuck to his principles about organic design and form following function- therefore a rightful heir to Sullivan and Wright. This book is well written, well illustrated and well balanced between biography, theory, and architectural history. My only quibble is I wish there were more floor/ building plans to understand the structure of Byrne's designs but the ample photos and images make up for that nicely. This book does require some previous knowledge in the birthing of the Modernist design movement during the early 20th century but it is, overall, a fascinating read on an architect that deserves wider recognition.