Franklin Toker is a professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of nine books on the history of art and architecture, ranging from the excavations he conducted under the famed Cathedral of Saint Maria del Fiore, Florence to 21st centuryAmerican urbanism. A past president of the Society of Architectural Historians, in 1979 Toker was the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Architecture, Planning, & Design. Born in Montreal in 1944, Toker obtained degrees in Fine Arts from McGill University, Oberlin College, and a PhD from Harvard University before obtaining a faculty position at the University of Pittsburgh where he continues today. Toker's The Church of Notre-Dame in Montréal won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award of the Society of Architectural Historians. He has also been awarded the Porter Prize of the College Art Association for his article in The Art Bulletin. He is known for his book, Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House, about the creation of Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece Fallingwater, which was named a New York Times notable book of 2003. He is also noted for his works on the architecture of Pittsburgh, but his international reputation rests on his four-volume "Florence Duomo Project,", of which two volumes are published and two forthcoming. CAA Reviews for 6 February 2014 called the work in Florence, "one of the major archaeological campaigns of this generation," and said of The Florence Duomo Project: "Stepping back to digest this material, as Toker has been able to do with such rigor, candor, insight, and sensitivity, we witness the way in which successful collaboration can produce spectacular results—results that together can, quite literally, alter the face of history."
Selected publications
Aside from numerous articles, Toker has written
The Church of Notre Dame in Montreal: An Architectural History winner of the Hitchcock Award of the Society of Architectural Historians as most distinguished new book in architectural history for 1970. The book studied not just a new architectural style coming into Canada, but how a French-speaking and Catholic constituency used this new style to advance their political agenda. Published in French as L'église Notre-Dame de Montréal: son architecture, son passé.
Santa Reparata : l'antica cattedrale fiorentina, i risultati dello scavo condotto dal 1965 al 1974. This book, a triumph of Italian color printing for a popular audience, laid out the essentials of the excavations under the Cathedral of Florence from 1965 through 1974, of which Toker directed the second half.
Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait. This was a pioneer attempt to understand a city through a synthesis of architectural and urban history. The journal Pennsylvania History wrote of it that "perhaps we historians ought to pass a regulation that henceforth none among us...is allowed into the city without having read Toker's portrait."
Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House . A New York Times notable book for 2003. The first and most authoritative book on Wright’s masterpiece: the context within his career, the ecology of the site; the patron and his aspirations; the architectural design and its many recollections of American history; the hype that put it on a world stage; its meaning within American culture of the 1930s and today. Chinese edition as Liu shui bie shu zhuan. Japanese edition pending.
Buildings of Pittsburgh. An encyclopedia of Pittsburgh’s notable buildings.
Pittsburgh: A New Portrait Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. This full-color revision and reorganization of an earlier text presents Pittsburgh as an ongoing expansion from its 18th-century core, and goes far to explaining the revitalization that distinguishes Pittsburgh from all industrial cities, not just in America but worldwide.
On Holy Ground: Liturgy, Architecture and Urbanism in the Cathedral and the Streets of Medieval Florence. An assembly of medieval textual sources on the early cathedral of Florence, destroyed by 1375. A pioneer study of liturgical texts and how they shaped not only the architecture but the urbanism of medieval Florence.
Archaeological Campaigns Below the Florence Duomo and Baptistery, 1895-1980. With 54 color and 541 b/w illustrations, this volume treats not only the six chronological levels excavated below S. Maria del Fiore, but also the 17,000 excavated artifacts through both formal and scientific analysis. A masterpiece of collaborative scholarship and user-friendly text on a crucial site, by the director of the main portion of the archaeological excavations.
