Wright, Frank Lloyd

Wright, Frank Lloyd (1867–1959), architect.Born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, Wright at age twenty withdrew from his first year of engineering studies at the University of Wisconsin and moved to Chicago, where he worked for architects Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan. Opening his own practice in 1893, Wright in 1900 developed his “Prairie House,” the first truly American mode of dwelling appropriate to the emerging suburban residential communities. During this prolific period, Wright also redefined workplace and church architecture with the Larkin Building (1902), and the Unity Temple (1905). In 1889 Wright married Catherine Tobin; they had six children. In 1909 he left his family, traveling to Europe with Mamah Cheney, the wife of a client. In 1911, they moved to Taliesin, the home and studio he built at Spring Green, Wisconsin.

By 1910, Wright's work was being hailed in Europe as a revolutionary, truly modern way of building appropriate to life in the twentieth century. Yet Wright's single important work built abroad, Tokyo's Imperial Hotel (1914–1922), was followed by a twenty‐year period of relative inactivity, during which he realized only a series of concrete‐block houses and the Aline Barnsdall “Hollyhock” House in Los Angeles (1917). Personal tragedy also contributed to this long hiatus. In 1914, an insane employee burned Taliesen and murdered seven people, including Mamah Cheney and her children. In 1924, after a brief second marriage, Wright began a relationship with Olgivanna Lazovich, who survived him. In 1932, amid the Depression of the 1930s, Wright established the Taliesin Fellowship, a school and apprenticeship program at his rebuilt home and studio.

Almost forgotten at age seventy, Wright re‐emerged to dominate the American architectural scene with his three great works of the late 1930s, the Edgar Kaufmann “Fallingwater” House in Pennsylvania, the Johnson Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin, and the first “Usonian,” the Herbert Jacobs House, in Madison, Wisconsin. Like the early Prairie House, the Usonian House was Wright's answer to the housing needs of a new generation. Over the next twenty years Wright built hundreds of these low‐cost dwellings for America's rapidly expanding middle class. The Broadacre City project of 1932, an idealized community composed of these individual houses, was Wright's visionary counterproposal to suburban sprawl.

In his final two decades, Wright built numerous internationally acclaimed works, including Taliesin West (1937) in Scottsdale, Arizona; Florida Southern College (1938) in Lakeland, Florida; the Price Tower (1952) in Bartlesville, Oklahoma; the Beth Sholom Synagogue (1954) in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania; the Marin County Civic Center (1957) in San Rafael, California; and New York's Guggenheim Museum, designed in 1943 but not completed until after Wright's death. It is the hundreds of modest Usonian Houses, however, affordable to the middle class yet offering a quality of sun‐filled space unmatched even today, which stand as Wright's greatest achievement and most important legacy.

At the end of the twentieth century, Frank Lloyd Wright remained America's most influential and most famous architect. His buildings of the Prairie Period, an indigenous alternative to the dominant classical style imported from Europe, not only founded the “organic” tradition in American architecture, but also directly inspired the beginning of modern architecture in Europe. Wright established by example the fundamental attributes of a modern American architecture shaped by the landscape, the materials of its construction, and the daily lives that take place within its spaces.
See also Architecture: Public Architecture; Architecture: Domestic Architecture; Suburbanization.

Bibliography

Meryle Secrest , Frank Lloyd Wright, 1992.
Robert McCarter , Frank Lloyd Wright, 1997.

Robert McCarter