In the first years of the twentieth century, William Lightfoot Price (1861-1916) designed the fabulous hotels that made Atlantic City a national icon that is still celebrated in the game of Monopoly. His Midwestern railroad stations spread the gospel of modern design across the nation's heartland. And his stucco cottages with tile ornament demonstrated the potential for contemporary, middle-class design in American suburbs and villages. After World War I, Price's firm designed the sleek buildings which gave Miami Beach its modern image in the roaring 'twenties. Price was one of the shapers of the exuberant American architecture that transformed city skylines and commercial streets before the Depression. Committed to representing the culture of his time Price broke with historical forms to design at the large scale that represented the potential of modern techniques. Price's colorful and sculptural works became hallmarks of American modern architecture and are familiar across the country. Independent of historical forms, his buildings were instantly accessible to their time and to ours, suggesting ways in which twentieth century architecture might have been humanized and connected to the interests of a broader public. In 1930, fellow Philadelphian and architect George Howe (1886-1955) placed Price in the pantheon of American architects when he wrote, "Wright, Sullivan and Price were among the first to grasp the architectural possibilities of the new life and new means of construction. Their names were known in Europe, while they remained comparatively obscure among their countrymen." Today, the contributions of Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959) and Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) to the architecture of the early twentieth century are well known. Yet even to those who are literate in the history of American architecture, it is probably not clear to which Price Howe referred. This was not the case before 1932, when Price's buildings were widely published as representations of contemporary design. Price had such a broad effect on American design because, like his early master Frank Furness (1839-1912), he received commissions that spanned the range of professional practice from factories and railroad stations to houses, hotels, and shops. His own ventures in utopian design also led him to community planning in the Rose Valley Arts and Crafts community near Philadelphia, in a Garden City plan for the Henry George Single-Tax community of Arden, Delaware, and, at the end of his life, in the attempt to make a single-tax country in the principality of Andorra in the mountains between France and Spain. Working in Philadelphia, headquarters of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, Price was active from Atlantic City to Chicago and from New England to Florida. So busy was his midwestern practice that for a time he was forced to open a second office in Indianapolis. William L. Price: From Arts and Crafts to Modern Design broadens the history of modern architecture from the familiar interpretation representing European directions and goals toward the complexity and richness of early twentieth century American architecture. Through a broad array of cultural icons that were linked to Price's career, it demonstrates the roots of his architecture in the emerging mass culture of the American democracy. Like his mentor Frank Furness, Price embraced the "progressivism" of the engineering culture that was centered in Philadelphia and the American Midwest. Working in Philadelphia where engineers had pioneered industrial standardization and developed the scientific standards for reinforced concrete, Price adopted the progressive goals of his community into contemporary design. The exhibit situates Price with Sullivan and Wright, the American architects whom Howe knew as part of the modern American tradition, but it also links Price to the larger circle of Greene and Greene and Bernard Maybeck (1862-1957) in California, and to his fellow modernist Bertram Goodhue (1869-1924) in the east. It demonstrates the relationship between Price and his contemporary European progressives, such as H.P Berlage (1856-1934), Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) and Otto Wagner (1841-1918), and suggests formal parallels with such later visionaries as Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953) and Tony Garnier (1869-1948). William L. Price: From Arts and Crafts to Modern Design draws on a remarkable array of materials to trace the evolution of the architect's work from his early study in Furness's office, through historical revivals in the 1890s, until he learned to apply the values of the Arts and Crafts movement to contemporary design in the twentieth century. The office's photographic archives provide images of buildings during construction, and at the moment of completion; a vast array of drawings make it possible to follow the evolution of projects, while family and community records link Price's circle to the issues of his design. Adding spice to the exhibit are Will's splendid watercolors of European scenes, a caricature of Will by N. C. Wyeth, as well as a brilliant oil sketch by the same artist for the decorations in the "Submarine Grill" of the Traymore Hotel. Price's career as a furniture designer is also represented in a number of never-before-exhibited pieces of Rose Valley furniture as well as furniture from the Traymore Hotel. It should be noted that Price's designs were above all, made for fun. Located in resorts such as Atlantic City and Miami, they were designed to attract a broad public. At the Traymore, for example, a crystal ball was hollowed out and attached to a fountain so that goldfish pumped into the ball were magnified to the size of a shad. A glass-bottomed pool on a roof deck above the Submarine Grill formed a ceiling for a dance floor below, so that the shadows of fish and seaweed could be projected amidst the dancers. These touches assured the building national exposure. With such notoriety, it should be no surprise that Price's sculptural and vital concrete architecture established the formal vocabulary of the 1920s now commonly referred to as "Art Deco" but which could more accurately be termed "Art Price." In his introduction to the companion book William L. Price: From Arts and Crafts to Modern Design, Robert Venturi finds "an architecture or architectures that engage the immediate and the everyday, the practical and the realistic, and that balance the extravagant and the modest and then embrace ideas that are responsive as well as poetic." Noting that "proper histories ignore commercial design, the area of much of the most effective American design of the twentieth century, " Venturi challenges historians to incorporate "Price's iconic seashore hotels as well as 1920s skyscrapers, classic Las Vegas buildings, and road-side vernacular." This provocative exhibit begins the process by returning the architecture of William L. Price to the national scene.