The Wasmuth Portfolio whose main title is Ausgefuhrte Bauten und Entwurfe von Frank Lloyd Wright was given to the Architecture program at FIU and ultimately the Libraries through the extremely generous donation from Mr. William Cox of Coral Gables. The gift is of one of the seminal publications in architecture, the Ausgefuhrte Bauten und Entwurfe von Frank Uoyd Wright or the Wasmuth Portfolio.

Verlag Ernst Wasmuth A.G. Berlin published the Wasmuth Portfolio of I 00 lithographs in 1910. The portfolio in two large volumes (64x4O cm) includes an introductory text, Studies and Executed Buildings, and annotations written in English by Frank Lloyd Wright. The book is considered one of the three most influential architectural treatises of the twentieth century (the other two being Le Corbusier's Vers Une Architecture, 1923 and Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1 966).

Vincent Scully in his foreword to the 1986 reprint of the Portfolio notes that "it is impossible to pick up this magnificent folio publication without feeling exalted. It is big, four-square, solid, and not very thick, like a structural tile ... the lines are thin and comparatively few, so that the pages seem vast and the drawings stretch across them as if opening out to reaches of space unknown before." This publication was a major success in Europe but not in America.

Today, this original printing of the Wasmuth Portfolio remains unique in that it was entirely envisioned by Wright from the choice of paper to the different styles of layout with its Japanese influenced design and tissue overlay.

Selected for the exhibition are plates representing Wright's Prairie School (the Coonley and Robie Houses), the Unity Temple, a lost masterpiece, the Larkin Building and a conceptual design never built for the "Ladies Home Journal".