American Dream documents the Houses at Sagaponac, a groundbreaking architecture project initiated by real estate developer Harry J. Brown. The project features homes designed by internationally recognized architects on a 10-acre site near the tip of Long Island. THe region has nurtured modern housing in previous decades, and the weekend homes and artist studios of the 1960s and 1970s serve as early precursors to the project. Additonal sources of inspiration for the Sagaponac houses include Case Study Houses in California commissioned by Arts + Architecture magazine in the 1950s and the famed 1927 Weissenhof Siedlung experimental housing in Stuttgart, Germany.

Pritzker Prize-winning architect Richard Meier is creative advisor to the initiative and is also designing one of the houses. Meier collaborated with Brown on architect selection, bringing together well-known figures like Michael Graves, Philip Johnson, and Richard Rogers with acclaimed younger practitioners, including Gisue and Mojgan Jariri, Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umenoto, Lindy Roy, and Deborah Berke.

The designs of all the Sagaponac Houses are illustrated in full-color and are accompanied by floor plans, architectural drawings, and computer renderings.

Franz Schulze's acclaimed biography is a captivating story of the life, designs, and ideas that made Mies van der Rohe one of the world's most celebrated modern architects.

"The most comprehensive book ever written about the master designer and, by any measure, the best....This is a genuinely readable book....Because no writer has ever before probed into Mies's life at such depth, we have here the first definitive reconstruction of the architect's personal habits, loves, fears, triumphs, loneliness and (in his old age) agonies."?Paul Gapp, Chicago Tribune

"A herculean, generally successful effort to present Mies's work in terms of both character and context....The substance is impressive and much of the material is fresh and revealing....This book has obviously been a long labor of love and respect for which no source has been left untouched."?Ada Louise Huxtable, New York Times Book Review

"Schulze's excellent book...is absolutely worthy of its subject. Soundly researched, vividly detailed, and hard to fault critically, it is the most complete survey ever written of Mies'[s] life and works....No one else has approached Schulze's achievement in telling the whole story over eight decades."?Allan Temko, San Francisco Chronicle Review

"Schulze has both the gift of an architectural historian able to render Mies's building innovations and that of a biographer able to paint the humanity and shortcomings of the man."?Jane Holtz Kay, Christian Science Monitor

"By its broad scope, its eloquent style, and, above all, its prodigious scholarship, this book clearly establishes itself as an indispensable volume for the library of the serious Mies scholar."?Louis Rocah, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

"In Schulze's hands Mies is no longer the impassive monolith he has sometimes seemed to be, but a complex human being whose varying moods reflected and affected the vicissitudes of his life and work....Yet, in this model architectural biography, [Schulze] also knows and brilliantly demonstrates the integral nexus of architecture and life."?Thomas S. Hines, Progressive Architecture

"Franz Schulze's Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography captivates from the very first paragraph....The writer is a skillful storyteller. In his hands, Mies's life acquires the intensity and dramatic progression of a novel."?Juan Pablo Bonta, Design Book Review

"A revelation....The man who emerges from its pages is not cold and rational but exuberant and illogical."?Donald Davis, Newsweek

"[A] readable, well-researched and sympathetic biography."?Mark Girouard, Washington Post Book World

"The standard life of Mies for some time to come."?William H. Jordy, The New Criterion

"[A] distinguished and eloquent biography."?Paul Goldberger, New York Times

"[A] magnificent biography."?Diana Ketcham, The Oakland Tribune