Frank Lloyd Wright

Architect

• Born: June 8, 1867
• Birthplace: Richland Center, Wisconsin
• Died: April 9, 1959
• Place of death: Phoenix, Arizona

American architect

Strongly individualistic, flamboyant, and arrogant, Wright designed and built more than four hundred structures that reflect his architectural genius. Directly and indirectly, he heavily influenced twentieth century architecture with his diverse use of geometry in his designs.

Area of achievement Architecture

Early Life

The life of one of America’s most eccentric, dramatic personalities began simply enough when Frank Lloyd Wright was born in the small town of Richland Center, Wisconsin, the eldest of three children born to William C. Wright, a Baptist preacher, and his young wife, Anna Lloyd-Jones. After his parents were divorced in 1885, Wright was reared by his mother, and he sustained a close relationship with her during her lifetime. Anna Wright’s use of the Froebel kindergarten method, which introduced children to pure geometric forms and their patterns on grids, provided Wright with the foundations of sophisticated geometric design so evident in his later architecture.

Wright grew up in a rather comfortable, middle-class home during the 1870’s and 1880’s. With the hope of studying at the University of Wisconsin, he moved to Madison in 1885, seeking part-time employment and admission to the university. A local contractor took Wright on as an apprentice, and he worked his way up to construction supervisor within two years. At the same time, Wright took engineering and graphics courses in 1886, his only year at the university. To further his architectural apprenticeship and training, Wright left Madison in 1887 for Chicago, where he secured a position with a family friend, the successful residential architect, Joseph Lyman Silsbee.

Wright’s position with Silsbee exposed him to the architects who were transforming Chicago in the 1880’s. With Silsbee’s permission, he soon took on his own commissions and gained confidence as a residential architect. In 1888, he moved to the firm of Adler and Sullivan, where he was given the firm’s home designs. This position introduced him to Louis H. Sullivan, the most innovative and influential architect of Chicago at the time, and established Wright’s talents as an architect specializing in houses. He collaborated with Sullivan on the seminal Transportation Building for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, a design that testified to the innovative talent of each man. As Wright’s position became more secure, he married and built a home for his new wife in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, where he lived until the marriage dissolved in 1909.

In 1893, at the age of twenty-six, Wright left the firm of Adler and Sullivan and established a full-time private practice. The break with Sullivan was uneasy, especially because Sullivan had developed a close personal relationship with Wright, treating him as a son. Wright, however, had learned all he could from Sullivan by the early 1890’s and believed that the time was right to launch his own independent career.

Life’s Work

As he began his independent career, Wright had an established reputation as an excellent domestic architect. From 1893 to 1910, he created many houses in the prairie-house style, an amalgam of Japanese and American influences. A style that he perfected, the prairie house epitomized Wright’s perspective of America, which was rooted deeply in the nineteenth century. In contrast to crowded urban Europe, America’s was an open, expanding society. Wright believed that American architecture should reflect that environment of the frontier, of an abundance of land; thus, he created homes with strong horizontal shapes, with large roof overhangs, and with a dynamic asymmetry to create a sense of the horizon, of motion, and of spaciousness. His interior designs, influenced by the Japanese style of large open spaces using modular units, called for expansive central rooms, few closed corners, ample windows, and a geometric emphasis in the rooms’ decor. For the most part, the exteriors of Wright’s prairie houses were unadorned, although he often created an ornate entranceway in a home otherwise characterized by bold simplicity. To complete the dramatic design, Wright integrated the house into the landscape so that the building seemed to grow out of the ground and to belong on its site.

One of the best extant examples of Wright’s prairie-house style is the Robie House (1909), adjacent to the University of Chicago. This red-brick-and-stone structure contains many innovations that were pioneering techniques and designs in American domestic architecture. Features Wright used in the prototype prairie house included the casement window, the corner window, cathedral ceilings, built-in furniture and lighting, a concrete slab foundation with radiant heat, and the carport. Many of these ideas appeared in mass housing almost a half century after Wright incorporated them as trademarks of his successful prairie style.

Wright’s professional success in the first decade of the twentieth century, with more than 140 houses and buildings to his credit, did not translate into a successful home life. In 1909, as had his father before him, he abandoned his wife and family and traveled in Europe with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of a former client. Europeans were beginning to discover Wright at that time, and he and his new companion escaped much of the scandal in the United States over their affair by remaining in Europe for more than a year. On their return to the United States, Wright settled at Spring Green, Wisconsin, near his birthplace, and built Taliesin (“shining brow” in Welsh) for himself and for Cheney. Professionally, Wright fell from favor as a domestic architect, obtaining fewer commissions and enduring the continuing scandal about his personal life. Although he continued to receive commercial projects, his overall work declined. In 1914, personal tragedy struck when a newly hired chef murdered Mamah Cheney and six other occupants of the Wright home and set fire to Taliesin. Shattered emotionally and physically, Wright secluded himself in the remains of Taliesin. Fortunately, a major commission abroad took him away from Wisconsin and its tragedy.

Wright’s design of Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel enhanced his reputation as an architectural genius. This large-scale project kept him in Japan for much of the time from 1915 to the hotel’s completion in 1922. Forgoing the striking simplicity of his prairie-house designs, Wright devised an intricate, ornate, complex building in Tokyo. Because of earthquake danger, the hotel he designed consisted of many independent sections that could move separately. Each floor was suspended from a center post, or cantilever. When a major earthquake struck Tokyo in 1923 and Wright’s Imperial Hotel was one of the few buildings to suffer no damage, he gained even greater esteem in architectural circles.

The 1920’s were unhappy times for Wright. A second and short-lived marriage failed; another fire at Taliesin in 1925 further sapped his dwindling finances. Although he received a few commissions each year in that decade, Wright turned to writing and to addressing his personal problems in the 1920’s. Late in the era, partly to raise revenue and partly to direct his creative energies, he established the Taliesin Fellowship. There, under Wright’s direction, students would develop their creative energies through craftsmanship and physical labor on the land.

The stock market crash of 1929 and the resultant Depression of the 1930’s also took its toll on Wright and his finances. Potential commissions were canceled, and Wright, never very careful about money, was more deeply in debt. Yet his work and personal life did improve. His successful marriage, in 1928, to Olgivanna (Olga Milanoff Hinzenberg) steadied his domestic world.

Four major projects of the 1930’s reconfirmed his originality and leading position among American architects: the Kaufmann House (1936), the Johnson Wax Company headquarters buildings (1936-1937, 1947-1950), Taliesin West (1938), and the Usonian houses. The Kaufmann House, best known as Fallingwater, was prairie-house architecture at its most dramatic. Built over a waterfall in the mountains of southern Pennsylvania, this multilevel residence, daring in design and spectacular in setting, consisted of several cantilevered balconies in a building of stone, concrete, and glass.

Equally dramatic and unique is the Johnson Wax Company headquarters complex in Racine, Wisconsin. An administration building with surfaces supported by thin disc-topped pillars, it mirrored Wright’s growing interest in continuity and plasticity. With the research tower, Wright demonstrated his structural solution for the skyscraper in an organic way, patterning his design of brick and opaque-glass walls and cantilevered floors after a tree with a solid trunk and several supporting branches, thus avoiding the rigid rectilinear forms of the standard skyscraper design pioneered by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Taliesin West, begun in 1938, was Wright’s winter headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona. A building of stone, concrete, redwood, and canvas, this desert home conveyed the essence of Wright’s organic architecture, with its use of natural materials and its low profile in the arid landscape. With the simplicity and boldness he used at Fallingwater, Wright had created another dramatic addition to an attractive natural setting with Taliesin West.

The Usonian houses, introduced in the late 1930’s and named for the United States, were modest versions of the prairie-house style. Usually one story with a concrete-slab foundation and carport, these homes influenced suburban tract architecture for at least two decades. Horizontal in profile, with walls and spaces based on modular construction, the Usonian design provided owners with efficient, economical, and easily maintained homes.

After World War II, Wright came into his own again in the United States. Americans recognized his genius and his daring; by the 1950’s, he was a popular, though eccentric, hero. From 1939 to 1945, he moved away from the horizontal motif to the circle and spiral as signatures of his work. The most famous of these structures is the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1956-1959) on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Its circular form and concrete construction reaffirm Wright’s interest, late in his life, in continuous shapes and plastic forms. Wright, now in his eighties, delighted in eccentricity, drama, flamboyance, and unconventionality; yet he continued his prolific output even in his senior years. When he died from complications following surgery in a Phoenix hospital on April 9, 1959, he had built in his long lifetime more than four hundred homes and other buildings that carried the Wright hallmark of originality, drama, and innovation.

Significance

Wright was one of America’s most creative architects. His artistic genius is evident in the variety of styles he created, from the horizontal prairie house to the plastic, circular forms of his last works. Rooted in the nineteenth century, Wright perceived an America of unlimited opportunity, abundant land, and strong individualism. His buildings, in harmony with nature, made of natural materials with dramatic and dynamic designs, mirrored the energy, youth, and promise of a democratic American society.

Never conventional, usually eccentric and flamboyant, and strongly individualistic, Wright influenced hundreds of architects through his designs and his Taliesin Fellowship program. Although his disciples seldom replicated his originality and genius, they and other designers did learn from Wright’s examples the diversity and potential of architecture and its relationship to the larger culture of American society. At a time when many other architects were relying on European influences or historical styles, Wright was enclosing and defining space in unique and artistic ways, far in advance of the conventions of his time. His buildings had the distinctive mark of newness in a New World and of the spirit of individual creativity he hoped to nurture in the United States.

Like many greatly talented individuals, Wright experienced an unsettled personal life. Extravagance and indebtedness were twin conditions for him. Failed marriages, unconventional behavior, and tragedy marred his private world. His uncompromising nature, outspokenness, and arrogance cost him popular acclaim throughout much of his life. Only in the last decade of his life did Americans claim him warmly as a distinguished citizen.

Wright’s legacy of more than four hundred structures is a testament to his genius and prodigious talent. Ironically, the modern flavor of Wright’s works owed more to his nineteenth century attitudes about the United States than to the twentieth century urban, industrial country that embraced them. However, more than any other American architect, he has left a tangible record of buildings that defy the conventional, that remain fresh and vital years after their construction, and that anticipated many building innovations and designs considered modern long after he introduced them.

Further Reading

Blake, Peter. Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture and Space. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964. Excellent brief treatment of Wright’s life and work. Serves as a very good introduction to Wright’s architecture.

Brooks, H. Allen. The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and His Midwestern Contemporaries. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1971. A thorough treatment of Wright and his influence in domestic architecture, especially the derivative prairie-style houses in the United States.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Writings on Wright. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983. Selected comments on Wright’s work and life by his contemporaries, by his clients, by Europeans, and by later evaluators. Provides a fascinating portrait of Wright through the thoughts and words of others.

Drennan, William R. Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. Focuses on the circumstances surrounding the death of seven people in the fire that destroyed Taliesin in 1914.

Huxtable, Ada Louis. Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: Lipper/Viking, 2004. Huxtable, a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, provides a concise and comprehensive overview of Wright’s life and works, including analyses of his designs for his most significant buildings.

Jencks, Charles. Modern Movements in Architecture. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1973. Jencks puts Wright in the context of modern architecture.

Kaufmann, Edgar, and Ben Raeburn, eds. Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings. New York: New American Library, 1960. One of several books reprinting Wright’s own writings. Well illustrated with a map showing the location of his buildings in the United States.

Storrer, William A. The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Complete Catalog. 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978. The most complete photographic and descriptive catalog of Wright’s buildings; includes locator map, listing by state, and alphabetical index.

Twombly, Robert C. Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1979. A first-rate biography of Wright; well illustrated.

Wright, Frank Lloyd. An Autobiography. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943. A rather unconventionally written autobiography that gives the reader a sense of Wright’s distinctive personality and character.