Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8 1867 – April 9 1959) was one of the world's most prominent and influential
architects.
He developed a series of highly individual styles over his extraordinarily long architectural career (spanning the years
1887–1959) and he influenced the entire course of architecture and building interntionally. To this day, he remains America's
most famous architect.
Wright was also well known in his lifetime. His colorful personal life frequently made headlines, most notably for the failure
of his first two marriages and for the 1914 fire and murders at his Taliesin
studio.
Biography
Early years
Frank Lloyd Wright was born in the agricultural town of Richland Center,
Wisconsin, United States, on June 8, 1867, just two years after the end of the American Civil War. His father, William
Russell Cary Wright was a locally admired orator, music teacher, occasional lawyer and itinerant minster. He had met and married
Anna Lloyd Jones, 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 Lloyd Jones was a member of the large, prosperous and well-known Lloyd Jones family of Unitarians, who had
emigrated from Wales to southwestern Wisconsin. Both of Wright's parents were strong-willed individuals with idiosyncratic
interests that they passed on to Frank. 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 where William had been called as a minister to a small
congregation. During this period in the East, Anna visited the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition and viewed an exhibit of
educational blocks created by Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel. The
blocks, known as Froebel Gifts, were the foundation of his innovative kindergarten
curriculum. A trained teacher, Anna was excited by the program and purchased a set for her family. As a child, Frank spent a
great deal of time playing with the kindergarten educational blocks. These consisted of various geometrically shaped blocks that
could be assembled in various combinations to form three-dimensional compositions. Wright in his autobiography talks about the
influence of these exercises on his approach to design. Many of his buildings are notable for the geometrical clarity they
exhibit.
Wright's home in Oak Park, Illinois
The family struggled financially in Weymouth and the journey east proved unsuccessful. The Reverend Wright could not provide
for his family from the pastorate's small congregation. The Wrights 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 Bach, with his children. Soon after he turned 14 in 1881 Wright's parents separated. Anna had been
unhappy for sometime 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 never saw the family again.
At this time Frank's middle name was changed from Lincoln to Lloyd. As the only male left in the family, Frank assumed financial
responsibility for his mother and two sisters.
Wright never attended high school and was admitted to the University of Wisconsin as a special student in 1885. He took
classes part-time for two semesters, while apprenticing under a local builder and professor of civil engineering. In 1887, Wright
left the University without taking a degree (although he was granted an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University in
1955) and moved to Chicago, Illinois, still rebuilding from the Great Chicago Fire of
1871, where he joined the architectural firm of Joseph Lyman Silsbee. Within the year, he had left Silsbee to work for the
firm of Adler & Sullivan.
In 1889, he married his first wife, Catherine Lee "Kitty" Tobin, purchased land in Oak
Park, Illinois, and built his first home, and eventually his studio there. His mother, Anna, soon followed Wright to the
city, where he purchased a home adjacent to his newly-built residence for her. His marriage to Kitty Tobin, the daughter of a
wealthy businessman, raised his social status, and he became more well-known. [1]
Beginning in 1890, he was assigned all residential design work for the firm. In 1893, Louis
Sullivan discovered that Wright had been accepting private commissions. Sullivan felt betrayed that his favored employee
had designed houses "behind his back", and he asked Wright to leave the firm. Constantly in need of funds to support his growing
family, Wright designed the homes to supplement his meager income. Wright referred to these houses as his "bootleg" designs and
the homes are located near the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, on
Chicago Avenue in Oak Park. After leaving Sullivan, Wright established his own practice at his home. By 1901, Wright's completed
projects numbered approximately fifty, including many houses in Oak Park.
Prairie House
Between 1900 and 1917, his residential designs were "Prairie Houses" (extended low
buildings with shallow, sloping roofs, clean sky lines, suppressed chimneys, overhangs and terraces, using unfinished materials),
so-called because the design is considered to complement the land around Chicago. These houses are credited with being the first
examples of the "open plan."
In fact, the manipulation of interior space in residential and public buildings, such as Unity
Temple, the home of the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Oak Park, are hallmarks of his style. A lifelong Unitarian
and member of Unity temple, Wright offered his services to the congregation after their church burned in 1904. The community
agreed to hire him and he worked on the building between 1905 through 1908. He believed that humanity should be central to all
design. Many examples of this work can be found in Buffalo, New York, resulting from a
friendship between Wright and an executive from the Larkin Soap Company,
Darwin D. Martin. In 1902 the Larkin Company decided to build a
new administration building.
Wright came to Buffalo and designed not only the first sketches for the
Larkin Administration Building (completed in 1904, demolished in 1950),
but also homes for three of the company's executives:
Hillside Home School, 1902, Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin
- Darwin D. Martin House, Buffalo NY, 1904
- William Heath House, Buffalo NY, 1905
- and later, the Graycliff estate, Derby, NY 1926
The Westcott House [1] was built between
(1907 and 1908), in Springfield, Ohio. It not only embodies Frank Lloyd Wright’s innovative Prairie Style design but also
reflects his passion for Japanese art and culture as the Westcott House displays unique design traits characteristic of
traditional Japanese design. The Westcott House is the only Prairie house to be built in Ohio, and it represents an important
evolution of Wright’s Prairie concept. The Westcott House includes an extensive ninety-eight foot pergola, capped with an
intricate wooden trellis, that connects a detached carriage house and garage to the main house -- features that are included in
only a few of Wright’s later Prairie Style houses designs.
It is not known exactly when Wright designed The Westcott House; scholars speculate that it may have been several months prior
to more than a year after the architect returned from his first trip to Japan in 1905. Wright created two separate designs for
the Westcott House; both are included in Studies and Executed Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, published by the
distinguished Ernst Wasmuth (Germany, 1910-1911). This two-volume work contains more than one hundred lithographs of Wright’s
designs and is commonly known as the Wasmuth Portfolio.
Other Frank Lloyd 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. The Robie House, with its soaring, cantilevered roof
lines, supported by a foot ( m)-long 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." Wright's work, however, was not known to
European architects until the publication of the Wasmuth Portfolio 1910-1911.
Europe and personal troubles
Local gossips noticed Wright's flirtations and he developed a reputation in Oak Park as a man-about-town. His large family had
grown to six children and the brood required most of Catherine's attention. In 1904, 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 actually completed, Wright and Mamah Cheney eloped to
Europe; abandoning their own spouses and children. The scandal that erupted virtually destroyed Wright's ability to practice
architecture in the United States.
Architectural historians have speculated on why Wright decided to turn his life upside-down. Scholars argue that he felt by
1907-8 that he had done every thing he could do with the Prairie Style, particularly from the standpoint of the one-family house.
Wright was not getting larger commissions for commercial or public buildings, which frustrated him as it would any highly skilled
architect.
Wright and Mamah Cheney traveled extensively throughout Europe. In 1910, during a stop in Berlin, Wright, with virtually all of his drawings, visited the publishing house of Ernst Wasmuth, who had agreed
to publish his work there. In two volumes, the Wasmuth Portfolio was thus published,
and created the first major exposure of Wright's work in Europe. The later Bauhaus movement's
founders claimed to have been inspired by these books.
Wright remained in Europe for one year (though Mamah Cheney returned to the United States a few times) and set up home in
Fiesole, Italy. During this time, Edwin Cheney granted her a divorce, though Kitty again refused
to grant one to her husband. After Wright's return to the United States in late 1910, Wright persuaded his mother to purchase
land for him in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The land, purchased 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 of 1911.
More personal turmoil
On August 15, 1914, while Wright was in Chicago completing a
large project, Midway Gardens, Julian Carlton, a male servant whom he had hired several months
earlier, set fire to the living quarters of Taliesin and murdered seven people with an axe as the fire burned. The dead were:
Mamah; her two children, John and Martha; a gardener; a draftsman; a workman; and the 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.
In 1922, Wright's first wife granted him a divorce, and the architect was required to wait for 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, followed soon after by
Olgivanna's pregnancy with their daughter, Iovanna (born December 2, 1925).
On April 22, 1925, another fire destroyed the living quarters of Taliesin. This appears to
have been the result of a faulty electrical system.[1]
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 Minnetonka, Minnesota, Wright and Olgivanna were accused of violating the Mann Act and arrested in October 1926 (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.
Notable projects after the Prairie Period
Imperial Hotel, Tokyo (1923)
During the turbulent 1920's, Wright designed Graycliff, one of his most innovative
residences of the period, and a precursor to Fallingwater. The Graycliff estate was constructed from 1926 to 1929 for Isabelle
and Darwin Martin on a bluff overlooking Lake Erie, just south of Buffalo, NY. A complex of three buildings and extensive grounds
all designed by Wright, Graycliff incorporates cantilevered balconies and terraces, "ribbons" of windows, and a transparent
"screen" of windows allowing views of the lake through the Isabelle R. Martin House, Graycliff's largest building. Constructed of
limestone from the beach below, warm ochre-colored stucco and striking red-stained roofs, Graycliff's light-filled buildings were
designed in Wright's "organic" style. Wright's designs for Graycliff's grounds incorporate water features that echo the lake
beyond...a pond, a fountain, sunken gardens and stone walls in a "waterfall" pattern that surround the property. On the summer
solstice, Graycliff is aligned with the setting sun on Lake Erie,as Wright intended.
One of his most famous private residences was constructed from 1935 to 1939—Fallingwater—for Mr. and Mrs. E.J. Kaufmann Sr., at
Bear 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.
It was also in the 1930s that Wright first designed "Usonian" houses. Intended to be highly
practical houses for middle-class clients, the designs were based on a simple, yet elegant geometry. He would later use similar
elementary forms in his First Unitarian Meeting House built in
Madison, Wisconsin, between 1946 and 1951. [2]
Wright is responsible for a concept or a series of extremely original 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 very large (12 by 12 ft) model of this community of the future, showing it in several venues in the following
years. He went on developing the idea until his death.
His 'Usonian' homes set a new style for suburban design that was followed by countless developers. Many features of modern
American homes date back to Wright; open plans, slab-on-grade foundations, and simplified construction techniques that allowed
more mechanization or at least efficiency in building are amongst his innovations.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New
York City is a building that occupied Wright for 16 years (1943 - 59) [3] 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 experience Guggenheim's collection of nonobjective geometric paintings with ease 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, in order 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.
Other Projects
Wright built 363 houses. About 300 survive as of 2005. Three have been lost to forces of nature:
the waterfront house for W. L. Fuller in Pass Christian, Mississippi, which
was destroyed by Hurricane Camille in August 1969, the Louis Sullivan Bungalow and the James Charnley Bungalow of
Ocean Springs, Mississippi were both destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The Ennis House in California has also been damaged by earthquake and rain-induced ground
movement. In January, 2006, the Wynant House in Gary, Indiana was destroyed by fire.
[4]
One of his projects, Monona Terrace, originally designed in 1937 as City and County
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 sixty years between the original design and the completion of the structure.
A lesser known project that never came to fruition was Wright's plan for Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe [5]. Few Tahoe locals are
even aware of the iconic American architect's plan for their natural treasure.
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 shops at Anderton Court in Beverly
Hills.
Following the Hollyhock House, Wright used an innovative building process in 1923 and 1924, which he called "textile block system" 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 TV and movie makers. He also
designed a fifth textile block house for Aline Barnsdall, the Community Playhouse ("Little Dipper"), which was never constructed.
Frank Lloyd Wright's son, Lloyd Wright, supervised construction for the Storer, Freeman and
Ennis House.
Most of these houses are private residences and/or are closed to the public because of renovation, including the Sturgis House
(Brentwood) and the Arch Oboler Gatehouse & Studio (Malibu).
Oak Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, has the largest collection of Wright houses,
as well as Wright's home and studio, which are open for public tours. Tours of certain homes occur during the year. The Unity
Temple is located on Lake Street in Oak Park. The Cheney House, Edwin and Mamah Cheney's residence, has been a bed and breakfast for many years. Beside the home's beauty, it contains a stunning in-law suite on the
lower level.
Florida Southern College, located in Lakeland, Florida constructed 12 (out of 18 planned) Frank Lloyd Wright buildings between 1941 and
1958.
Death and legacy
Turmoil followed Wright even many years after his death on April 9, 1959. His third wife Olgivanna continued to run the Fellowship after Wright's death, until her own death in
Scottsdale, Arizona in 1985. In 1985, following the death of Olgivanna, it was
learned that her dying wish had been that Wright, her daughter by a first marriage and herself all be cremated and relocated to
Scottsdale, Arizona. During the nearly 30-year period prior to Olgivanna's death,
Wright's body had lain interred in the Lloyd-Jones cemetery, next to the Unity Chapel, near Taliesin, Wright's later-life home in
Spring Green, Wisconsin. (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 draughtsman for the design of the Unity Chapel.) Olgivanna's plan to exhume her late-husband and cremate him, her
daughter and herself called for a memorial garden, already in the works, to be finished and prepared for their remains. Despite
the fact that 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, anyone who visits the small cemetery south
of Spring Green, Wisconsin and a long stone's throw from Taliesin to look upon a gravestone marked with Wright's name will be
visiting an empty grave.[2]
Personal style and concepts
Wright practiced what is known as organic architecture, an architecture that
evolves naturally out of the context, most importantly for him the relationship between the site and the building and the needs
of the client. Houses in wooded regions, for instance, made heavy use of wood, desert houses had rambling floor plans and heavy
use of stone, and houses in rocky areas such as Los Angeles were built mainly of
cinder block. 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. 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