WRIGHT, FRANK LLOYD 1867-1959

ARCHITECT

America's Premier Architect

One of the world's most famous architects, Frank Lloyd Wright had a profound and enduring effect on Western architecture. His professional career spanned seventy years, starting with a revival of past styles and continuing through the beginnings of modern architecture, a movement in which he played a major role. Throughout his career he maintained a strong reverence for life and nature. His architecture was always far ahead of the work of other architects. He was a creative innovator and experimented throughout his long career with structure, using great steel and concrete cantilevers and poured concrete. He was one of the first architects to see the design capability of concrete blocks, designing buildings of custom-cast blocks with patterns. He also introduced open planning in buildings, letting spaces flow into each other rather than enclosing them with walls. He was interested in machines and was an early advocate of factory-manufactured products in his buildings.

Early Life

Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, on 8 June 1867. His father deserted the family when Wright was sixteen. His mother was a strong-willed woman who had decided that her son should become an architect. Starting when he was seven, his mother tutored him in the art of building designs by playing with blocks and paper, a technique originated by Friedrich Froebel. Using a basic set of blocks and other simple materials, Wright drew plans for buildings and constructed them, furniture and all. At eighteen he went to Chicago to work in the offices of Louis H. Sullivan. As a designer and draftsman in the firm of Adler and Sullivan, Wright worked on some of their finest buildings, such as the Wainwright Building (1891) in Saint Louis. Most important, he absorbed much of the philosophy, design principles, and engineering knowledge of the two partners. He left the firm in 1893 to set up his own practice.

The Prairie Style

During his early career Wright worked from a studio in downtown Chicago. He designed houses, gradually developing what he called his Prairie Style, which adopted the horizontal lines of the Great Plains. He also built the Larkin Building (1904) in Buffalo and the Robie House (1907) in Chicago. Throughout these years he developed his mature philosophy of an organic architecture, an architecture that grew like living organisms by adaptation to specific environments, sites, uses, and materials.

Wright's Mature Period

The second, or mature, period of Wright's career began when, in 1911, he built his home and studio, Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wisconsin. It burned twice and was rebuilt each time. Notable buildings from this period include Midway Gardens (1914), a great indoor and outdoor amusement center in Chicago; the Imperial Hotel (1922) in Tokyo, which survived the great earthquake of 1923; and the Millard House (1923) in Pasadena, California.

Usonian

Faced with fewer commissions in the 1930s, Wright started a new series of houses he called Usonia, a term for the United States used by Samuel Butler in his 1872 novel, Erewhon. Usonia was Wright's utopian vision of an American democracy in which life was led closer to nature, where architecture supported community, and where every family had a beautiful home. With these houses, many of which were in California, Wright pioneered the custom-designed concrete block, a material no other architect used toward such aesthetic ends. At the end of the decade he produced some of his finest buildings. He designed what many view as a residential masterpiece, the Kaufmann House (1936), called Fallingwater because it was built over a waterfall in Bear Run, Pennsylvania. In 1939 he completed the Johnson Wax Company Administration building in Racine, Wisconsin. In 1940 he started the designs for Florida Southern University at Lakeland, which was completed in 1952. He also began work on his own winter house and school, Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1939, on which he worked until his death in 1959. In 1949, when he was eighty years old, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects.