Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect

Born: 8 June 1867
Birthplace: Richland Center, Wisconsin
Died: 9 April 1959
Best Known As: Influential American architect

Frank Lloyd Wright is considered the most influential American architect of the 20th century. His legacy is an architectural style that departed from European influences to create a purely American form, one that included the idea that buildings can be in harmony with the natural environment. Over his long career Wright designed a wide variety of structures, both public and private, including the home known as Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax Building and New York's Guggenheim Museum.

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Frank Lloyd Wright

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(born June 8, 1867, Richland Center, Wis., U.S. — died April 9, 1959, Phoenix, Ariz.) U.S. architect. After studying engineering briefly at the University of Wisconsin, he worked for the firm of Dankmar Adler (1844 – 1900) and Louis Sullivan in Chicago before opening his own practice there in 1893. Wright became the chief practitioner of the Prairie school, building about 50 Prairie houses from 1900 to 1910. Early nonresidential buildings include the forward-looking Larkin Building in Buffalo, N.Y. (1904; destroyed 1950), and Unity Temple in Oak Park, Ill. (1906). In 1911 he began work on his own house, Taliesin, near Spring Green, Wis. The lavish Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1915 – 22, dismantled 1967) was significant for its revolutionary floating cantilever construction, which made it one of the only large buildings to withstand the earthquake of 1923. In the 1930s he designed his low-cost Usonian houses, but his most admired house, Fallingwater, in Bear Run, Pa. (1936), is an extravagant country retreat cantilevered over a waterfall. His Johnson Wax Building (1936 – 39), an example of humane workplace design, touched off an avalanche of major commissions. Of particular note is the Guggenheim Museum (1956 – 59), which has no separate floor levels but instead uses a spiral ramp, realizing Wright's ideal of a continuous space. Throughout his career he retained the use of ornamental detail, earthy colours, and rich textural effects. His sensitive use of materials helped to control and perfect his dynamic expression of space, which opened a new era in American architecture. Often considered the greatest U.S. architect of all time, his greatest legacy is "organic architecture," or the idea that buildings harmonize both with their inhabitants and with their environment.

For more information on Frank Lloyd Wright, visit Britannica.com.

Oxford Grove Art:

Lloyd Frank (Lincoln) Wright

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(b Richland Center, WI, 8 June 1867; d Phoenix, AZ, 9 April 1959). He is one of the most universally acclaimed and admired of all American architects, and his name is known worldwide, to laymen as well as to architects and historians. Yet, unlike other important architects whose reputations rest at least in part on the influence of their work in shaping the architecture of their time, Wright's buildings and theories seem to have had only a slight impact on the evolution of 20th-century architecture. While the example of his buildings may have nurtured the early development of Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the mature work of these architects seems largely unaffected by Wright. Instead, his work came to be appreciated primarily for its intrinsic artistic qualities, especially those dealing with spatial definition and surface articulation. That his architecture should be so highly regarded for its inherent values is remarkable testimony to the magnitude of his genius.

Part of the Wright family

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:

Frank Lloyd Wright

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The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959) designed dramatically innovative buildings during a career of almost 70 years. His work established the imagery for much of the contemporary architectural environment.

The most famous, although never the most popular or successful, among American architects, Frank Lloyd Wright set himself the task, as no previous architect had, of designing distinctive and varied architecture for the diverse terrains of a nation that stretched over the valleys, deserts, woods, and mountains, spanning an entire continent. Herald of thesis that architecture should express its time, its site, its builders, and its materials, Wright argued from that romantic, specifically Hegelian thesis that the United States, as a new nation with a new society on a new frontier with a new technology, should express those unique conditions and should build its special aspirations into buildings that would be distinctively and wholly its own - a new style that would speak of the American environment, "Usonian," he once called it, an architecture of democracy.

Wright's art was so original, his imagination was so endlessly fertile, and his sense of form was so appropriate to the site and so bold and uninhibited that even the most recent students, although they are more than a generation removed from Wright and nurtured in urban premises and technical resources alien to his, still see in his drawings and his buildings that virtuosity in planning, that command over form, that grace in shaping space which have been the talent of only a few, the greatest masters of architecture.

Wright was born on June 8, 1869, in Richland Center, Wis. When he was 12 years old his family settled in Madison, and Wright worked on his uncle's farm at Spring Green during the summers. He developed a passion for the land that never left him. He attended Madison High School and left in 1885, apparently without graduating. He went to work as a draftsman and the following year, while still working, took a few courses in civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin.

In 1887 Wright went to Chicago, worked briefly for an architect, and then joined the firm of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan. Wright was very much influenced by Sullivan, and, although their relationship ended in a rupture when Sullivan found out that Wright was designing houses on his own, he always acknowledged his indebtedness to Sullivan and referred to him as "lieber Meister." In 1893 Wright opened his own office.

Master of Domestic Architecture

The houses Wright built in Buffalo and in Chicago and its suburbs before World War I gained international fame wherever there were avant-garde movements in the arts, especially in those countries where industrialization had brought new institutional and urban problems and had developed clients or patrons with the courage to eschew traditional design and the means to essay modernism, as in Germany (the Wasmuth publications of Wright's work in 1910 and 1911), the Netherlands (H. T. Wijdeveld, ed., The Life Work of the American Architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1925), and, later, Japan, where Wright designed the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo (1916-1922). Similarly, in the United States, Wright's clients were exceptional individuals and small, adventurous institutions, not governments or national corporations. A small progressive private school (Hillside Home School, Spring Green, 1902) and an occasional private, commercial firm (Larkin Company in Buffalo) came to him, but, chiefly, his clients were midwestern businessmen, practical, unscholarly, independent, and moderately successful, such as the Chicago building contractor Frederick C. Robie, for whom Wright designed houses.

Commissions to design a bank, an office building, or a factory were rare; Wright never received any large corporate or governmental commission. These were awarded to the classicists and the Gothicists of the early 20th century; at midcentury, after the case for modernism was won, the corporate commissions continued to go to large, dependable firms who worked in a rectilinear, contemporary idiom. Wright was left for nearly 70 years to exercise his art, always brilliantly and often resentfully, chiefly in domestic architecture, where, indeed, Americans, unlike many other peoples, have long lavished enormous, probably inordinate attention, assigning to their spacious, freestanding, single-family dwellings the inventiveness that some other nations have reserved for public architecture.

Early, Wright insisted upon declaring the presence of pure cubic mass, the color and texture of raw stone and brick and copper, and the sharp-etched punctures made by unornamented windows and doors in sheer walls (Charnley House, Chicago, 1891). He made of the house a compact block, which might be enclosed handsomely by a hipped roof (Winslow House, River Forest, Ill., 1893). Soon, the restrained delight in the simplicity of a single mass gave way to his passion for passages of continuous, flowing spaces; he burst the enclosed, separated spaces of classical architecture, removed the containment, the sense of walls and ceilings, and created single, continuously modified spaces, which he shaped by screens, piers, and intermittent planes and masses that were disposed in asymmetric compositions. By suggesting spaces, but not enclosing them, then by connecting them, Wright achieved extended, interweaving, horizontal compositions of space, and his roofs, windows, walls, and chimneys struck dynamic balances and rhythms. Vertical elements rise through horizontal planes (Husser House, Chicago, 1899); interior spaces flare from a central chimney mass (Willitts House, Highland Park, Ill., 1900-1902); low spaces rise into a high space that is carved into a second story (Roberts House, River Forest, 1908). Unexpectedly, light is captured from a clerestory or a room beyond, and a space flows in vistas seen beyond a structural pier, beneath low roofs and cantilevered eaves, over terraces and courts, and through trellises and foliage into gardens and landscape (Martin House, Buffalo, 1904). All his genius with weaving space, with creating a tension between compact alcove and generous vista, with variegated light, with occult balances of intermittent masses, with cantilevers that soared while piers and chimneys anchored, came to unrivaled harmony in the Robie House, Chicago (1909; now the Adlai Stevenson Institute, University of Chicago).

The Robie House has few antecedents. Perhaps its composition recalls the 19th-century rambling, picturesque houses of Bruce Price and Stanford White; its spaces owe something to Japanese architecture, and something is owed, too, to the master of dramatic balance of bold masses, Henry Hobson Richardson; but the Robie House is Wright's own, a uniquely personal organization of space. While wholly original, the Robie House stands within the principles of Chicago's special theory of architecture, as developed by Sullivan. That the Robie House also reflects an international movement, cubism, which had begun to fascinate pioneering artists in France, the Netherlands, and Germany, shows that Wright, while sensitive to his contemporaries' innovation, subsumed many traditions without any subservience.

Philosophy of Architecture

Wright's philosophy of architecture was compounded of several radical and traditional ideas. There was, first, the romantic idea of honest expression: that a building should be faithful in revealing its materials and structure, as Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc had argued, without any classical ornament or counterfeit surface or structure, which John Ruskin abhorred. There was, second, the idea that a building's form should reflect its plan, its functional arrangement of interior spaces, as Henry Latrobe and Horatio Greenough had proposed. There was, third, the conviction that each building should express something new and distinctive in the times (G. W. F. Hegel, Gottfried Semper) and specifically the new technical resources, such as steel skeletons and electric light and elevators, which suggested skyscrapers and new forms of building (John Wellborn Root). There was, fourth, the ambition, even pride, to achieve an art appropriate to a new nation, an American art (Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman), without Continental or English or colonial dependencies. Finally, there was the theory derived by Sullivan from Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer that a building should be analogous to a biological organism, a unified work of art, rooted to its soil, organized to serve specified functions, and, as a form, evolved as an organism evolves, fitted to its landscape, adapted to its environment, expressive of its purpose.

Those diverse currents of thought were not readily united. The Unitarianism of Wright's family prepared him to design the humanist Unity Church in Oak Park, Ill. (1906), a cubistic, light-filled meetinghouse, constructed, quite extraordinarily, in concrete. His introduction in kindergarten to F. W. A. Froebel's system of education through construction with blocks prepared Wright to design the playhouse and school of the beautiful Avery Coonley House, Riverside, Ill. (1908); there, significantly, in the progressive architecture of a house and school, John Dewey and his students were educational advisers. Form breaking and function making, the ferment of ideas in late-19th-century Chicago encouraged new thinking about institutions for religion, education, and urban settlement; Wright led a revolt from precedent in form and a celebration of necessity in new functions. His essay "The Art and Craft of the Machine" announced his leadership at Hull House in 1901; and he continued to state his dissatisfaction with America's failure to build institutions and environment adequate to the social problems and opportunities. His theory of an "organic architecture: the architecture of democracy" was broadcast in his Princeton lectures of 1930 and London lectures of 1939, as well as in his Autobiography (1932), which also offers some insight into his life and his family, including the apprentices who lived with him and for whom he established the Taliesin Fellowship in 1932 at Taliesin East, the house Wright built over many years (beginning in 1938) at Spring Green.

His Idea and Imagery for Modern Design

If the handsome Taliesin East, whose roofs are rhythmical accents on the brow of a bluff overlooking the confluence of two valleys, were all that Wright left, he would be remembered as the finest architect who worked in the 19th-century tradition of romantic domestic design. But, early, he prepared an idea and an imagery for modern design. He achieved in the Larkin Building, Buffalo (1904; destroyed) an unprecedented integration of circulation, structure, ventilation, plumbing, furniture, office equipment, and lighting; that building, an early example of modern commercial architecture, was emulated by Peter Behrens and Walter Gropius in Germany and Hendrik Petrus Berlage in Holland. Wright's plans for Midway Gardens, Chicago (1914; demolished) and the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo (1916-1922), organized complex modern institutions into new architectural compositions, and they showed inventiveness in structural technique, such as the structure of the Imperial Hotel, which was intended to resist earthquakes, which it did, even though it could not resist the wrecker in 1967. Wright tended to enjoy and to glorify nature and the rural condition, but he attacked various urban problems. Beginning with inexpensive row apartments in 1895, he designed buildings for cities, culminating in his drawing for a high-rise tower whose floors were to be cantilevered from a central shaft, the St. Mark's Tower project for New York City (1929); that project is reflected in the Price Tower at Bartlesville, Okla. (1953). Like many of his projects, the tower was a fundamental element in the Broadacre City project, the coherent, self-sufficient agricultural and industrial community Wright designed in 1931-1935.

Constant Search for Form

Significantly, Wright's concern for 20th-century problems, including urban form, did not lead him to the mechanistic rectilinear forms and finishes admired by Gropius or the sculptural purism of Le Corbusier. Always distinctive and independent, Wright's style changed often. For about 10 years after 1915 he drew upon Mayan massing and ornament (Barndall House, Hollywood, 1920). He cast ornament in concrete blocks (Millard House, Pasadena, 1923), and he did not achieve his several versions of a decisively modern style until various European architects, including Le Corbusier and others, notably Richard Neutra (who came to the United States in the late 1920s), had dramatized a sheer, stripped geometry. Even then Wright avoided the barrenness and abstraction of the isolated, single parallelepiped; he insisted upon having the multiple form of buildings reflect the movement of unique sites: the Kaufmann House, "Falling Water," at Bear Run, Pa. (1936-1937), where cantilevered, interlocked, reinforced-concrete terraces are poised over the waterfall; the low-cost houses (Herbert Jacobs House, Madison, Wis., 1937); and the "prairie houses" (Lloyd Lewis House, Libertyville, Ill., 1940). No architect was more skillful in fitting form to its terrain: the Pauson House in Phoenix, Ariz. (1940; destroyed) rose from the desert, like a Mayan pyramid, its battered ashlar and shiplapped, wooden walls reflecting the mountains and desert. There is a compatibility, an organic adaptation in stone walls, wooden frames, and canvas that marries Wright's western home, Taliesin West (1938-1959), to Maricopa Mesa, near Phoenix.

Those brilliant rural houses did not reveal how Wright would respond to an urban setting or to the program of a corporate client. But in the Administration Building for the Johnson Wax Company, Racine, Wis. (1936-1939, with a research tower added in 1950), he astonished architects with his second great commercial building (after the Larkin Building). A continuous, windowless red-brick wall encloses a high, clerestory-lighted interior space; that space, which contains tall dendriform columns, is one of the most serene and graceful interior spaces in the world. Thereafter, a college, Florida Southern at Lakeland, Fla., was encouraged to retain Wright to design its campus (1938-1959); unfortunately, it suffers from an obsession with multifaceted form and oblique and acute angles (as does the Unitarian Church in Madison, Wis., 1947). But after those probings toward a new geometry Wright succeeded with complex pyramids (as suggested earlier by his Lake Tahoe project of the 1920s) when he built the Beth Sholom Synagogue at Elkins Park, Pa. (1959), a Mycenaean sacred mountain. Such a temple, a sanctuary of light approached by a continuous spiral, fascinated the elderly Wright. At Florida Southern College he juxtaposed circle and fragmented rhombus, recalling Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, Italy; he set a helix inside the Morris Gift Shop in San Francisco (1948-1949). Ultimately, he conceived of having the helix surround a tall central space: the six-story Guggenheim Museum in New York City (1946-1959), which paid in significant functional defects to gain a memorable experience in viewing art, especially where the helix affords views into a side gallery below.

Of Wright's colossal helix that he proposed for the Golden Triangle in Pittsburgh (1947), nothing was built. He envisioned ramps for automobiles that would lead to stores and galleries and auditoriums. His drawings, which are in ink and crayon on huge sheets of rice paper, stand among the greatest and most inspiring displays of architectural imagination; what was built in Pittsburgh by other hands is expedient and vulgar. His drawings are magical and lyrical. No one might ever build accordingly, but Wright was never content with the commonplace or servile to the conventional or the practical. He imagined the wonderful where others were content with the probable. Avoidance of the vulgar or probable excited him to ecstatic design: the hyper-bole of the Grand Opera and Civic Auditorium for Baghdad, Iraq (1957). The drawings of helix, domes, and finals suggest how far Wright's talent transcended any client's capacity fully to realize his dream: a world of sanctuaries and gardens, of earth and machines, of rivers, seas, mountains, and prairies, where grand architecture enables men to dwell nobly.

Wright died at Taliesin West on April 9, 1959. His widow, Olgivanna, directs the Taliesin Fellowship.

Frank Lloyd Wright

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(1867-1959)

Widely celebrated as one of the most influential American architects of the 20th century, Wright also played an important role as a furniture designer and design theorist. After studying engineering at the University of Wisconsin (1885-7) in 1888 he joined the architectural office of Louis Sullivan, an influential figure in the development of Modernism in architecture and design. In 1893 Wright established his own practice and began to evolve his principles of organic architecture in a series of low, horizontal, asymmetrically planned houses. Commissioned between the 1890s and early 1900s they became known as the Prairie School style on account of their influence on many of Wright's American contemporaries working in the Midwest. In 1897 Wright became a founder member of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society, reflecting an outlook which influenced many of his early furniture and interior designs although, unlike many associated with the Arts and Crafts, he was more unequivocally committed to ideas of machine production. This was particularly evident in the rectilinear metal office furniture for his Larkin Company Administration Building (1904) in Buffalo, New York. The painted metal desks and swivelling chairs were conceived as integral both to the aesthetic and function of the building as whole. In 1909 he went to Europe, where he was influenced by first-hand experience of Viennese and other avant-garde European design which he had for the most part previously encountered in published form. This was perhaps reflected in his abstract rectilinear stained glass designs for the Avery Coonley Playhouse (1912) and the lighter, more geometric forms of his furniture for the Little House in Wayzata, Minnesota (1913). However, Wright's influence was also felt in Europe, as in the work of Hendrik Berlage and Gerrit Rietveld. The ways in which he sought to unify designs from building to detail was evident in his Imperial Hotel, Tokyo (1915-22), where he designed everything from furniture to tableware. A different aesthetic, though still essentially organic, approach was evident rather later in his career, as at the Johnson Administration Building in Racine, Wisconsin (1936-9), for which he designed painted aluminium and steel furniture that embraced, like its architectural surroundings, something of the quality of contemporary streamlined forms. In 1955 Wright sought to capture new, essentially middle-class, markets with his Taliesin Line furniture (named after his homes in Arizona and Wisconsin) for the Heritage Henredon Company of North Carolina. Similarly, in the same year, a Taliesin Line series of thirteen Wright textiles and four wallpapers was manufactured in a variety of colours by the New York firm F. Schumacher & Co. Elizabeth Gordon, editor of House Beautiful, has been credited with the idea for the scheme when preparing an issue of the magazine devoted to Wright's work. However, the Taliesin range failed to sell in large quantities. Nonetheless, Wright's influence on 20th-century design and architecture was profound, both in terms of practical work and his many writings.

Oxford Dictionary of Architecture & Landscaping:

Frank Lloyd Lincoln Wright

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(1869–1959)

American architect, some say the greatest of C20. He learned the rudiments of his art from Joseph Lyman Silsbee (1845–1913), whose essays in the Queen Anne and Shingle styles were competent. He later (1888) became assistant to Louis H. Sullivan, and remained with the firm of Adler & Sullivan until 1893. While revering Sullivan, Wright was also influenced by Owen Jones, the English Arts-and-Crafts movement, Ruskin, and Viollet-le-Duc (or rather by what Viollet was said to have written), interlocking forms (perhaps suggested by the Froebel blocks with which he played when a child), and Japanese architecture (prompted by the Japanese pavilion at the Chicago Exposition of 1893). In 1889 he designed his first independent building, his own house and studio at Oak Park, Chicago, IL, an eclectic work, with a shingled exterior (altered and extended 1889–1911), and in 1894 became a founder-member of the Arts-and-Crafts Society in Chicago. At this time he began to evolve his Prairie House type, with volumes developing from a central core, long, low roofs that appeared to float over the structure, corners treated as voids, and enclosing walls that were treated more as independent screens (techniques he called ‘breaking the box’). Furthermore, the main axes within the houses were continued into the gardens and terraces, suggested in the schemes Wright published in the Ladies' Home Journal (1901), and developed in the series of houses he designed from that time until just before the 1914–18 war. Yet Lutyens had also been moving in this direction, as with the Deanery, Sonning, Berks. (1899–1902), while Schinkel had also brought gardens, water, and terraces within his profoundly ordered geometries, as at the Court Gardener's House and Roman Baths complex, Potsdam (1820s). Wright's finest essays in the Prairie House style were the Willitts House, Highland Park, IL (1902), Robie House, Chicago (1908), and Coonley House, Riverside, IL (1908–12).

With the Unity Temple (Unitarian Church), Oak Park (1906), and the Larkin Building, Buffalo, NY (1904—demolished), a severe, monumental architecture evolved, in which a powerful grid-like geometry was well to the fore, while the architectural language seemed to owe something to a stripped Classicism reminiscent of aspects of the work of Schinkel, Otto Wagner, and others (especially the rows of square columns at Unity Temple which recall the Berlin Schauspielhaus (Play House) by Schinkel and some of the Vienna Metropolitan Railway Stations by Wagner).

Wright's work had been widely publicized, and in 1910 Wasmuth of Berlin published Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright (Realized Buildings and Projects of Frank Lloyd Wright) as a handsome pair of portfolios, followed in 1911 by a paperback volume of illustrations and plans. The introduction was by C. R. Ashbee, the prominent English Arts-and-Craftsman, and these publications helped to promote Wright's work. His designs seem to have enjoyed considerable favour in Germany (Gropius and Mies van der Rohe were two architects affected) and in The Netherlands, in particular, where Robert van't Hoff, Dudok, and some members of De Stijl were undoubtedly influenced by his work, and it shows. In 1911 he moved to the Wisconsin countryside, where he built his Prairie House-based home and studios at Taliesin (burnt down 1914, but rebuilt and extended during the 1920s). There he was the Master with his pupils, a pose he developed further at Taliesin West, mentioned below.

In spite of a scandalous private life he gained two important major commissions: the Midway Gardens, Chicago (1913—demolished); and the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan (1915–22—with Antonin Raymond—also demolished). Both had highly organized plans in which axes featured prominently, and both were lavishly decorated with polygonal, triangular, and other sharp-angled forms, including chevrons, that had already begun to appear on the lead cames of some of the Chicago houses, and that anticipated Art Deco ornament. With the Hollyhock (or Barnsdall) House (1916–21), Los Angeles, Calif., he experimented with repetitive stylized motifs (abstractions of hollyhock forms) cast in moulds (the whole house was cement-rendered), and created a building faintly reminiscent of pre-Columbian American architecture, a theme more pronounced in the Ennis House, Los Angeles (1923–4), constructed of decorated concrete blocks, and featuring battered walls set on terraces. He again used concrete blocks in e.g. the Millard House, Pasadena, CA (1923), and Freeman House, Los Angeles (1923–4), but for the rest of the decade his work did not attract the attention his earlier designs had enjoyed. In the 1930s, however, Wright's buildings were once more widely publicized.

At the Kaufmann House (1935–48), ‘Falling Water’, Connelsville, PA (1935–48), he gave full expression to horizontals and verticals in a tour-de-force constructed over a stream called Bear Run, a design that had superficial resemblances to the International Modernism of the time, but, with its coursed rubble walls and hand-crafted detail, owed more, perhaps, to the Arts-and-Crafts tradition, while the disposition of elements derived from his Prairie House type. In 1936–9 he designed and built the Johnson Wax Factory, Racine, WI, with a tall interior the roof of which was supported by tapered mushroom-shaped columns, the walls being of brick with glass tubes forming the light-sources. At the same time he developed his low-cost Usonian houses, based on vernacular American buildings, that explored the possibilities of prefabrication. The prototype was the Jacobs House, Madison, WI (1936–7), and Wright publicized his ideas in Architectural Forum of 1938. He also evolved proposals for Broadacre City, a low-density plan in which the Usonian house would feature large. In 1937 he designed Taliesin West, winter quarters for himself and his disciples, which he built at Scottsdale, AZ From 1942 he prepared designs for the Guggenheim Museum, NYC (completed 1960), a spiral ramp that proved to be an inappropriate form for viewing works of art, but as an exercise in formal geometry was remarkable for its time. At Bartlesville, OK, he designed the Price Tower (1953–6), a tall block rather more elegant than the slabs so prevalent during that period, demonstrating Wright's interest in the acute angles he had also employed at Taliesin West. Among his last works the Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, Calif. (1957–66), and the Beth Sholom Synagogue, Elkins Park, PA (1958–9), deserve note.

Wright has been seen as an exponent of organic architecture, by which he seems to have meant design that proceeds from the nature of Mankind and his circumstances as they both change. Although his writings suffer from rather obvious conceit, prolixity, and dense obfuscation (e.g. An Autobiography (1943), An Organic Architecture (1939), and When Democracy Builds (1945)), they were collected and published as Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture: Selected Writings 1894–1940 (1941) and In the Cause of Architecture: Essays by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Architectural Review 1908–1952 (1975).

Wright, Frank Lloyd Lincoln (Top) Plan of Robie House. (Bottom) Plan of Unity Temple

Bibliography

Alofsin (ed.) (1999)
Bolon et al. (1988)
Etlin (1994)
Futagawa (ed.) (2002, 2002a)
B. Gill (1987)
G&I (1981)
Gutheim (ed.) (1941)
T. Heinz (1982, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000)
Hitchcock (1973)
D.Hoffmann (1988)
LeG&S (1996)
Levine (1996)
Long (1996)
McCarter (1997)
Placzek (ed.) (1982)
K. Smith (1998)
N. Smith (1966)
Storrer (1974, 1993, 2002)
Stungo (1999a)
R. Sweeney (1978)
Jane Turner (1996)
I. Thomson (2000)
Twombly (1979)
Wright (1943, 1945, 1970, 1975, 1998)
van Vynckt (ed.) (1983)
Zevi (1979)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

Houghton Mifflin Companion to US History:

Wright, Frank Lloyd

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(1867-1959), architect. The most innovative and important architect in U.S. history, Wright is known for his pioneering private residences and his bold public buildings. During a seventy-two-year career, he produced over eight hundred designs, of which some four hundred were built and three hundred still stand. In his most creative periods (c. 1901-1909, 1935-1941), he revolutionized the suburban home, in the process acquiring international standing while generating unprecedented overseas interest in American architecture.

Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, and spent two unfruitful semesters at the University of Wisconsin. He then moved to Chicago in 1887 to work with the architect J. L. Silsbee, soon shifting to Louis H. Sullivan's firm.

Wright rose quickly from renderer to chief draftsman to Sullivan's confidant, but their relationship ended prematurely in 1893 when Wright, who had taken his own commissions in violation of contract, was fired. In speeches, essays, and designs during the next eight years, his keen interest in new technologies, midwestern topography, middle-class family life, and the national search for an indigenous style were gradually but brashly synthesized into a design concept that in 1901 he labeled the "prairie house."

Frederick C. Robie's home (1906-1908, Chicago) is the most famous of these houses. They featured long, low, horizontal lines in harmony with the landscape, an open plan of interpenetrating group spaces, a heightened visual and physical association between indoors and out, and decorations functionally integrated with the structure. Wright also applied this style to nonresidential work, notably the Larkin Building (1904, Buffalo) and Unity Temple (1905-1906, Oak Park, Illinois). It was widely imitated, mostly in the Midwest, and exerted enormous influence in Europe, especially in Germany and the Netherlands.

In 1909 Wright left his wife and family and moved to Europe with Mamah Borthwick (Cheney), a client, ultimately settling with her on family land in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The accompanying scandal that almost ruined his career was exacerbated in 1914 by Borthwick's ax-murder (along with six others including her children) and the destruction of Taliesin, their home, by arson. During the next twenty years, two love affairs and marriages, a child born out of wedlock, another fire at Taliesin, numerous lawsuits, an arrest and jailing, and a period in exile contributed to Wright's going bankrupt. In 1913-1914 he had built the massive Midway Gardens entertainment complex in Chicago and from 1913 to 1922 executed the even more massive Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, but overall, from 1915 to 1935, he completed few commissions. He lectured and wrote regularly but was considered finished as a practicing architect.

Then in a burst of creativity from 1935 to 1937, Wright designed Fallingwater in western Pennsylvania, widely considered the finest private house of the twentieth century; the Johnson Wax Administration Building in Racine, Wisconsin, a tour-de-force of aesthetic and structural innovation; and the Herbert Jacobs residence in Madison, the prototype "Usonian" house. Based on a thorough rethinking of the prairie house, the Usonian residence featured partial prefabrication, radiant heating, increased open planning and indoor-outdoor association, utility clustering, and site specificity. Influenced by the International Style of the 1920s, the Usonians erected by 1941 were important models for post-World War II suburban housing.

From 1945 until his death, Wright was extraordinarily prolific, writing and lecturing, campaigning endlessly for his deurbanization scheme, and building some 150 commissions. These were the years of his boldest large works--New York's Guggenheim Museum, the Marin County Civic Center in California, and many others--and hundreds of projects of every sort, ranging from a Baghdad cultural center to a mile-high skyscraper, hotels, churches, parking garages, and even a doghouse.

Aside from his innovations and popularizations--the carport, open and geometric grid planning, unframed corner windows, radiant heating, decorated concrete blocks, and many more--his greatest legacy may have been consistency, his steadfast adherence to his own principles resulting in his unwillingness to follow fashion. Unlike Mies van der Rohe, Wright left no disciples of note because his work was not reducible to formulae. But his reputation remains unmatched, and the fecundity of his ideas, still incompletely mined, continues to stimulate new generations of architects.

Bibliography:

Robert Twombly, Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture (1979); Frank Lloyd Wright, The Future of Architecture (1953).

Author:

Robert Twombly

See also Architecture; Progressivism.

Columbia Encyclopedia:

Frank Lloyd Wright

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Wright, Frank Lloyd, 1867-1959, American architect, b. Richland Center, Wis. Wright is widely considered the greatest American architect. After studying civil engineering at the Univ. of Wisconsin, he worked for seven years in the office of Dankmar Adler and Louis H. Sullivan in Chicago.

The Prairie Style

Wright's first independent commission was the Winslow residence (1893) in River Forest, Ill. Establishing himself in Oak Park, Ill., he built a series of residences with low horizontal lines and strongly projecting eaves that echoed the rhythms of the surrounding landscape; it was termed his prairie style. The most famous examples are located in Chicago and its suburbs; they include the Willitts house (1900?-1902), Highland Park; the Coonley house (1908), Riverside; and the Robie house (1909), Chicago.

Innovative Techniques and Styles

From the beginning Wright practiced radical innovation both as to structure and aesthetics, and many of his methods have since become internationally current. At a time when poured reinforced concrete and steel cantilevers were generally confined to commercial structures, Wright did pioneer work in integrating machine methods and materials into a true architectural expression. He was the first architect in the United States to produce open planning in houses, in a break from the traditional closed volume, and to achieve a fluidity of interior space by his frequent elimination of confining walls between rooms. For the Millard house (1923) at Pasadena, Calif., he worked out a new method, known as textile-block slab construction, consisting of double walls of precast concrete blocks tied together with steel reinforcing rods set into both the vertical and the horizontal joints.

Important Works

The Larkin Office Building (1904; destroyed 1950), Buffalo, and Oak Park Unity Temple (1908), near Chicago, were early monumental works that exerted wide influence. Among other notable works are the Imperial Hotel (1916-22; demolished 1968; partially reconstructed, Meiji Mura Mus., Inuyama, Japan), Tokyo, Japan, which withstood the effects of the 1923 earthquake; the Midway Gardens (1914; destroyed 1923), Chicago; and Wright's own residence "Taliesin" (1911; twice burned and rebuilt) at Spring Green, Wis. Among his later projects were "Taliesin West" (1936-59), Scottsdale, Ariz. (which has continued since his death as a school of architecture); the Johnson administration building (1936-39; research tower, 1950), Racine Wis.; and the house for Edgar Kaufmann, "Fallingwater" (1936-37), Bear Run, Pa., which is dramatically cantilevered over a waterfall.

After World War II, Wright continued a large and ever-inventive practice until his death. He created dynamic interior spaces with spiral ramps for the V. C. Morris Gift Shop (1948-49), San Francisco, and for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1946-59), New York City. Other notable later buildings include a Unitarian church (1947), Madison, Wis.; the Price Tower (1955), Bartlesville, Okla.; and Beth Sholom Synagogue (1959), Elkins Park, Pa. He left numerous unrealized projects, including one for a mile-high skyscraper ("The Illinois") for Chicago and an ambitious design for a civic center in Madison, Wis. The latter was later reconceived as the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center and opened in 1997.

Writings and Bibliography

Wright's architectural philosophy was expressed in his lectures and writings. Among them are On Architecture (1941); When Democracy Builds (1945); Genius and the Mobocracy (1949, enl. ed. 1971), an evaluation of his master Louis H. Sullivan; The Future of Architecture (1953); An American Architecture (1955); and A Testament (1957). His influence can be seen throughout Europe. Volumes illustrative of his works were published in France and Germany as early as 1910. In 1995 about 5,000 of his architectural drawings were published in CD-ROM form as Frank Lloyd Wright: Presentation and Conceptual Drawings.

See also his autobiography (enl. ed. 1977); biographies by his daughter, Iovanna Lloyd Wright (1962) and his wife, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright (rev. ed. 1970), F. Farr (1961), R. C. Twombly (1973), M. Secrest (1992), and A. L. Huxtable (2004); studies by H. R. Hitchcock (1942, repr. 1973); V. Scully (1960), P. Blake (rev. ed. 1964), H. A. Brooks (1972), D. L. Johnson (1990), and D. Hoffmann (1995); W. A. Storrer, a catalog of his buildings (1974, repr. 1978) and The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion (1994); bibliography by R. L. Sweeney (1978).

Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: Fine Arts:

Wright, Frank Lloyd

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A twentieth-century American architect known for his highly original methods of uniting buildings with their surroundings.

Quotes By:

Frank Lloyd Wright

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Quotes:

"An idea is salvation by imagination."

"I hate intellectuals. They are from the top down. I am from the bottom up."

"The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life."

"All fine architectural values are human vales, else not valuable."

"A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."

"The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."

See more famous quotes by Frank Lloyd Wright

Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Frank Lloyd Wright

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Frank Lloyd Wright

Born	Frank Lincoln Wright June 8, 1867(1867-06-08) Richland Center, Wisconsin
Died	April 9, 1959(1959-04-09) (aged 91) Phoenix, Arizona
Nationality	American
Work
Buildings	Robie House Price Tower Fallingwater Johnson Wax Headquarters Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Taliesin
Projects	Florida Southern College

Frank Lloyd Wright (born Frank Lincoln Wright, June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures and completed 500 works. Wright believed in designing structures which were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture. This philosophy was best exemplified by his design for Fallingwater (1935), which has been called "the best all-time work of American architecture".^[1] Wright was a leader of the Prairie School movement of architecture and developed the concept of the Usonian home, his unique vision for urban planning in the United States.

His work includes original and innovative examples of many different building types, including offices, churches, schools, skyscrapers, hotels, and museums. Wright also designed many of the interior elements of his buildings, such as the furniture and stained glass. Wright authored 20 books and many articles and was a popular lecturer in the United States and in Europe. His colorful personal life often made headlines, most notably for the 1914 fire and murders at his Taliesin studio. Already well known during his lifetime, Wright was recognized in 1991 by the American Institute of Architects as "the greatest American architect of all time."^[1]

Contents

1 Early years
2 Prairie House
3 Midlife controversy and architecture
4 Mature Organic Style
- 4.1 Usonian Houses
- 4.2 Significant later works
5 Other projects
- 5.1 Wright's last design and first European project
- 5.2 Community planning
6 Japanese art
7 Death and legacy
8 Family
9 Archives
10 Selected works
11 See also
12 References
13 External links

Early years

Frank Lloyd Wright was born in the farming town of Richland Center, Wisconsin, United States, in 1867 and named Frank Lincoln Wright. His father, William Carey Wright (1825–1904), was a locally admired orator, music teacher, occasional lawyer, and itinerant minister. William Wright had met and married Anna Lloyd Jones (1838/39 – 1923), a county school teacher, the previous year when he was employed as the superintendent of schools for Richland County. Originally from Massachusetts, William Wright had been a Baptist minister, but he later joined his wife's family in the Unitarian faith. Anna was a member of the large, prosperous and well-known Lloyd Jones family of Unitarians, who had emigrated from Wales to Spring Green, Wisconsin. One of Anna's brothers was Jenkin Lloyd Jones, who would become an important figure in the spread of the Unitarian faith in the Western United States. Both of Wright's parents were strong-willed individuals with idiosyncratic interests that they passed on to him. In his biography his mother declared, when she was expecting her first child, that he would grow up to build beautiful buildings. She decorated his nursery with engravings of English cathedrals torn from a periodical to encourage the infant's ambition. The family moved to Weymouth, Massachusetts in 1870 for William to minister a small congregation.

In 1876, Anna visited the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and saw an exhibit of educational blocks created by Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel. The blocks, known as Froebel Gifts, were the foundation of his innovative kindergarten curriculum. A trained teacher, Anna was excited by the program and bought a set of blocks for her family. Young Wright spent much time playing with the blocks. These were geometrically shaped and could be assembled in various combinations to form three-dimensional compositions. Wright's autobiography talks about the influence of these exercises on his approach to design. Many of his buildings are notable for their geometrical clarity.

The Wright family struggled financially in Weymouth and returned to Spring Green, Wisconsin, where the supportive Lloyd Jones clan could help William find employment. They settled in Madison, where William taught music lessons and served as the secretary to the newly formed Unitarian society. Although William was a distant parent, he shared his love of music, especially the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, with his children.

Soon after Wright turned 14, his parents separated. Anna had been unhappy for some time with William's inability to provide for his family and asked him to leave. The divorce was finalized in 1885 after William sued Anna for lack of physical affection. William left Wisconsin after the divorce and Wright claimed he never saw his father again.^[2] At this time Wright changed his middle name from Lincoln to Lloyd in honor of his mother's family, the Lloyd Joneses. As the only male left in the family, Wright assumed financial responsibility for his mother and two sisters.

Education and work for Silsbee (1885–1888)

Wright attended a Madison high school, but there is no evidence he ever graduated.^[3] He was admitted to the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a special student in 1886. There he joined Phi Delta Theta fraternity,^[4] took classes part-time for two semesters, and worked with a professor of civil engineering, Allan D. Conover.^[5] In 1887, Wright left the school without taking a degree (although he was granted an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University in 1955).

In 1887, Wright arrived in Chicago in search of employment. As a result of the devastating Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and recent population boom, new development was plentiful in the city. He later recalled that his first impressions of Chicago were that of grimy neighborhoods, crowded streets, and disappointing architecture, yet he was determined to find work. Within days, and after interviews with several prominent firms, he was hired as a draftsman with the architectural firm of Joseph Lyman Silsbee.^[6] Wright previously collaborated with Silsbee—accredited as the draftsman and the construction supervisor—on the 1886 Unity Chapel for Wright's family in Spring Green, Wisconsin.^[7] While with the firm, he also worked on two other family projects: the All Souls Church in Chicago for his uncle, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, and the Hillside Home School I in Spring Green for two of his aunts.^[8] Other draftsmen who worked for Silsbee in 1887 included future architects Cecil Corwin, George W. Maher, and George G. Elmslie. Wright soon befriended Corwin, with whom he lived until he found a permanent home.

In his autobiography, Wright recounts that he also had a short stint in another Chicago architecture office. Feeling that he was underpaid for the quality of his work for Silsbee (at $8 a week), the young draftsman quit and found work as a designer at the firm of Beers, Clay, and Dutton. However, Wright soon realized that he was not ready to handle building design by himself; he left his new job to return to Joseph Silsbee—this time with a raise in salary.^[9]

Although Silsbee adhered mainly to Victorian and revivalist architecture, Wright found his work to be more "gracefully picturesque" than the other "brutalities" of the period.^[10] Still, Wright aspired for more progressive work. After less than a year had passed in Silsbee's office, Wright learned that the Chicago firm of Adler & Sullivan was "looking for someone to make the finish drawings for the interior of the Auditorium [Building]." ^[11] Wright demonstrated that he was a competent impressionist of Louis Sullivan's ornamental designs and two short interviews later, was an official apprentice in the firm.^[12]

Adler & Sullivan (1888–1893)

Wright did not get along well with Sullivan's other draftsmen; he wrote that several violent altercations occurred between them during the first years of his apprenticeship. For that matter, Sullivan showed very little respect for his employees as well.^[13] In spite of this, "Sullivan took [Wright] under his wing and gave him great design responsibility." As a show of respect, Wright would later refer to Sullivan as Lieber Meister (German for "Dear Master").^[14] Wright also formed a bond with office foreman Paul Mueller. Wright would later engage Mueller to build several of his public and commercial buildings between 1903 and 1923.^[15]

Wright's home in Oak Park, Illinois

On June 1, 1889, Wright married his first wife, Catherine Lee "Kitty" Tobin (1871–1959). The two had met around a year earlier during activities at All Souls Church. Sullivan did his part to facilitate the financial success of the young couple by granting Wright a five-year employment contract. Wright made one more request: "Mr. Sullivan, if you want me to work for you as long as five years, couldn't you lend me enough money to build a little house?"^[16] With Sullivan's $5000 loan, Wright purchased a lot at the corner of Chicago and Forest Avenues in the suburb of Oak Park. The existing Gothic Revival house was given to his mother, while a compact Shingle style house was built alongside for Wright and Catherine.^[17]

According to an 1890 diagram of the firm's new, 17th floor space atop the Auditorium Building, Wright soon earned a private office next to Sullivan's own.^[15] However, that office was actually shared with friend and draftsman George Elmslie, who was hired by Sullivan at Wright's request.^[18] Wright had risen to head draftsman and handled all residential design work in the office. As a general rule, Adler & Sullivan did not design or build houses, but they obliged when asked by the clients of their important commercial projects. Wright was occupied by the firm's major commissions during office hours, so house designs were relegated to evening and weekend overtime hours at his home studio. He would later claim total responsibility for the design of these houses, but careful inspection of their architectural style, and accounts from historian Robert Twombly suggest that it was Sullivan that dictated the overall form and motifs of the residential works; Wright's design duties were often reduced to detailing the projects from Sullivan's sketches.^[18] During this time, Wright worked on Sullivan's bungalow (1890) and the James A. Charnley Bungalow (1890) both in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, the Berry-MacHarg House (1891) and Sullivan's townhouse (1892) both in Chicago, and the most noted 1891 James A. Charnley House also in Chicago. Of the five collaborations, only the two commissions for the Charnley family still stand.^[19]^[20]

The Walter Gale House (1893) is Queen Anne in style yet features window bands and a cantilevered porch roof which hint at Wright's developing aesthetics

Despite Sullivan's loan and overtime salary, Wright was constantly short on funds. Wright admitted that his poor finances were likely due to his expensive tastes in wardrobe and vehicles, and the extra luxuries he designed into his house. To compound the problem, Wright's children – including first born Lloyd (b.1890) and John (b.1892) – would share similar tastes for fine goods.^[16]^[21] To supplement his income and repay his debts, Wright accepted independent commissions for at least nine houses. These "bootlegged" houses, as he later called them, were conservatively designed in variations of the fashionable Queen Anne and Colonial Revival styles. Nevertheless, unlike the prevailing architecture of the period, each house emphasized simple geometric massing and contained features such as bands of horizontal windows, occasional cantilevers, and open floor plans which would become hallmarks of his later work. Eight of these early houses remain today including the Thomas Gale, Parker, Blossom, and Walter Gale houses.^[22]

As with the residential projects for Adler & Sullivan, Wright designed his bootleg houses on his own time. Sullivan knew nothing of the independent works until 1893, when he recognized that one of the houses was unmistakably a Frank Lloyd Wright design. This particular house, built for Allison Harlan, was only blocks away from Sullivan's townhouse in the Chicago community of Kenwood. Aside from the location, the geometric purity of the composition and balcony tracery in the same style as the Charnley House likely gave away Wright's involvement. Since Wright's five year contract forbade any outside work, the incident led to his departure from Sullivan's firm.^[20] A variety of stories recount the break in the relationship between Sullivan and Wright; even Wright later told two different versions of the occurrence. In An Autobiography, Wright claimed that he was unaware that his side ventures were a breach of his contract. When Sullivan learned of them, he was angered and offended; he prohibited any further outside commissions and refused to issue Wright the deed to his Oak Park house until after he completed his five years. Wright could not bear the new hostility from his master and thought the situation was unjust. He "threw down [his] pencil and walked out of the Adler and Sullivan office never to return." Dankmar Adler, who was more sympathetic to Wright's actions, later sent him the deed.^[23] On the other hand, Wright told his Taliesin apprentices (as recorded by Edgar Tafel) that Sullivan fired him on the spot upon learning of the Harlan House. Tafel also accounted that Wright had Cecil Corwin sign several of the bootleg jobs, indicating that Wright was aware of their illegal nature.^[20]^[24] Regardless of the correct series of events, Wright and Sullivan did not meet or speak for twelve years.

Transition and experimentation (1893–1900)

After leaving Louis Sullivan, Wright established his own practice on the top floor of the Sullivan designed Schiller Building (1892, demolished 1961) on Randolph Street in Chicago. Wright chose to locate his office in the building because the tower location reminded him of the office of Adler & Sullivan. Although Cecil Corwin followed Wright and set up his architecture practice in the same office, the two worked independently and did not consider themselves partners.^[25] Within a year, Corwin decided that he did not enjoy architecture and journeyed east to find a new profession.^[26]

With Corwin gone, Wright moved out of the Schiller Building and into the nearby and newly completed Steinway Hall Building. The loft space was shared with Robert C. Spencer, Jr., Myron Hunt, and Dwight H. Perkins.^[27] These young architects, inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement and the philosophies of Louis Sullivan, formed what would become known as the Prairie School.^[28] They were joined by Perkins apprentice, Marion Mahony, who in 1895 transferred to Wright's team of drafters and took over production of his presentation drawings and watercolor renderings. Mahony, the first licensed female architect in the United States, also designed furniture, leaded glass windows, and light fixtures, among other features, for Wright's houses.^[29]^[30] Between 1894 and the early 1910s, several other leading Prairie School architects and many of Wright's future employees launched their careers in the offices of Steinway Hall.

William H. Winslow House (1893) in River Forest, Illinois

Wright's projects during this period followed two basic models. On one hand, there was his first independent commission, the Winslow House, which combined Sullivanesque ornamentation with the emphasis on simple geometry and horizontal lines that is typical in Wright houses. The Francis Apartments (1895, demolished 1971) Heller House (1896), Rollin Furbeck House (1897), and Husser House (1899, demolished 1926) were designed in the same mode. For more conservative clients, Wright conceded to design more traditional dwellings. These included the Dutch Colonial Revival style Bagley House (1894), Tudor Revival style Moore House I (1895), and Queen Anne style Charles Roberts House (1896).^[31] As an emerging architect, Wright could not afford to turn down clients over disagreements in taste, but even his most conservative designs retained simplified massing and occasional Sullivan inspired details.^[32]

Soon after the completion of the Winslow House in 1894, Edward Waller, a friend and former client, invited Wright to meet Chicago architect and planner Daniel Burnham. Burnham had been impressed by the Winslow House and other examples of Wright's work; he offered to finance a four year education at the École des Beaux-Arts and two years in Rome. To top it off, Wright would have a position in Burnham's firm upon his return. In spite of guaranteed success and support of his family, Wright declined the offer. Burnham, who had directed the classical design of the World's Columbian Exposition was a major proponent of the Beaux Arts movement, thought that Wright was making a foolish mistake. Yet for Wright, the classical education of the École lacked creativity and was altogether at odds with his vision of modern American architecture.^[33]^[34]

Wright's studio (1898) viewed from Chicago Avenue

Wright relocated his practice to his home in 1898 in order to bring his work and family lives closer. This move made further sense as the majority of the architect's projects at that time were in Oak Park or neighboring River Forest. The past five years had seen the birth of three more children – Catherine in 1894, David in 1895, and Frances in 1898 – prompting Wright to sacrifice his original home studio space for additional bedrooms. Thus, moving his workspace necessitated his design and construction of an expansive studio addition to the north of the main house. The space, which included a hanging balcony within the two story drafting room, was one of Wright's first experiments with innovative structure. The studio was a poster for Wright's developing aesthetics and would become the laboratory from which the next ten years of architectural creations would emerge.^[35]

Prairie House

By 1901, Wright had completed about 50 projects, including many houses in Oak Park. As his son John Lloyd Wright wrote:

"William Eugene Drummond, Francis Barry Byrne, Walter Burley Griffin, Albert Chase McArthur, Marion Mahony, Isabel Roberts and George Willis were the draftsmen. Five men, two women. They wore flowing ties, and smocks suitable to the realm. The men wore their hair like Papa, all except Albert, he didn't have enough hair. They worshiped Papa! Papa liked them! I know that each one of them was then making valuable contributions to the pioneering of the modern American architecture for which my father gets the full glory, headaches and recognition today!"^[36]

Between 1900 and 1901, Frank Lloyd Wright completed four houses which have since been considered the onset of the "Prairie style". Two, the Hickox and Bradley Houses, were the last transitional step between Wright's early designs and the Prairie creations.^[37] Meanwhile, the Thomas House and Willits House received recognition as the first mature examples of the new style.^[38]^[39] At the same time, Wright gave his new ideas for the American house widespread awareness through two publications in the Ladies' Home Journal. The articles were in response to an invitation from the president of Curtis Publishing Company, Edward Bok, as part of a project to improve modern house design. Bok also extended the offer to other architects, but Wright was the sole responder. "A Home in a Prairie Town" and "A Small House with Lots of Room in it" appeared respectively in the February and July 1901 issues of the journal. Although neither of the affordable house plans were ever constructed, Wright received increased requests for similar designs in following years.^[37]

Wright's residential designs were "Prairie Houses" because the design is considered to complement the land around Chicago. These houses featured extended low buildings with shallow, sloping roofs, clean sky lines, suppressed chimneys, overhangs and terraces all using unfinished materials. The houses are credited with being the first examples of the "open plan". Windows whenever possible are long, and low, allowing a connection between the interior and nature, outside, that was new to western architecture and reflected the influence of Japanese architecture on Wright . The manipulation of interior space in residential and public buildings are hallmarks of his style.

Public buildings in the Prairie style include Unity Temple, the home of the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Oak Park. As a lifelong Unitarian and member of Unity Temple, Wright offered his services to the congregation after their church burned down in 1905. The community agreed to hire him and he worked on the building from 1905 to 1909. Wright later said that Unity Temple was the edifice in which he ceased to be an architect of structure, and became an architect of space. Many architects consider it the world's first modern building, because of its unique construction of only one material: reinforced concrete. This would become a hallmark of the modernists who followed Wright, such as Mies van der Rohe, and even some post-modernists, such as Frank Gehry.

Darwin D. Martin House, Buffalo, New York

Hillside Home School, 1902, Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin

Many examples of this work are in Buffalo, New York as a result of friendship between Wright and Darwin D. Martin, an executive of the Larkin Soap Company. In 1902, the Larkin Company decided to build a new administration building. Wright came to Buffalo and designed not only the Larkin Administration Building (completed in 1904, demolished in 1950), but also homes for three of the company's executives including the Darwin D. Martin House in 1904.

Other Wright houses considered to be masterpieces of the late Prairie Period (1907–1909) are the Frederick Robie House in Chicago and the Avery and Queene Coonley House in Riverside, Illinois. The Robie House, with its soaring, cantilevered roof lines, supported by a 110-foot-long (34 m) channel of steel, is the most dramatic. Its living and dining areas form virtually one uninterrupted space. This building had a profound influence on young European architects after World War I and is sometimes called the "cornerstone of modernism". However, Wright's work was not known to European architects until the publication of the Wasmuth Portfolio.

Midlife controversy and architecture

Family abandonment

Aerial photo of Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin

Local gossips noticed Wright's flirtations, and he developed a reputation in Oak Park as a man-about-town. His family had grown to six children, and the brood required most of Catherine's attention. In 1903, Wright designed a house for Edwin Cheney, a neighbor in Oak Park, and immediately took a liking to Cheney's wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Mamah Cheney was a modern woman with interests outside the home. She was an early feminist and Wright viewed her as his intellectual equal. The two fell in love, even though Wright had been married for almost 20 years. Often the two could be seen taking rides in Wright's automobile through Oak Park, and they became the talk of the town. Wright's wife, Kitty, sure that this attachment would fade as the others had, refused to grant him a divorce. Neither would Edwin Cheney grant one to Mamah. In 1909, even before the Robie House was completed, Wright and Mamah Cheney went together to Europe, leaving their own spouses and children behind. The scandal that erupted virtually destroyed Wright's ability to practice architecture in the United States.

Scholars argue that he felt by 1907 that he had done everything he could do with the Prairie Style, particularly from the standpoint of the single family house. Wright was not getting larger commissions for commercial or public buildings, which frustrated him.

What drew Wright to Europe was the chance to publish a portfolio of his work with Ernst Wasmuth, who had agreed in 1909 to publish his work there.^[40] This chance also allowed Wright to deepen his relationship with Mamah Cheney. Wright and Cheney left the United States in 1909 going to Berlin, where the offices of Wasmuth were located.

The resulting two volumes, titled Studies and Executed Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, were published in 1911 in two editions, creating the first major exposure of Wright's work in Europe. The work contained more than 100 lithographs of Wright's designs and was commonly known as the Wasmuth Portfolio.

Wright remained in Europe for almost one year and set up home first in Florence, Italy and later in Fiesole, Italy. During this time, Edwin Cheney granted Mamah a divorce, though Kitty still refused to grant one to her husband. After Wright's return to the United States in October 1910, Wright persuaded his mother to buy land for him in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The land, bought on April 10, 1911, was adjacent to land held by his mother's family, the Lloyd-Joneses. Wright began to build himself a new home, which he called Taliesin, by May 1911. The recurring theme of Taliesin also came from his mother's side: Taliesin in Welsh mythology was a poet, magician, and priest. The family motto was Y Gwir yn Erbyn y Byd which means "The Truth Against the World"; it was created by Iolo Morgannwg who also had a son called Taliesin, and the motto is still used today as the cry of the druids and chief bard of the Eisteddfod in Wales.^[41]

More personal turmoil

On August 15, 1914, while Wright was working in Chicago, Julian Carlton, a male servant from Barbados who had been hired several months earlier, set fire to the living quarters of Taliesin and murdered seven people with an axe as the fire burned.^[42] The dead included Mamah; her two children, John and Martha; a gardener; a draftsman named Emil Brodelle; a workman; and another workman's son. Two people survived the mayhem, one of whom helped to put out the fire that almost completely consumed the residential wing of the house. Carlton swallowed muriatic acid immediately following the attack in an attempt to kill himself.^[42] He was nearly lynched on the spot, but was taken to the Dodgeville jail.^[42] Carlton died from starvation seven weeks after the attack, despite medical attention.^[42]

In 1922, Wright's first wife, Kitty, granted him a divorce, and Wright was required to wait one year until he married his then-partner, Maude "Miriam" Noel. In 1923, Wright's mother, Anna (Lloyd Jones) Wright, died. Wright wed Miriam Noel in November 1923, but her addiction to morphine led to the failure of the marriage in less than one year. In 1924, after the separation but while still married, Wright met Olga (Olgivanna) Lazovich Hinzenburg at a Petrograd Ballet performance in Chicago. They moved in together at Taliesin in 1925, and soon Olgivanna was pregnant with their daughter, Iovanna, born on December 2, 1925.

On April 20, 1925, another fire destroyed the bungalow at Taliesin. Crossed wires from a newly installed telephone system were deemed to be responsible for the blaze, which destroyed a collection of Japanese prints that Wright declared invaluable. Wright estimated the loss at $250,000 to $500,000.^[43] Wright rebuilt the living quarters again, naming the home "Taliesin III".

In 1926, Olga's ex-husband, Vlademar Hinzenburg, sought custody of his daughter, Svetlana. In October 1926, Wright and Olgivanna were accused of violating the Mann Act and arrested in Minnetonka, Minnesota.^[44] The charges were later dropped.

Wright and Miriam Noel's divorce was finalized in 1927, and once again, Wright was required to wait for one year until marrying again. Wright and Olgivanna married in 1928.

California and the textile block houses

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Mosaics at Mitla Ruins, Mexico. These were among the inspirations for Wright's textile blocks, though he never acknowledged the source.^[45] Photo circa 1900, courtesy SMU.

Wright also built several houses in the Los Angeles area. Currently open to the public are the Hollyhock House (Aline Barnsdall Residence) in Hollywood and the Anderton Court Shops in Beverly Hills.

Following the Hollyhock House, Wright used an innovative building process in 1923 and 1924, which he called the textile block system^[46] where buildings were constructed with precast concrete blocks with a patterned, squarish exterior surface: The Alice Millard House (Pasadena), the John Storer House (West Hollywood), the Samuel Freeman House (Hollywood) and the Ennis House in the Griffith Park area of Los Angeles. During the past two decades the Ennis House has become popular as an exotic, nearby shooting location to Hollywood television and movie makers. He also designed a fifth textile block house for Aline Barnsdall, the Community Playhouse ("Little Dipper"), which was never constructed. Wright's son, Lloyd Wright, supervised construction for the Storer, Freeman and Ennis House. Most of these houses are private residences closed to the public because of renovation, including the George Sturges House (Brentwood) and the Arch Oboler Gatehouse & Studio (Malibu).

Mature Organic Style

During the later 1920s and 1930s Wright's Organic style had fully matured with the design of Graycliff, Fallingwater and Taliesin West.

Graycliff, located just south of Buffalo, NY is an important mid-career (1926–1931) design by Wright; it is a summer estate designed for his long-time patrons, Isabelle and Darwin D. Martin. Created in Wright's high Organic style, Wright wrote in a letter to the Martins that "Coming in the house would be something like putting on your hat and going outdoors."^[47] Graycliff consists of three buildings set within 8.4 acres of landscape, also designed by Wright. Its site, high on a bluff overlooking Lake Erie, inspired Wright to create a home that was transparent, with views through the building to the lake beyond. Terraces and cantilevered balconies also encourage lake views, and water features throughout the landscape were designed by Wright to echo the lake as well.

Fallingwater, Mill Run, Pennsylvania (1937)

One of Wright's most famous private residences was built from 1934 to 1937—Fallingwater—for Mr. and Mrs. Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr., at Mill Run, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. It was designed according to Wright's desire to place the occupants close to the natural surroundings, with a stream and waterfall running under part of the building. The construction is a series of cantilevered balconies and terraces, using limestone for all verticals and concrete for the horizontals. The house cost $155,000, including the architect's fee of $8,000. Kaufmann's own engineers argued that the design was not sound. They were overruled by Wright, but the contractor secretly added extra steel to the horizontal concrete elements. In 1994, Robert Silman and Associates examined the building and developed a plan to restore the structure. In the late 1990s, steel supports were added under the lowest cantilever until a detailed structural analysis could be done. In March 2002, post-tensioning of the lowest terrace was completed.

Taliesin West, Wright's winter home and studio complex in Scottsdale, AZ, was a laboratory for Wright from 1937 to his death in 1959. Now the home of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and archives, it continues today as the site of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.

Wright is responsible for a series of concepts of suburban development united under the term Broadacre City. He proposed the idea in his book The Disappearing City in 1932, and unveiled a 12-square-foot (1.1 m²) model of this community of the future, showing it in several venues in the following years. He continued developing the idea until his death.

Usonian Houses

Charles Weltzheimer Residence (1948) in Oberlin, Ohio

Main article: Usonia

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Concurrent with the development of Broadacre City, also referred to as Usonia, Wright conceived a new type of dwelling that came to be known as the Usonian House. An early version of the form can be seen in the Malcolm Willey House (1934) in Minneapolis; but the Usonian ideal emerged most completely in the Herbert and Katherine Jacobs First House (1937) in Madison, Wisconsin. Designed on a gridded concrete slab that integrated the house's radiant heating system, the house featured new approaches to construction, including sandwich walls that consisted of layers of wood siding, plywood cores and building paper, a significant change from typically framed walls. Usonian houses most commonly featured flat roofs and were mostly constructed without basements, completing the excision of attics and basements from houses, a feat Wright had been attempting since the early 20th century.

Intended to be highly practical houses for middle-class clients, and designed to be run without servants, Usonian houses often featured small kitchens – called "workspaces" by Wright – that adjoined the dining spaces. These spaces in turn flowed into the main living areas, which also were characteristically outfitted with built-in seating and tables. As in the Prairie Houses, Usonian living areas focused on the fireplace. Bedrooms were typically isolated and relatively small, encouraging the family to gather in the main living areas. The conception of spaces instead of rooms was a development of the Prairie ideal; as the built-in furnishings related to the Arts and Crafts principles from which Wright's early works grew. Spatially and in terms of their construction, the Usonian houses represented a new model for independent living, and allowed dozens of clients to live in a Wright-designed house at relatively low cost. The diversity of the Usonian ideal can be seen in houses such as the Gregor S. and Elizabeth B. Affleck House (1941) in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, which projects over a ravine; and the Hanna-Honeycomb House (1937) in Palo Alto, California, which features a honeycomb planning grid. Gordon House, completed in 1963, was Wright's last Usonian design. Fewer than 60 of Wright's Usonian houses were built.

His Usonian homes set a new style for suburban design that was a feature of countless developers. Many features of modern American homes date back to Wright, including open plans, slab-on-grade foundations, and simplified construction techniques that allowed more mechanization and efficiency in building.

Significant later works

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City (1959)

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City occupied Wright for 16 years (1943–1959)^[48] and is probably his most recognized masterpiece. The building rises as a warm beige spiral from its site on Fifth Avenue; its interior is similar to the inside of a seashell. Its unique central geometry was meant to allow visitors to easily experience Guggenheim's collection of nonobjective geometric paintings by taking an elevator to the top level and then viewing artworks by walking down the slowly descending, central spiral ramp, which features a floor embedded with circular shapes and triangular light fixtures to complement the geometric nature of the structure. Unfortunately, when the museum was completed, a number of important details of Wright's design were ignored, including his desire for the interior to be painted off-white. Furthermore, the Museum currently designs exhibits to be viewed by walking up the curved walkway rather than walking down from the top level.

Wright's Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma

The only realized skyscraper designed by Wright is the Price Tower, a 19-story tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. It is also one of the two existing vertically-oriented Wright structures (the other is the S.C. Johnson Wax Research Tower in Racine, Wisconsin). The Price Tower was commissioned by Harold C. Price of the H. C. Price Company, a local oil pipeline and chemical firm. It opened to the public in February 1956. On March 29, 2007, Price Tower was designated a National Historic Landmark by the United States Department of the Interior, one of only 20 such properties in the state of Oklahoma.^[49]

Other projects

Wright designed over 400 built structures^[50] of which about 300 survive as of 2005. Four have been lost to forces of nature: the waterfront house for W. L. Fuller in Pass Christian, Mississippi, destroyed by Hurricane Camille in August 1969; the Louis Sullivan Bungalow of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005; and the Arinobu Fukuhara House (1918) in Hakone, Japan, destroyed in the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. The Ennis House in California has also been damaged by earthquake and rain-induced ground movement. In January, 2006, the Wilbur Wynant House in Gary, Indiana was destroyed by fire.^[51]

Imperial Hotel, Tokyo (1923)

In addition, other buildings were intentionally demolished during and after Wright's lifetime, such as: Midway Gardens (1913, Chicago, Illinois) and the Larkin Administration Building (1903, Buffalo, New York) were destroyed in 1929 and 1950 respectively; the Francis Apartments and Francisco Terrace Apartments (both located in Chicago and designed in 1895) were destroyed in 1971 and 1974, respectively; the Geneva Inn (1911) in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin was destroyed in 1970; and the Banff National Park Pavilion (1911) in Alberta, Canada was destroyed in 1939. The Imperial Hotel, in Tokyo (1913) survived the Great Kantō earthquake but was demolished in 1968 due to urban developmental pressures.^[52]

One of his projects, Monona Terrace, originally designed in 1937 as municipal offices for Madison, Wisconsin, was completed in 1997 on the original site, using a variation of Wright's final design for the exterior with the interior design altered by its new purpose as a convention center. The "as-built" design was carried out by Wright's apprentice Tony Puttnam. Monona Terrace was accompanied by controversy throughout the 60 years between the original design and the completion of the structure.^[53]

Florida Southern College, located in Lakeland, Florida, constructed 12 (out of 18 planned) Frank Lloyd Wright buildings between 1941 and 1958 as part of the Child of the Sun project. It is the world's largest single-site collection of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture.

A lesser known project that never came to fruition was Wright's plan for Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe.^[54] Few Tahoe locals know of the iconic American architect's plan for their natural treasure.

The Kalita Humphreys Theater in Dallas, Texas was Wright's last project before his death.

Wright's last design and first European project

A design that Wright signed off on shortly before his death in 1959 – possibly his last completed design – was realized in late 2007 in the Republic of Ireland.^[55] Wright scholar and devotee Marc Coleman worked closely with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, dealing with E. Thomas Casey, the last surviving Foundation architect who trained under Wright. Working with the Foundation, Coleman selected an unbuilt design that was originally commissioned for Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Wieland and due to be built in Maryland, USA. However, the Wielands subsequently had financial problems and the design was shelved. The Foundation looked through its archive of 380 unbuilt designs and selected 4 for Coleman that were the closest fit for his site. In the end, he chose the Wieland house, largely because the topography of his site is virtually identical to that for which the building was originally designed. The completed house,^[56] in only the fourth country in which a Wright design has been realized, is attracting broad interest from the international architectural community. Casey visited the site in County Wicklow, but died before construction began.

Community planning

Frank Lloyd Wright was interested in site and community planning throughout his career. His commissions and theories on urban design began as early as 1900 and continued until his death. He had 41 commissions on the scale of community planning or urban design.^[57]

His thoughts on suburban design started in 1900 with a proposed subdivision layout for Charles E. Roberts entitled the "Quadruple Block Plan." This design strayed from traditional suburban lot layouts and set houses on small square blocks of four equal-sized lots surrounded on all sides by roads instead of straight rows of houses on parallel streets. The houses – which used the same design as published in "A Home in a Prairie Town" from the Ladies' Home Journal – were set toward the center of the block to maximize the yard space and included private space in the center. This also allowed for far more interesting views from each house. Although this plan was never realized, Wright published the design in the Wasmuth Portfolio in 1910.^[58]

The more ambitious designs of entire communities were exemplified by his entry into the City Club of Chicago Land Development Competition in 1913. The contest was for the development of a suburban quarter section. This design expanded on the Quadruple Block Plan and included several social levels. The design shows the placement of the upscale homes in the most desirable areas and the blue collar homes and apartments separated by parks and common spaces. The design also included all the amenities of a small city: schools, museums, markets, etc.^[59] This view of decentralization was later reinforced by theoretical Broadacre City design. The philosophy behind his community planning was decentralization. The new development must be away from the cities. In this decentralized America, all services and facilities could coexist "factories side by side with farm and home."^[60] Notable Community Planning Designs:

1900–1903 – Quadruple Block Plan – 24 homes in Oak Park, IL (unbuilt)

1909 – Como Orchard Summer Colony – Town site development for new town in the Bitterroot Valley, MT

1913 – Chicago Land Development competition – Suburban Chicago quarter section

1934–1959 – Broadacre City – Theoretical decentralized city plan – exhibits of large scale model

1938 – Suntop Homes also known as Cloverleaf Quadruple Housing Project – commission from Federal Works Agency, Division of Defense Housing – low cost multifamily housing alternative to suburban development

1945 – Usonia Homes – 47 homes (3 designed by Wright himself) in Pleasantville, New York

1949 – The Acres, also known as Galesburg Country Homes, 5 homes (4 designed by Wright himself) in Charleston Township, Michigan

1949 - Parkwyn neighborhood - A plat in Kalamazoo, MI developed by Wright himself containing mostly Usonian homes on circular lots with common spaces in between (since replatted)

Japanese art

Though most famous as an architect, Wright was an active dealer in Japanese art, primarily ukiyo-e woodblock prints. He frequently served as both architect and art dealer to the same clients; "he designed a home, then provided the art to fill it".^[61] For a time, Wright made more from selling art than from his work as an architect.

Wright first traveled to Japan in 1905, where he bought hundreds of prints. The following year, he helped organize the world's first retrospective exhibition of works by Hiroshige, held at the Art Institute of Chicago.^[61] For many years, he was a major presence in the Japanese art world, selling a great number of works to prominent collectors such as John Spaulding of Boston,^[61] and to prominent museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.^[62] He penned a book on Japanese art in 1912.^[62]

In 1920, however, rival art dealers began to spread rumors that Wright was selling retouched prints; this combined with Wright's tendency to live beyond his means, and other factors, led to great financial troubles for the architect. Though he provided his clients with genuine prints as replacements for those he was accused of retouching, this marked the end of the high point of his career as an art dealer.^[62] He was forced to sell off much of his art collection in 1927 to pay off outstanding debts; the Bank of Wisconsin claimed his Taliesin home the following year, and sold thousands of his prints, for only one dollar a piece, to collector Edward Burr Van Vleck.^[61]

Wright continued to collect, and deal in, prints until his death in 1959, frequently using prints as collateral for loans, frequently relying upon his art business to remain financially solvent^[62]

The extent of his dealings in Japanese art went largely unknown, or underestimated, among art historians for decades until, in 1980, Julia Meech, then associate curator of Japanese art at the Metropolitan Museum, began researching the history of the museum's collection of Japanese prints. She discovered "a three-inch-deep 'clump of 400 cards' from 1918, each listing a print bought from the same seller—'F. L. Wright'" and a number of letters exchanged between Wright and the museum's first curator of Far Eastern Art, Sigisbert C. Bosch Reitz, in 1918 to 1922.^[62] These discoveries, and subsequent research, led to a renewed understanding of Wright's career as an art dealer.

Death and legacy

1954 portrait by Al Ravenna, New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer

Wright-designed window in Robie House, Chicago (1906)

Turmoil followed Wright even many years after his death on April 9, 1959, while undergoing surgery in Phoenix, Arizona, to remove an intestinal obstruction.^[63] His third wife, Olgivanna, ran the Fellowship after Wright's death, until her own death in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1985. That year, it was learned that her dying wish had been that Wright, she, and her daughter by a first marriage all be cremated and relocated to Scottsdale, Arizona. By then, Wright's body had lain for over 25 years in the Lloyd-Jones cemetery, next to the Unity Chapel, near Taliesin, Wright's later-life home in Spring Green, Wisconsin.^[64] Olgivanna's plan called for a memorial garden, already in the works, to be finished and prepared for their remains. Although the garden had yet to be finished, his remains were prepared and sent to Scottsdale where they waited in storage for an unidentified amount of time before being interred in the memorial area. Today, the small cemetery south of Spring Green, Wisconsin and a long stone's throw from Taliesin, contains a gravestone marked with Wright's name, though its grave is empty.^[65]

Personal style and concepts

Wright's creations took his concern with organic architecture down to the smallest details. From his largest commercial commissions to the relatively modest Usonian houses, Wright conceived virtually every detail of both the external design and the internal fixtures, including furniture, carpets, windows, doors, tables and chairs, light fittings and decorative elements. He was one of the first architects to design and supply custom-made, purpose-built furniture and fittings that functioned as integrated parts of the whole design, and he often returned to earlier commissions to redesign internal fittings. Some of the built-in furniture remains, while other restorations have included replacement pieces created using his plans. His Prairie houses use themed, coordinated design elements (often based on plant forms) that are repeated in windows, carpets and other fittings. He made innovative use of new building materials such as precast concrete blocks, glass bricks and zinc cames (instead of the traditional lead) for his leadlight windows, and he famously used Pyrex glass tubing as a major element in the Johnson Wax Headquarters. Wright was also one of the first architects to design and install custom-made electric light fittings, including some of the very first electric floor lamps, and his very early use of the then-novel spherical glass lampshade (a design previously not possible due to the physical restrictions of gas lighting).

As Wright's career progressed, so did the mechanization of the glass industry. Wright fully embraced glass in his designs and found that it fit well into his philosophy of organic architecture. Glass allowed for interaction and viewing of the outdoors while still protecting from the elements. In 1928, Wright wrote an essay on glass in which he compared it to the mirrors of nature: lakes, rivers and ponds. One of Wright's earliest uses of glass in his works was to string panes of glass along whole walls in an attempt to create light screens to join together solid walls. By utilizing this large amount of glass, Wright sought to achieve a balance between the lightness and airiness of the glass and the solid, hard walls. Arguably, Wright's best-known art glass is that of the Prairie style. The simple geometric shapes that yield to very ornate and intricate windows represent some of the most integral ornamentation of his career.^[66]

Wright responded to the transformation of domestic life that occurred at the turn of the 20th century, when servants became a less prominent or completely absent from most American households, by developing homes with progressively more open plans. This allowed the woman of the house to work in her 'workspace', as he often called the kitchen, yet keep track of and be available for the children and/or guests in the dining room. Much of modern architecture, including the early work of Mies van der Rohe, can be traced back to Wright's innovative work.

Wright also designed some of his own clothing. His fashion sense was unique, and he usually wore expensive suits, flowing neckties, and capes. Wright drove a custom yellow 'raceabout' in the Prairie years, a red Cord convertible in the 1930s, and a famously customized 1940 Lincoln for many years. He earned many speeding tickets in each of his vehicles.^{[citation needed]}

Colleagues and influences

Wright rarely credited any influences on his designs, but most architects, historians and scholars agree he had five major influences:

Louis Sullivan, whom he considered to be his 'Lieber Meister' (dear master),
Nature, particularly shapes/forms and colors/patterns of plant life,
Music (his favorite composer was Ludwig van Beethoven),
Japanese art, prints and buildings,
Froebel Gifts^{[citation needed]}

He also routinely claimed the architects and architectural designers who were his employees' work as his own design and claimed that the rest of the Prairie School architects were merely his followers, imitators and subordinates.^[67] But, as with any architect, Wright worked in a collaborative process and drew his ideas from the work of others. In his earlier days, Wright worked with some of the top architects of the Chicago School, including Sullivan. In his Prairie School days, Wright's office was populated by many talented architects including William Eugene Drummond, John Van Bergen, Isabel Roberts, Francis Barry Byrne, Albert McArthur, Marion Mahony Griffin and Walter Burley Griffin.

The Czech-born architect Antonin Raymond, recognized as the father of modern architecture in Japan, worked for Wright at Taliesin and led the construction of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. He subsequently stayed in Japan and opened his own practice. Rudolf Schindler also worked for Wright on the Imperial hotel. His own work is often credited as influencing Wright's Usonian houses. Schindler's friend Richard Neutra also worked briefly for Wright and became an internationally successful architect.

Later in the Taliesin days, Wright employed many architects and artists who later become notable, such as Aaron Green, John Lautner, E. Fay Jones, Henry Klumb and Paolo Soleri in architecture and Santiago Martinez Delgado in the arts. As a young man, actor Anthony Quinn applied to study with Wright at Taliesin. However, Wright suggested that he first take voice lessons to help overcome a speech impediment.

Bruce Goff never worked for Wright but maintained correspondence with him. Their works can be seen to parallel each other.

Recognition

1966 U.S. postage stamp honoring Frank Lloyd Wright

Later in his life and well after his death in 1959, Wright received much honorary recognition for his lifetime achievements. He received Gold Medal awards from The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in 1941 and the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1949. He was awarded the Franklin Institute's Frank P. Brown Medal in 1953. He received honorary degrees from several universities (including his "alma mater", the University of Wisconsin) and several nations named him as an honorary board member to their national academies of art and/or architecture. In 2000, Fallingwater was named "The Building of the 20th century" in an unscientific "Top-Ten" poll taken by members attending the AIA annual convention in Philadelphia. On that list, Wright was listed along with many of the USA's other greatest architects including Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and he was the only architect who had more than one building on the list. The other three buildings were the Guggenheim Museum, the Frederick C. Robie House and the Johnson Wax Building.

In 1992, The Madison Opera in Madison, Wisconsin commissioned and premiered the opera Shining Brow, by composer Daron Hagen and librettist Paul Muldoon based on events early in Wright's life. The work has since received numerous revivals. In 2000, Work Song: Three Views of Frank Lloyd Wright, a play based on the relationship between the personal and working aspects of Wright's life, debuted at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.

In 1966, the United States Postal Service honored Wright with a Prominent Americans series 2¢ postage stamp.

Family

Frank Lloyd Wright was married three times and fathered seven children, four sons and three daughters. He also adopted Svetlana Milanoff, the daughter of his third wife, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright.^[68]

His wives were:

Catherine "Kitty" (Tobin) Wright (1871–1959); social worker, socialite (married in June 1889; divorced November 1922)
Maude "Miriam" (Noel) Wright (1869–1930), artist (married in November 1923; divorced August 1927)
Olga Ivanovna "Olgivanna" (Lazovich Milanoff) Lloyd Wright (1897–1985), dancer and writer (married in August 1928)

One of Wright's sons, Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., known as Lloyd Wright, was also a notable architect in Los Angeles. Lloyd Wright's son (and Wright's grandson), Eric Lloyd Wright, is currently an architect in Malibu, California where he has a practice of mostly residences, but also civic and commercial buildings.

Another son and architect, John Lloyd Wright, invented Lincoln Logs in 1918, and practiced extensively in the San Diego area. John's daughter, Elizabeth Wright Ingraham, is an architect in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She is the mother of Christine, an interior designer in Connecticut, and Catherine, an architecture professor at the Pratt Institute.^[69]

The Oscar-winning actress Anne Baxter was Wright's granddaughter. Baxter was the daughter of Catherine Baxter, a child born of Wright's first marriage. Baxter's daughter, Melissa Galt, currently lives and works in Atlanta as an interior designer.^[69]

His adopted daughter Svetlana (daughter of Olgivanna) and her son Daniel died in an automobile accident in 1946. Her widower, William Wesley Peters, was later briefly married to Svetlana Alliluyeva, the youngest child and only daughter of Joseph Stalin. They divorced after she could not adjust to the communal lifestyle of the Wright communities, which she compared to life in the Soviet Union under her father, and because of the constant interference of Wright's widow. Peters served as Chairman of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation from 1985 to 1991.

A great-grandson of Wright, S. Lloyd Natof, currently lives and works in Chicago as a master woodworker who specializes in the design and creation of custom wood furniture.^[70]

Selected works

Main article: List of Frank Lloyd Wright works

Nathan G. Moore House, Oak Park, Illinois

The Robie House on the University of Chicago campus

Taliesin West Panorama from the "prow" looking at the "ship"

Gammage Auditorium viewed from one of the pedestrian ramps

Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, Oak Park, Illinois, 1889–1909
William H. Winslow House, River Forest, Illinois, 1894
Ward Winfield Willits Residence, and Gardener’s Cottage and Stables, Highland Park, Illinois, 1901
Dana-Thomas House, Springfield, Illinois, 1902
Larkin Administration Building, Buffalo, New York, 1903 (demolished, 1950)
Darwin D. Martin House, Buffalo, New York, 1903–1905
Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois, 1904
Frederick C. Robie Residence, Chicago, Illinois, 1909
Taliesin I, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1911
Midway Gardens, Chicago, Illinois, 1913 (demolished, 1929)
Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan, 1923 (demolished, 1968; entrance hall reconstructed at Meiji Mura near Nagoya, Japan, 1976)
Hollyhock House (Aline Barnsdall Residence), Los Angeles, 1919–1921
Ennis House, Los Angeles, 1923
Taliesin III, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1925
Graycliff. Buffalo, NY 1926
Westhope (Richard Lloyd Jones Residence, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1929
Fallingwater (Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr. Residence), Bear Run, Pennsylvania, 1935–1937
First Jacobs House, 1936–1937
Johnson Wax Headquarters, Racine, Wisconsin, 1936
Herbert F. Johnson Residence ("Wingspread"), Wind Point, WI, 1937
Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona, 1937
Usonian homes, various locations, 1930s–1950s
Child of the Sun, Florida Southern College, Lakeland, Florida, 1941–1958
First Unitarian Society of Madison, Shorewood Hills, Wisconsin, 1947
V. C. Morris Gift Shop, San Francisco, 1948
Price Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, 1952–1956
Beth Sholom Synagogue, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 1954
Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1956–1961
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, 1956–1959
Kentuck Knob, Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania, 1956
The Illinois, mile-high tower in Chicago, 1956 (unbuilt)
Marshall Erdman Prefab Houses, various locations, 1956–1960
Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, 1956–1961
Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, CA, 1957–1966
Gammage Auditorium, Tempe, Arizona, 1959–1964
Kenneth Laurent House It is the only home Wright designed to be handicapped accessible. Built in 1949 in Rockford, Illinois.

References

Works cited in article

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^ An Autobiography, by Frank Lloyd Wright, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York City, 1943, p. 51
^ Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography, by Meryle Secrest, University of Chicago Press, 1992, p.72
^ Phi Delta Theta list of Famous Phis, accessed on May 26. 2008
^ Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography, by Meryle Secrest, p. 82
^ Wright, Frank Lloyd (2005). Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography. Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications. pp. 60–63. ISBN 076493243.
^ "A brief Biography". Wright's Life + Work. Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. 2010. http://www.franklloydwright.org/fllwf_web_091104/Biography.html. Retrieved May 16, 2010.
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^ ^a ^b Saint, Andrew (May 2004). "Frank Lloyd Wright and Paul Mueller: the architect and his builder of choice". Architectural Research Quarterly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 7 (2): 157–167. http://www.bolender.com/Frank%20Lloyd%20Wright/Files/Frank%20Lloyd%20Wright%20and%20Paul%20Mueller%20June%202003.pdf. Retrieved March 16, 2010.
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^ Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust 2001, pp. 6–9.
^ My Father: Frank Lloyd Wright, by John Lloyd Wright; 1992; page 35
^ ^a ^b Clayton, Marie (2002). Frank Lloyd Wright Field Guide. Running Press. pp. 97–102. ISBN 0-7624-1324-7.
^ Sommer, Robin Langley (1997). "Frank W. Thomas House". Frank Lloyd Wright: A Gatefold Portfolio. Honk Kong: Barnes & Noble Books. ISBN 0-7607-0463-5.
^ O'Gorman 2004, p. 134.
^ Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography, by Meryle Secrest, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, p. 202
^ "Home Country". Unitychapel.org. July 1, 2005. http://www.unitychapel.org/home_country.htm. Retrieved October 16, 2009.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d BBC News article: "Mystery of the murders at Taliesin".
^ Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography, by Meryle Secrest, p. 315–317. "$500,000 Fire in Bungalow,"The New York Times, April 22, 1925
^ Minnesota Historical Society, Collections Up Close, "Frank Lloyd Wright Arrested in Minnesota"
^ Anthony Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright: the lost years, 1910–1922 : a study of influence, 1993, University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226013669. Google Books preview. P. 372, note 33 refers to Millard House.
^ A. P. Vargas & G. G. Schierle, The textile block system: seismic analysis and upgrading, http://library.witpress.com/pages/PaperInfo.asp?PaperID=18110
^ State University of New York at Buffalo Archives http://ubdigit.buffalo.edu/collections/lib/lib-ua/lib-ua001_DDMartin.php
^ Guggenheim Museum – History^{[dead link]}
^ National Park Service – National Historic Landmarks Designated, April 13, 2007
^ The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Complete Catalog, by William Allin Storrer, University of Chicago Press, 1992 (third edition)
^ "Preservation Online: Today's News Archives: Fire Guts Rare FLW House in Indiana". Nationaltrust.org. Archived from the original on June 12, 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20080612122021/http%3A//www.nationaltrust.org/magazine/archives/arc_news_2006/011706.htm. Retrieved October 16, 2009.
^ Berstein, Fred A. "Near Nagoya, Architecture From When the East Looked West," New York Times. April 2, 2006.
^ Monona Terrace Convention Center, history web page
^ "Frank Lloyd Wright Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe". Tahoelocals.com. January 8, 2007. http://tahoelocals.com/articles/franklloydwright.php. Retrieved October 16, 2009.
^ "Wright On". constructireland.ie. http://constructireland.ie/Vol-3-Issue-11/Articles/Case-Studies/Late-1950s-Frank-Lloyd-Wright-design-realised-in-Wicklow.html. Retrieved October 16, 2009.
^ Wright On – Late 1950s Frank Lloyd Wright design realized in Wicklow (Retrieved November 18, 2009)
^ Wrightscapes: Frank Lloyd Wright's Landscape Designs, Charles E. and Berdeana Aguar, McGraw-Hill, 2002, p.344
^ Wrightscapes:Frank Lloyd Wright's Landscape Designs, Charles E. and Berdeana Aguar, McGraw-Hill, 2002, pp. 51–56
^ "Undoing the City: Frank Lloyd Wright's Planned Communities," American Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Oct., 1972), p. 544
^ "Undoing the City: Frank Lloyd Wright's Planned Communities," American Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Oct., 1972), p. 542
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Cotter, Holland (April 6, 2001). "Seeking Japan's Prints, Out of Love and Need". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/06/arts/art-review-seeking-japan-s-prints-out-of-love-and-need.html.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Reif, Rita (March 18, 2001). "Frank Lloyd Wright's Love of Japanese Prints Helped Pay the Bills". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/18/arts/art-architecture-the-master-builder-whose-other-love-helped-pay-the-bills.html.
^ "Frank Lloyd Wright Dies; Famed Architect Was 89". nytimes.com<!. April 10, 1959. http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0608.html. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
^ The Unity Chapel, designed by Joseph Silsbee, should not be confused with the much larger and vastly more famous Unity Temple, designed by Wright and located in Oak Park, IL. Wright was the draftsman for the design of the Unity Chapel.
^ Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography, Meryle Secrest, University of Chicago Press, 1992.
^ Frank Lloyd Wright's Glass Designs, Carla Lind, Pomegranate Artbooks/Archetype Press, 1995.
^ "The Magic of America", Marion Mahony Griffin
^ ascedia.com. "Taliesin Preservation, Inc. – Frank Lloyd Wright – FAQs". Taliesinpreservation.org. Archived from the original on June 10, 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20080610011735/http%3A//www.taliesinpreservation.org/frank/faq.htm#Wives_children. Retrieved October 16, 2009.
^ ^a ^b Mann, Leslie (February 1, 2008). "Reflecting pools: Descendants follow in Frank Lloyd Wright's footsteps". Chicago Tribune. http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/realestate/news/chi-cp_wright_re_02-10feb03,1,4161107.story. Retrieved March 28, 2008.
^ "The Short List". Chicago Magazine. November 2006. http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/November-2006/Short-List-November-2006/. Retrieved March 10, 2008.

Selected books and articles on Wright’s philosophy

An Autobiography, by Frank Lloyd Wright (1943, Duell, Sloan and Pearce / 2005, Pomegranate; ISBN 0-7649-3243-8)
Frank Lloyd Wright: A Primer on Architectural Principles, by Robert McCarter (1991, Princeton Architectural Press; ISBN 1878271261)
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian Homes: Designs for Moderate Cost One-Family Homes, by John Sergeant (1984, Watson-Guptill; ISBN 0823071782)
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian Homes (Wright at a Glance Series), by Carla Lind (1994, Pomegranate Communications; ISBN 1566409985)
"In the Cause of Architecture", Architectural Record, March, 1908, by Frank Lloyd Wright. Published in Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, vol. 1 (1992, Rizzoli; ISBN 0-8478-1546-3)
Natural House, The, by Frank Lloyd Wright (1954, Horizon Press; ISBN 0517020785)
Taliesin Reflections: My Years Before, During, and After Living with Frank Lloyd Wright, by Earl Nisbet (2006, Meridian Press; ISBN 0-9778951-0-6)
Truth Against the World: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks for an Organic Architecture, ed. by Patrick Meehan (1987, Wiley; ISBN 0471845094)
Understanding Frank Lloyd Wright's Architecture, by Donald Hoffman (1995, Dover Publications; ISBN 048628364X)
Usonia : Frank Lloyd Wright's Design for America, Alvin Rosenbaum (1993, Preservation Press; ISBN 0891332014)
Frank Lloyd Wright, by Daniel Treiber (2008, Birkhäuser Basel, 2nd, updated edition; ISBN 978-3764386979)

Biographies of Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture, man in possession of his earth, by Iovanna Lloyd Wright (1962, Doubleday; OCLC 31514669)
Many Masks, by Brendan Gill (1987, Putnam; ISBN 0399132325)
Frank Lloyd Wright, by Ada Louise Huxtable (2004, Lipper/Viking; ISBN 0670033421)
Frank Lloyd Wright: a Biography, by Meryle Secrest (1992, Knopf; ISBN 0394564367)
Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and Architecture, by Robert Twombly (1979, Wiley; ISBN 0471034002)
Frank Lloyd Wright: by Vaccaro, Tony, (2002, Kultur-unterm-Schirm)
The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman (2006, Regan Books; ISBN 0060393882)
Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan, (2008, Random House, Inc; ISBN 0345494997)

Selected survey books on Wright’s work

Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, The, by Neil Levine (1996, Princeton University Press; ISBN 0691033714)
Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Complete Catalog, The, by William Allin Storrer (2007 updated 3rd. ed., University of Chicago Press; ISBN 0-226-77620-4)
Frank Lloyd Wright, by Robert McCarter (1997, Phaidon, London; ISBN 0 7148 31484 (hardback), ISBN 0714838543 (paperback))
Frank Lloyd Wright: America’s Master Architect, by Kathryn Smith (1998, Abbeville Publishing Group (Abbeville Press, Inc.); ISBN 0789202875)
Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect, by the Museum of Modern Art (1994, ISBN 087070642X)
Frank Lloyd Wright Companion, The, by William Allin Storrer (2006 Rev. Ed., University of Chicago Press; ISBN 0-226-77621-2)
Frank Lloyd Wright: Masterworks, by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (1993, Rizzoli; ISBN 0847817156)
Frank Lloyd Wright: Building for Democracy, by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (2004, Taschen; ISBN 3-8228-2757-6)
Wrightscapes: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Landscape Designs, by Charles and Berdeana Aguar (2003, McGraw-Hill; ISBN 007140953X)
Wright Space: Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright's Houses by Grant Hildebrand (1991, University of Washington Press; ISBN 0295970057)
Frank Lloyd Wright Field Guide, by Thomas A. Heinz (1999, Academy Editions; ISBN 0-8101-2244-8)
Frank Lloyd Wright's Glass Designs, by Carla Lind (1995, Pomegranate; ISBN 0876544685)
The Gardens of Frank Lloyd Wright, introduction by James van Sweden, Frances Linden 2009 ISBN 978-0-711229678
Frank Lloyd Wright Complete Works 1943–1959, by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and Peter Gössel (editor) (2009, Taschen; ISBN 978-3-8228-5770-0). First in a series of three monographs featuring all of Wright's 1,100 designs, both realized and unrealized.

Selected books about specific Wright projects

Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House, by Franklin Toker (2003, Knopf; ISBN 1400040264)
At Nature's Edge: Frank Lloyd Wright's Artist Studio, by Henry Whiting II. (2007). ISBN 978-0-87480-877-3

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Frank Lloyd Wright

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Official Website
Frank Lloyd Wright, Wisconsin Historical Society
Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy
Works by or about Frank Lloyd Wright in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust – FLW Home and Studio, Robie House
Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture
Frank Lloyd Wright Wisconsin Heritage Tourism Program
Frank Lloyd Wright – PBS documentary by Ken Burns and resources
American System-Built Houses by Frank Lloyd Wright – an overview with slideshow.
Frank Lloyd Wright. Designs for an American Landscape 1922–1932
Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings Recorded by the Historic American Buildings Survey
Complete list of Wright buildings by location
Sullivan, Wright, Prairie School, & Organic Architecture
Audio interview with Martin Filler on Frank Lloyd Wright from The New York Review of Books
Article on the 50th anniversary of Wright's only gas station.
Frank Lloyd Wright and Quebec
Frank Lloyd Wright interviewed by Mike Wallace on The Mike Wallace Interview recorded September 1 & 28, 1957

Authority control: LCCN: n79032932 | WorldCat

Persondata
Name	Wright, Frank Lloyd
Alternative names
Short description	American architect
Date of birth	1867-06-08
Place of birth	Richland Center, Wisconsin
Date of death	1959-04-09
Place of death	Phoenix, Arizona

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Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect

Frank Lloyd Wright

Lloyd Frank (Lincoln) Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Lincoln Wright

Wright, Frank Lloyd

Frank Lloyd Wright

Wright, Frank Lloyd

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright

Early years

Education and work for Silsbee (1885–1888)

Adler & Sullivan (1888–1893)

Transition and experimentation (1893–1900)

Prairie House

Midlife controversy and architecture

Family abandonment

More personal turmoil

California and the textile block houses

Mature Organic Style

Usonian Houses

Significant later works

Other projects

Wright's last design and first European project

Community planning

Japanese art

Death and legacy

Personal style and concepts

Colleagues and influences

Recognition

Family

Archives

Selected works

See also

References

Works cited in article

Selected books and articles on Wright’s philosophy

Biographies of Wright

Selected survey books on Wright’s work

Selected books about specific Wright projects

External links