Frank Lloyd Wright was the most talented famous architect of the c20; an American with Welsh ancestry. He was inspired by his mother to become an architect. Boyhood summers on his uncle’s farm embued a love of nature. Wright’s first building dates from 1886. In that year, as a young man, he was cited as job architect of Unity Chapel, Helena Valley, Wisc., designed by J. L. Silsbee. From then until his death he produced countless architectural projects; in 1974 it was estimated that some 433 buildings remained extant. His own publication output was phenomenal and he and his pupils, admirers, writers and critics produced about 2000 noteworthy items. Wright became a legend in his own lifetime; his lifestyle and extra-marital affairs scandalized America. He was claimed as the model for the character of Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead; it was also rumoured that he was a near communist. He had to fall back on farming as a way of surviving during lean times. The first period of his career was connected to the indigenous Prairie School and followed his short apprenticeship to his Lieber Meister Louis Sullivan of Adler & Sullivan. Wright’s family houses for middle-class businessmen, with “gently sloping rooves, low proportions, quiet skylines”, initiated a spatial revolution, where rooms were not box containers but were volumes overlapped and interpenetrated. In 1909, with his lover Mrs Mamah Cheney (n?e Borthwick), Wright travelled to Europe, where his early work was published in Berlin by Ernst Wasmuth (1910-11). It had a profound influence on continental architects. In 1913 Wright was in Japan, where he secured the Imperial Hotel commission. It brought him fame when it failed to collapse in the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. Wright’s own world, however, had collapsed in 1914 in the most appalling circumstances when he was building Midway Gardens, Chicago; Mrs Cheney and her two children were murdered. Apart from the Imperial Hotel he did little work until the textile block houses for the Los Angeles area of the mid-1920s. These include the famous Millard House. Some of the West Coast houses were supervised during construction by his son, Lloyd Wright. A year later he began the most important relationship of his life with Olgivanna Hinzenberg, a Gurdejieff disciple, whom he married in 1928. The second most successful period of Wright’s career followed, with many important houses, including the two Taliesins, Kaufmann’s “Fallingwater” and the Johnson Wax Company offices in Racine, Wisconsin, and the Johnson house, “Wingspread”. Wright believed in and promoted an “organic” architecture and way of life within a framework that was democratic, even at times utopian (e.g. the Broadacre City and Mile High projects, and his “Usonian” houses - a concept of modest dwellings close to earth, for the average American). During his “international” period of the 1930s, he visited the USSR and gave the Princeton and Sulgrave Manor lectures, which effectively summarized his philosophy. In 1941 he received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal. In the post-war period large-scale projects followed, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Marin County Court and offices as well as more houses, theatres, churches, and auditoria.

Frank Lloyd Wright
b. Richland Center, Wisconsin, 1867;
d. Phoenix, Arizona, 1959.

Major buildings /works:
Prairie School houses in and around Chicago, Illinois, including Oak Park (Unity Temple, Own Studio and House (now museum), Fricke, Martin Gale and Cheney Houses etc.); River Forest (Winslow, Roberts Houses etc.) and Riverside (Coonley Residence etc.), from 1890. Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan, 1915 (Annexe, 1916). Millard House “La Miniatura”, Pasadena, California, 1923. Taliesin III, Spring Green, Wise., from 1925; Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona, from 1937. S. C. Johnson and Son Offices, Racine, Wise., 1934 (Research Tower, 1944). Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr Residence “Falling Water”, Bear Run, Penn., 1935 (Guest House, 1938). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 5th Avenue, New York, 1956. Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium, ASU, Tempe, Arizona, 1959.

Bibliography:

F. L. Wright, An Autobiography, London, New York and Toronto, 1932 (new eds. 1943, 1977).
On Architecture, 1941, and The Future of Architecture, 1953 (his major lectures).
W. A. Storer, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, Cambridge, Mass., 1974.
R. L. Sweeny, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Annotated Bibliography, Los Angeles, 1978.
Edgar Tafel, Apprentice to Genius: Years with Frank Lloyd Wright, New York, 1979 (now reissued as Years with Frank Lloyd Wright, New York).
Brendan Gill, Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright, New York, 1987.