The Architecture of Edwin Lundie

Author Dale Mulfinger

Minnesota Historical Society Press (October 15, 1995)

For the first time, the significance of this unique body of work is presented in The Architecture of Edwin Lundie for architects, art historians, designers, builders, craftspeople, students, and the general public.

Description

Throughout a fifty-year career in St. Paul, architect Edwin H. Lundie (1886-1972) designed more than three hundred projects, predominantly residences, many utilizing either Northern European or Earl American themes. His architectural designs, along with the Prairie School inventions of Purcell and Elmslie and the modernist themes of Ralph Rapson, are collectively considered the best work of Minnesota architects in the twentieth century. What set Lundie apart from his colleagues was his devotion to detail and love of fine craftsmanship.

Long overlooked as architects moved away from picturesque themes in favor of modernism, Lundie’s designs are now enjoying a resurgence of attention concurrent with revived interest in postmodernism, regionalism, and a sense of place. For the first time, the significance of this unique body of work is presented in The Architecture of Edwin Lundie for architects, art historians, designers, builders, craftspeople, students, and the general public.

Author Dale Mulfinger undertook this book after a decade of studying and recording Lundie’s buildings and lecturing at local, regional, and national forums. Here he brings together a foreword by David Gebhard that sets Lundie in a national context; a biographical essay by Eileen Michels; his own piece assessing Lundie’s design principles; outstanding color photographs by Peter Kerze; and beautiful rendering in pencil and ink by Lundie himself. In addition, the book offers thirty profiles of individual buildings with photos, floor plans, and drawings to highlight feature demonstrating Ludie’s genius.

Author information

Dale Mulfinger, FAIA, is Professor in Practice in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota and a founding principal in the firm of SALA Architects, Inc. He has written three books for Taunton Press, The Cabin, The Getaway Home, and most recently Cabinology.

Reviews and news

Praise for The Architecture of Edwin Lundie

"The Architecture of Edwin Lundie has had a transformative effect on Minnesota architecture since its original publication in 1995. Many architects around the state have taken up Lundie's challenge of how to adapt traditional forms to today's needs. the book opened up new ways of thinking about 'regionalism' in Minnesota architecture, and for that, we are forever grateful."
Tom Fisher, Dean of College of Design, University of Minnesota

“Edwin Lundie was the great romantic among Minnesota architects, and this lovely book at last gives his work the recognition it so richly deserves.”
Larry Millett, author of Lost Twin Cities

“This book fills one of the many gaps in our knowledge of twentieth-century architects who were not Modernists. Lundie’s more or less Traditional work is enhanced by its ferocious exploitation of rough materials, and, in the cabins especially, by what seems to be primordial Scandinavian references quite at home in the north woods of Minnesota”
Vincent Scully, Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, Yale University

“This book reveals Edwin Lundie to be an architect imbued with a passion for his art that few attain, let alone sustain for a lifetime. His buildings, as did those of the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, attained an instant patina. This was the product of a mind that created character and composition by means of an extraordinary attention to the craft and construction of architecture. To realize that I received my architectural education at the University of Minnesota in the late 1950s without an awareness of Mr. Lundie’s presence, to say nothing of his mastery of architectural form, leaves me incredulous.”
William Peterson, Kohn Pederson Fox Associates PC, Architects & Planning Consultants, New York City

• 132 pages
• 9.25 x 11 inches
• ISBN: 9780873513142