Frank Lloyd Wright

The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959) designed dramatically innovative buildings during a career of almost 70 years. His work established the imagery for much of the contemporary architectural environment.

The most famous, although never the most popular or successful, among American architects, Frank Lloyd Wright set himself the task, as no previous architect had, of designing distinctive and varied architecture for the diverse terrains of a nation that stretched over the valleys, deserts, woods, and mountains, spanning an entire continent. Herald of thesis that architecture should express its time, its site, its builders, and its materials, Wright argued from that romantic, specifically Hegelian thesis that the United States, as a new nation with a new society on a new frontier with a new technology, should express those unique conditions and should build its special aspirations into buildings that would be distinctively and wholly its own—a new style that would speak of the American environment, "Usonian," he once called it, an architecture of democracy.

Wright's art was so original, his imagination was so endlessly fertile, and his sense of form was so appropriate to the site and so bold and uninhibited that even the most recent students, although they are more than a generation removed from Wright and nurtured in urban premises and technical resources alien to his, still see in his drawings and his buildings that virtuosity in planning, that command over form, that grace in shaping space which have been the talent of only a few, the greatest masters of architecture.

Wright was born on June 8, 1869, in Richland Center, Wis. When he was 12 years old his family settled in Madison, and Wright worked on his uncle's farm at Spring Green during the summers. He developed a passion for the land that never left him. He attended Madison High School and left in 1885, apparently without graduating. He went to work as a draftsman and the following year, while still working, took a few courses in civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin.

In 1887 Wright went to Chicago, worked briefly for an architect, and then joined the firm of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan. Wright was very much influenced by Sullivan, and, although their relationship ended in a rupture when Sullivan found out that Wright was designing houses on his own, he always acknowledged his indebtedness to Sullivan and referred to him as "lieber Meister." In 1893 Wright opened his own office.

Master of Domestic Architecture

The houses Wright built in Buffalo and in Chicago and its suburbs before World War I gained international fame wherever there were avant-garde movements in the arts, especially in those countries where industrialization had brought new institutional and urban problems and had developed clients or patrons with the courage to eschew traditional design and the means to essay modernism, as in Germany (the Wasmuth publications of Wright's work in 1910 and 1911), the Netherlands (H. T. Wijdeveld, ed., The Life Work of the American Architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1925), and, later, Japan, where Wright designed the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo (1916-1922). Similarly, in the United States, Wright's clients were exceptional individuals and small, adventurous institutions, not governments or national corporations. A small progressive private school (Hillside Home School, Spring Green, 1902) and an occasional private, commercial firm (Larkin Company in Buffalo) came to him, but, chiefly, his clients were midwestern businessmen, practical, unscholarly, independent, and moderately successful, such as the Chicago building contractor Frederick C. Robie, for whom Wright designed houses.

Commissions to design a bank, an office building, or a factory were rare; Wright never received any large corporate or governmental commission. These were awarded to the classicists and the Gothicists of the early 20th century; at midcentury, after the case for modernism was won, the corporate commissions continued to go to large, dependable firms who worked in a rectilinear, contemporary idiom. Wright was left for nearly 70 years to exercise his art, always brilliantly and often resentfully, chiefly in domestic architecture, where, indeed, Americans, unlike many other peoples, have long lavished enormous, probably inordinate attention, assigning to their spacious, freestanding, single-family dwellings the inventiveness that some other nations have reserved for public architecture.

Early, Wright insisted upon declaring the presence of pure cubic mass, the color and texture of raw stone and brick and copper, and the sharp-etched punctures made by unornamented windows and doors in sheer walls (Charnley House, Chicago, 1891). He made of the house a compact block, which might be enclosed handsomely by a hipped roof (Winslow House, River Forest, Ill., 1893). Soon, the restrained delight in the simplicity of a single mass gave way to his passion for passages of continuous, flowing spaces; he burst the enclosed, separated spaces of classical architecture, removed the containment, the sense of walls and ceilings, and created single, continuously modified spaces, which he shaped by screens, piers, and intermittent planes and masses that were disposed in asymmetric compositions. By suggesting spaces, but not enclosing them, then by connecting them, Wright achieved extended, interweaving, horizontal compositions of space, and his roofs, windows, walls, and chimneys struck dynamic balances and rhythms. Vertical elements rise through horizontal planes (Husser House, Chicago, 1899); interior spaces flare from a central chimney mass (Willitts House, Highland Park, Ill., 1900-1902); low spaces rise into a high space that is carved into a second story (Roberts House, River Forest, 1908). Unexpectedly, light is captured from a clerestory or a room beyond, and a space flows in vistas seen beyond a structural pier, beneath low roofs and cantilevered eaves, over terraces and courts, and through trellises and foliage into gardens and landscape (Martin House, Buffalo, 1904). All his genius with weaving space, with creating a tension between compact alcove and generous vista, with variegated light, with occult balances of intermittent masses, with cantilevers that soared while piers and chimneys anchored, came to unrivaled harmony in the Robie House, Chicago (1909; now the Adlai Stevenson Institute, University of Chicago).

The Robie House has few antecedents. Perhaps its composition recalls the 19th-century rambling, picturesque houses of Bruce Price and Stanford White; its spaces owe something to Japanese architecture, and something is owed, too, to the master of dramatic balance of bold masses, Henry Hobson Richardson; but the Robie House is Wright's own, a uniquely personal organization of space. While wholly original, the Robie House stands within the principles of Chicago's special theory of architecture, as developed by Sullivan. That the Robie House also reflects an international movement, cubism, which had begun to fascinate pioneering artists in France, the Netherlands, and Germany, shows that Wright, while sensitive to his contemporaries' innovation, subsumed many traditions without any subservience.

Philosophy of Architecture

Wright's philosophy of architecture was compounded of several radical and traditional ideas. There was, first, the romantic idea of honest expression: that a building should be faithful in revealing its materials and structure, as Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc had argued, without any classical ornament or counterfeit surface or structure, which John Ruskin abhorred. There was, second, the idea that a building's form should reflect its plan, its functional arrangement of interior spaces, as Henry Latrobe and Horatio Greenough had proposed. There was, third, the conviction that each building should express something new and distinctive in the times (G. W. F. Hegel, Gottfried Semper) and specifically the new technical resources, such as steel skeletons and electric light and elevators, which suggested skyscrapers and new forms of building (John Wellborn Root). There was, fourth, the ambition, even pride, to achieve an art appropriate to a new nation, an American art (Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman), without Continental or English or colonial dependencies. Finally, there was the theory derived by Sullivan from Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer that a building should be analogous to a biological organism, a unified work of art, rooted to its soil, organized to serve specified functions, and, as a form, evolved as an organism evolves, fitted to its landscape, adapted to its environment, expressive of its purpose.

Those diverse currents of thought were not readily united. The Unitarianism of Wright's family prepared him to design the humanist Unity Church in Oak Park, Ill. (1906), a cubistic, light-filled meetinghouse, constructed, quite extraordinarily, in concrete. His introduction in kindergarten to F. W. A. Froebel's system of education through construction with blocks prepared Wright to design the playhouse and school of the beautiful Avery Coonley House, Riverside, Ill. (1908); there, significantly, in the progressive architecture of a house and school, John Dewey and his students were educational advisers. Form breaking and function making, the ferment of ideas in late-19th-century Chicago encouraged new thinking about institutions for religion, education, and urban settlement; Wright led a revolt from precedent in form and a celebration of necessity in new functions. His essay "The Art and Craft of the Machine" announced his leadership at Hull House in 1901; and he continued to state his dissatisfaction with America's failure to build institutions and environment adequate to the social problems and opportunities. His theory of an "organic architecture: the architecture of democracy" was broadcast in his Princeton lectures of 1930 and London lectures of 1939, as well as in his Autobiography (1932), which also offers some insight into his life and his family, including the apprentices who lived with him and for whom he established the Taliesin Fellowship in 1932 at Taliesin East, the house Wright built over many years (beginning in 1938) at Spring Green.

His Idea and Imagery for Modern Design

If the handsome Taliesin East, whose roofs are rhythmical accents on the brow of a bluff overlooking the confluence of two valleys, were all that Wright left, he would be remembered as the finest architect who worked in the 19th-century tradition of romantic domestic design. But, early, he prepared an idea and an imagery for modern design. He achieved in the Larkin Building, Buffalo (1904; destroyed) an unprecedented integration of circulation, structure, ventilation, plumbing, furniture, office equipment, and lighting; that building, an early example of modern commercial architecture, was emulated by Peter Behrens and Walter Gropius in Germany and Hendrik Petrus Berlage in Holland. Wright's plans for Midway Gardens, Chicago (1914; demolished) and the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo (1916-1922), organized complex modern institutions into new architectural compositions, and they showed inventiveness in structural technique, such as the structure of the Imperial Hotel, which was intended to resist earthquakes, which it did, even though it could not resist the wrecker in 1967. Wright tended to enjoy and to glorify nature and the rural condition, but he attacked various urban problems. Beginning with inexpensive row apartments in 1895, he designed buildings for cities, culminating in his drawing for a high-rise tower whose floors were to be cantilevered from a central shaft, the St. Mark's Tower project for New York City (1929); that project is reflected in the Price Tower at Bartlesville, Okla. (1953). Like many of his projects, the tower was a fundamental element in the Broadacre City project, the coherent, self-sufficient agricultural and industrial community Wright designed in 1931-1935.

Constant Search for Form

Significantly, Wright's concern for 20th-century problems, including urban form, did not lead him to the mechanistic rectilinear forms and finishes admired by Gropius or the sculptural purism of Le Corbusier. Always distinctive and independent, Wright's style changed often. For about 10 years after 1915 he drew upon Mayan massing and ornament (Barndall House, Hollywood, 1920). He cast ornament in concrete blocks (Millard House, Pasadena, 1923), and he did not achieve his several versions of a decisively modern style until various European architects, including Le Corbusier and others, notably Richard Neutra (who came to the United States in the late 1920s), had dramatized a sheer, stripped geometry. Even then Wright avoided the barrenness and abstraction of the isolated, single parallelepiped; he insisted upon having the multiple form of buildings reflect the movement of unique sites: the Kaufmann House, "Falling Water," at Bear Run, Pa. (1936-1937), where cantilevered, interlocked, reinforced-concrete terraces are poised over the waterfall; the low-cost houses (Herbert Jacobs House, Madison, Wis., 1937); and the "prairie houses" (Lloyd Lewis House, Libertyville, Ill., 1940). No architect was more skillful in fitting form to its terrain: the Pauson House in Phoenix, Ariz. (1940; destroyed) rose from the desert, like a Mayan pyramid, its battered ashlar and shiplapped, wooden walls reflecting the mountains and desert. There is a compatibility, an organic adaptation in stone walls, wooden frames, and canvas that marries Wright's western home, Taliesin West (1938-1959), to Maricopa Mesa, near Phoenix.

Those brilliant rural houses did not reveal how Wright would respond to an urban setting or to the program of a corporate client. But in the Administration Building for the Johnson Wax Company, Racine, Wis. (1936-1939, with a research tower added in 1950), he astonished architects with his second great commercial building (after the Larkin Building). A continuous, windowless red-brick wall encloses a high, clerestory-lighted interior space; that space, which contains tall dendriform columns, is one of the most serene and graceful interior spaces in the world. Thereafter, a college, Florida Southern at Lakeland, Fla., was encouraged to retain Wright to design its campus (1938-1959); unfortunately, it suffers from an obsession with multifaceted form and oblique and acute angles (as does the Unitarian Church in Madison, Wis., 1947). But after those probings toward a new geometry Wright succeeded with complex pyramids (as suggested earlier by his Lake Tahoe project of the 1920s) when he built the Beth Sholom Synagogue at Elkins Park, Pa. (1959), a Mycenaean sacred mountain. Such a temple, a sanctuary of light approached by a continuous spiral, fascinated the elderly Wright. At Florida Southern College he juxtaposed circle and fragmented rhombus, recalling Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, Italy; he set a helix inside the Morris Gift Shop in San Francisco (1948-1949). Ultimately, he conceived of having the helix surround a tall central space: the six-story Guggenheim Museum in New York City (1946-1959), which paid in significant functional defects to gain a memorable experience in viewing art, especially where the helix affords views into a side gallery below.

Of Wright's colossal helix that he proposed for the Golden Triangle in Pittsburgh (1947), nothing was built. He envisioned ramps for automobiles that would lead to stores and galleries and auditoriums. His drawings, which are in ink and crayon on huge sheets of rice paper, stand among the greatest and most inspiring displays of architectural imagination; what was built in Pittsburgh by other hands is expedient and vulgar. His drawings are magical and lyrical. No one might ever build accordingly, but Wright was never content with the commonplace or servile to the conventional or the practical. He imagined the wonderful where others were content with the probable. Avoidance of the vulgar or probable excited him to ecstatic design: the hyper-bole of the Grand Opera and Civic Auditorium for Baghdad, Iraq (1957). The drawings of helix, domes, and finals suggest how far Wright's talent transcended any client's capacity fully to realize his dream: a world of sanctuaries and gardens, of earth and machines, of rivers, seas, mountains, and prairies, where grand architecture enables men to dwell nobly.

Wright died at Taliesin West on April 9, 1959. His widow, Olgivanna, directs the Taliesin Fellowship.

Further Reading

Wright's An Autobiography (1932; enlarged 1943) remains the best statement of his architectural theory. Other books by Wright to consult are An Organic Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy (1939), essays based on his London lectures of 1939; and When Democracy Builds (1945). An American Architecture, edited by Edgar Kaufmann (1955), is an anthology of Wright's writings and includes photographs of his work. Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings, selected by Edgar Kaufmann and Ben Raeburn (1960), is a well-edited compendium. A complication of Wright's work is Buildings, Plans and Designs, with a foreword by William Wesley Peters and an introduction by Wright (1963). Arthur Drexler, The Drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright (1962), contains some of the finest examples of Wright's art.

The standard monograph on Wright is Henry-Russell Hitchcock, In the Nature of Materials (1942; 2d ed. 1969). Grant C. Manson, Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910 (1958), is a detailed study of his early work. Vincent Scully, Frank Lloyd Wright (1960), a sensitive and informative essay about Wright's imagery, covers his entire career. John E. Burchard and Albert Bush-Brown, The Architecture of America (1961), interprets Wright in terms of American architectural experience. Wright figures prominently in John Jacobus, Twentieth-century Architecture: The Middle Years, 1940-65 (1966). □

Wright, Frank Lloyd Lincoln (1869–1959). American architect, some say the greatest of C20. He learned the rudiments of his art from Joseph Lyman Silsbee (1845–1913), whose essays in the Queen Anne and Shingle styles were competent. He later (1888) became assistant to Louis H. Sullivan, and remained with the firm of Adler & Sullivan until 1893. While revering Sullivan, Wright was also influenced by Owen Jones, the English Arts-and-Crafts movement, Ruskin, and Viollet-le-Duc (or rather by what Viollet was said to have written), interlocking forms (perhaps suggested by the Froebel blocks with which he played when a child), and Japanese architecture (prompted by the Japanese pavilion at the Chicago Exposition of 1893). In 1889 he designed his first independent building, his own house and studio at Oak Park, Chicago, IL, an eclectic work, with a shingled exterior (altered and extended 1889–1911), and in 1894 became a founder-member of the Arts-and-Crafts Society in Chicago. At this time he began to evolve his Prairie House type, with volumes developing from a central core, long, low roofs that appeared to float over the structure, corners treated as voids, and enclosing walls that were treated more as independent screens (techniques he called ‘breaking the box’). Furthermore, the main axes within the houses were continued into the gardens and terraces, suggested in the schemes Wright published in the Ladies' Home Journal (1901), and developed in the series of houses he designed from that time until just before the 1914–18 war. Yet Lutyens had also been moving in this direction, as with the Deanery, Sonning, Berks. (1899–1902), while Schinkel had also brought gardens, water, and terraces within his profoundly ordered geometries, as at the Court Gardener's House and Roman Baths complex, Potsdam (1820s). Wright's finest essays in the Prairie House style were the Willitts House, Highland Park, IL (1902), Robie House, Chicago (1908), and Coonley House, Riverside, IL (1908–12).

With the Unity Temple (Unitarian Church), Oak Park (1906), and the Larkin Building, Buffalo, NY (1904—demolished), a severe, monumental architecture evolved, in which a powerful grid-like geometry was well to the fore, while the architectural language seemed to owe something to a stripped Classicism reminiscent of aspects of the work of Schinkel, Otto Wagner, and others (especially the rows of square columns at Unity Temple which recall the Berlin Schauspielhaus (Play House) by Schinkel and some of the Vienna Metropolitan Railway Stations by Wagner).

Wright's work had been widely publicized, and in 1910 Wasmuth of Berlin published Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright (Realized Buildings and Projects of Frank Lloyd Wright) as a handsome pair of portfolios, followed in 1911 by a paperback volume of illustrations and plans. The introduction was by C. R. Ashbee, the prominent English Arts-and-Craftsman, and these publications helped to promote Wright's work. His designs seem to have enjoyed considerable favour in Germany (Gropius and Mies van der Rohe were two architects affected) and in The Netherlands, in particular, where Robert van't Hoff, Dudok, and some members of De Stijl were undoubtedly influenced by his work, and it shows. In 1911 he moved to the Wisconsin countryside, where he built his Prairie House-based home and studios at Taliesin (burnt down 1914, but rebuilt and extended during the 1920s). There he was the Master with his pupils, a pose he developed further at Taliesin West, mentioned below.

In spite of a scandalous private life he gained two important major commissions: the Midway Gardens, Chicago (1913—demolished); and the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan (1915–22—with Antonin Raymond—also demolished). Both had highly organized plans in which axes featured prominently, and both were lavishly decorated with polygonal, triangular, and other sharp-angled forms, including chevrons, that had already begun to appear on the lead cames of some of the Chicago houses, and that anticipated Art Deco ornament. With the Hollyhock (or Barnsdall) House (1916–21), Los Angeles, Calif., he experimented with repetitive stylized motifs (abstractions of hollyhock forms) cast in moulds (the whole house was cement-rendered), and created a building faintly reminiscent of pre-Columbian American architecture, a theme more pronounced in the Ennis House, Los Angeles (1923–4), constructed of decorated concrete blocks, and featuring battered walls set on terraces. He again used concrete blocks in e.g. the Millard House, Pasadena, CA (1923), and Freeman House, Los Angeles (1923–4), but for the rest of the decade his work did not attract the attention his earlier designs had enjoyed. In the 1930s, however, Wright's buildings were once more widely publicized.

At the Kaufmann House (1935–48), ‘Falling Water’, Connelsville, PA (1935–48), he gave full expression to horizontals and verticals in a tour-de-force constructed over a stream called Bear Run, a design that had superficial resemblances to the International Modernism of the time, but, with its coursed rubble walls and hand-crafted detail, owed more, perhaps, to the Arts-and-Crafts tradition, while the disposition of elements derived from his Prairie House type. In 1936–9 he designed and built the Johnson Wax Factory, Racine, WI, with a tall interior the roof of which was supported by tapered mushroom-shaped columns, the walls being of brick with glass tubes forming the light-sources. At the same time he developed his low-cost Usonian houses, based on vernacular American buildings, that explored the possibilities of prefabrication. The prototype was the Jacobs House, Madison, WI (1936–7), and Wright publicized his ideas in Architectural Forum of 1938. He also evolved proposals for Broadacre City, a low-density plan in which the Usonian house would feature large. In 1937 he designed Taliesin West, winter quarters for himself and his disciples, which he built at Scottsdale, AZ From 1942 he prepared designs for the Guggenheim Museum, NYC (completed 1960), a spiral ramp that proved to be an inappropriate form for viewing works of art, but as an exercise in formal geometry was remarkable for its time. At Bartlesville, OK, he designed the Price Tower (1953–6), a tall block rather more elegant than the slabs so prevalent during that period, demonstrating Wright's interest in the acute angles he had also employed at Taliesin West. Among his last works the Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, Calif. (1957–66), and the Beth Sholom Synagogue, Elkins Park, PA (1958–9), deserve note.

Wright has been seen as an exponent of organic architecture, by which he seems to have meant design that proceeds from the nature of Mankind and his circumstances as they both change. Although his writings suffer from rather obvious conceit, prolixity, and dense obfuscation (e.g. An Autobiography (1943), An Organic Architecture (1939), and When Democracy Builds (1945)), they were collected and published as Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture: Selected Writings 1894–1940 (1941) and In the Cause of Architecture: Essays by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Architectural Review 1908–1952 (1975).

Bibliography

Alofsin (ed.) (1999);
Bolon et al . (1988);
Etlin (1994);
Futagawa (ed.) (2002, 2002a);
B. Gill (1987);
G&I (1981);
Gutheim (ed.) (1941);
T. Heinz (1982, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000);
Hitchcock (1973);
D. Hoffmann (1988);
LeG&S (1996);
Levine (1996);
Long (1996);
McCarter (1997);
Placzek (ed.) (1982);
K. Smith (1998);
N. Smith (1966);
Storrer (1974, 1993, 2002);
Stungo (1999a);
R. Sweeney (1978);
Jane Turner (1996);
I. Thomson (2000);
Twombly (1979);
Wright (1943, 1945, 1970, 1975, 1998);
van Vynckt (ed.) (1983);
Zevi (1979)

WRIGHT, FRANK LLOYD 1867-1959

Architect

Innovator

Frank Lloyd Wright was one of America's—and the world's—most innovative and creative architects. He began his sixty-six-year career copying past styles and went on to play an important part in the establishment of modern architecture. Wright experimented with steel and concrete cantilevers and poured concrete; he was one of the first architects to see the aesthetic value of concrete blocks. He designed buildings of custom-cast blocks with patterns. He also introduced open planning, creating spaces that flowed into each other rather than separating them into distinct rooms. The critic Lewis Mumford said that Wright "altered the inner rhythm of the modern building." Wright was also interested in the creative possibilities of the machine and frequently used factory-manufactured products in his buildings.

Early Life and Training

Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, in 1867. His mother, who wanted her son to become an architect, began tutoring him in the kindergarten-education techniques of Frederick Froebel when Wright was seven years old. Wright was given a set of blocks, folded paper, and other simple materials, from which he was to design and build model buildings and furniture. In later years Wright claimed that his work with the Froebel system profoundly influenced his architecture. When Wright was sixteen, his father deserted the family. At about the same time, Wright enrolled in the civil engineering program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. At eighteen he dropped out and worked briefly for a Madison architect, then went to Chicago to work as a designer and draftsman for Louis Sullivan and Sullivan's partner, Dankmar Adler. In 1893 he began his own practice.

The Prairie Style

One of the finest houses Wright designed in what became known as the Prairie Style was the Frederick G. Robie House (1909) in Chicago. Wright said that he wanted to "break the box" of most domestic architecture, and with the Robie House he did so. Designed for a wealthy bicycle manufacturer who was sympathetic to Wright's vision, the Robie House was a long, horizontal structure of brick and wood topped with mammoth overhanging eaves and lighted by long banks of glass windows. Inside, the main floor was a single room broken into subsidiary spaces that merged and overlapped. The delineation of these spaces through light, glass, and color rather than walls was based on Japanese design, long an inspiration to Wright, as it had been to Sullivan. Other notable Prairie houses were those Wright designed for Ward W. Willits in Highland Park, Illinois (1902); for Arthur Heurtley in Chicago (1902); and for Avery Coonley in River Forest, Illinois (1909).

Organic Architecture

The second period of Wright's career lasted from 1909—in which year Wright, like his father before him, deserted his family (a wife and six children)—to 1944. In these years the architect refined what he called "organic architecture," an aesthetic based on the harmony of nature. In 1911 he designed and built his home and studio, Taliesin (Welsh for "shining brow" and the name of a sixth-century Welsh poet); it would be destroyed by fire twice and rebuilt each time. The Kaufmann House (1937), also called Fallingwater, in Bear Run, Pennsylvania, was built over a waterfall. The geometrical Johnson Wax Company Administration Building (1939) in Racine, Wisconsin, expressed the building's structure in strikingly new ways. Wright designed the campus and buildings for Florida Southern University in Lakeland, Florida, and his own winter house and studio, Taliesin West (1938), in Scottsdale, Arizona, during this period. He also worked on plans for a utopian American city called Usonia.

Late Period

After World War II Wright was swamped with commissions. He built the Unitarian Church (1947) in Madison, Wisconsin; the Beth Shalom Synagogue (1959) in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania; and the H. C. Price Company Tower (1953), a sixteen-story building with professional office spaces and duplex apartments in Bartlesville, Oklahoma—Wright's only free-standing high-rise building. In 1949 the American Institute of Architects awarded Wright its Gold Medal. Wright continued to work until the end of his life. The total number of buildings he produced during his career is unknown but has been estimated as high as six hundred. He died in 1959, the year the revolutionary Guggenheim Museum—which he had begun designing in 1943—was completed.

Source:

Robert Twombly, Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture (New York: Wiley, 1978).

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.

Sources:

Henry-Russell Hitchcock, In the Nature of Materials, 1887-1941: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942);

Robert C. Twombly, Frank Lloyd Wright; His Life and His Architecture (New York: Wiley, 1979).

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

Frank Lloyd Wright 1867–1959, American architect, b. Richland Center, Wis. Wright is widely considered the greatest American architect. After studying civil engineering at the Univ. of Wisconsin, he worked for seven years in the office of Dankmar Adler and Louis H. Sullivan in Chicago.

The Prairie Style

Wright's first independent commission was the Winslow residence (1893) in River Forest, Ill. Establishing himself in Oak Park, Ill., he built a series of residences with low horizontal lines and strongly projecting eaves that echoed the rhythms of the surrounding landscape; it was termed his prairie style. The most famous examples are located in Chicago and its suburbs; they include the Willitts house (1900?–1902), Highland Park; the Coonley house (1908), Riverside; and the Robie house (1909), Chicago.

Innovative Techniques and Styles

From the beginning Wright practiced radical innovation both as to structure and aesthetics, and many of his methods have since become internationally current. At a time when poured reinforced concrete and steel cantilevers were generally confined to commercial structures, Wright did pioneer work in integrating machine methods and materials into a true architectural expression. He was the first architect in the United States to produce open planning in houses, in a break from the traditional closed volume, and to achieve a fluidity of interior space by his frequent elimination of confining walls between rooms. For the Millard house (1923) at Pasadena, Calif., he worked out a new method, known as textile-block slab construction, consisting of double walls of precast concrete blocks tied together with steel reinforcing rods set into both the vertical and the horizontal joints.

Important Works

The Larkin Office Building (1904; destroyed 1950), Buffalo, and Oak Park Unity Temple (1908), near Chicago, were early monumental works that exerted wide influence. Among other notable works are the Imperial Hotel (1916–22; demolished 1968; partially reconstructed, Meiji Mura Mus., Inuyama, Japan), Tokyo, Japan, which withstood the effects of the 1923 earthquake; the Midway Gardens (1914; destroyed 1923), Chicago; and Wright's own residence "Taliesin" (1911; twice burned and rebuilt) at Spring Green, Wis. Among his later projects were "Taliesin West" (1936–59), Scottsdale, Ariz. (which has continued since his death as a school of architecture); the Johnson administration building (1936–39; research tower, 1950), Racine Wis.; and the house for Edgar Kaufmann, "Fallingwater" (1936–37), Bear Run, Pa., which is dramatically cantilevered over a waterfall.

After World War II, Wright continued a large and ever-inventive practice until his death. He created dynamic interior spaces with spiral ramps for the V. C. Morris Gift Shop (1948–49), San Francisco, and for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1946–59), New York City. Other notable later buildings include a Unitarian church (1947), Madison, Wis.; the Price Tower (1955), Bartlesville, Okla.; and Beth Sholom Synagogue (1959), Elkins Park, Pa. He left numerous unrealized projects, including one for a mile-high skyscraper ( "The Illinois" ) for Chicago and an ambitious design for a civic center in Madison, Wis. The latter was later reconceived as the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center and opened in 1997.

Writings and Bibliography

Wright's architectural philosophy was expressed in his lectures and writings. Among them are On Architecture (1941); When Democracy Builds (1945); Genius and the Mobocracy (1949, enl. ed. 1971), an evaluation of his master Louis H. Sullivan; The Future of Architecture (1953); An American Architecture (1955); and A Testament (1957). His influence can be seen throughout Europe. Volumes illustrative of his works were published in France and Germany as early as 1910. In 1995 about 5,000 of his architectural drawings were published in CD-ROM form as Frank Lloyd Wright: Presentation and Conceptual Drawings.

WRIGHT, FRANK LLOYD 1869-1959

Greatest architect of the twentieth century

Trailblazer

A trailblazer in modern American architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright left a legacy of more than seven hundred buildings that spanned more than half a century, from the Robie House in Chicago (1904) to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City (1959). Already elderly when the 1950s began, Wright continued to be active, designing provocative, exuberant masterpieces until his death.

Always an Architect

From the beginning Anna Wright, a Wisconsin schoolteacher, wanted her son to become an architect. Since the University of Wisconsin offered no courses in architecture, he enrolled as a civil engineer in 1884 but left the university without graduating and went to Chicago in 1887, when many of his early designs were completed. He called himself a farm boy, and in 1900 Wright designed the first of his famous "prairie houses" (a low, ground-hugging type of bungalow ideally suited to the Midwest), for which there was no precedent.

Organic Approach

Wright believed a building's form was derived from nature and should harmonize with it. Although he had no single architectural style, his work was characterized by broad lines, stark surfaces, curves, and natural materials. He was famous for the organic growth of his houses from interior to exterior, for blending the houses with their natural surroundings, and for using various building materials according to their inherent characteristics. His focus on curves intensified during the 1950s, culminating in the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 1959. This concrete structure has the form of a spiral ramp to provide continuous gallery space. Wright originated many design concepts that are reflected in modern houses, including the "open" plan, builtin furniture, radiant floor heating, and "indoor-outdoor integration" accomplished by glass walls and corners.

Other Undertakings

Wright's architectural style was wholly American, but his most famous international work is probably the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1915-1922). His training as an engineer helped enormously because the vast structure had to be made to withstand earthquakes. The problem was solved through a unique use of concrete-supported cantilevered floors and a foundation floating on a cushion of soft mud. The hotel survived the major earthquake of 1923 without damage. Wright was also famous for his many "Usonian" homes—Wright's name for an ideal, democratic America. These houses were medium-sized and medium-priced. One of his most beautiful houses is Falling Water in Bear Run, Pennsylvania, cantilevered over a waterfall.

Gold Medal

Wright received countless awards over his long lifetime, but perhaps the most significant was the Gold Medal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, which he received in 1953. His vision of freedom and spaciousness in homes and buildings truly liberated twentienth-century architecture.

Wright, Frank Lloyd (1869–1959), Wisconsin‐born architect, began work as an assistant to Louis Sullivan (1887–94). He developed a Prairie style having low horizontal lines to harmonize with the Midwestern landscape, large windows, open terraces, and interiors treated as unified flowing space. His cantilever construction and poured and reinforced concrete also illustrate his creed that form should follow function. After 1910 he replaced his simple surfaces by external ornamentation, as in Tokyo's Imperial Hotel (1916–22), also known for the floating cantilever construction, which enabled it to withstand the earthquake of 1923. During the 1920s, he stressed patterned blocks of precast concrete, reinforced at the joints, which produced an austere effect, as in the Millard house (1921). Later he became more occupied with homes and office buildings that achieve their effect mainly through the disposition of masses and the frank emphasis upon modern materials rather than decoration. His books include Modern Architecture (1931), An Autobiography (1932, revised 1943), Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture (1941), When Democracy Builds (1945), revised as The Living City (1958), and The Natural House (1954). He was the inspiration for the hero of Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead and of Meyer Levin's novel The Architect.

Wright, Frank Lloyd (1869–1959) US architect, regarded as the leading modernist designer of private housing. He worked with Louis Sullivan in the Chicago School of architecture, before his first independent design in 1893. His distinctive ‘organic’ style of low-built, prairie-style houses was designed to blend in with natural features. Influenced by Japanese art and architecture, Wright's open-plan approach to interiors was highly influential. His use of materials and construction techniques was radical. Buildings include: Robie House, Chicago (1909); ‘Falling Water’, Bear Run, Pennsylvania (1936–37); and the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1946–59).

http://www.franklloydwright.org

WRIGHT, FRANK LLOYD

Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959) was considered one of the most influential and most important twentieth century U.S. architects. His buildings—more than 400—possessed the quality and feel of genius at work. His designs, his unique ideas about homes, seemed eternally futuristic, enormously functional, and have influenced every sphere of twentieth century architecture.

Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the most dramatic and eccentric U.S. geniuses. He was born on June 8, 1867, the eldest of three children born to William and Anna Lloyd Wright in the small town of Richland Center, Wisconsin, on the American prairie. Wright's mother had emigrated from Wales with her family. Her brothers and her father, who was a Unitarian minister, became skilled carpenters and built themselves homes in the Wisconsin River Valley. Wright's relationship with his mother was very close throughout his life. When he was very young his mother, who was a schoolteacher, used the Froebel Kindergarten Method at home, which introduced children to pure geometric forms and their patterns on grids. Scholars have speculated that Wright's later use of so much sophisticated geometric design in his work was an outgrowth of his early integrated exposure to geometric design as a learning tool.

His father, William Carey Wright, was a Baptist minister and musician. When Wright was three years old, his family moved to Massachusetts, where his father worked as a minister. Around 1880 the family moved back to Wisconsin. His father opened a music conservatory and Wright went to school and worked on his uncle's farm. When Wright was 18, his father divorced his wife, leaving him with his mother and two younger siblings. After his parents' divorce in 1885, Wright sought part-time employment in Madison, Wisconsin. He also had plans to study at the University of Wisconsin. Wright took a job with a Madison contractor as a draftsman's apprentice, and he took engineering and graphics courses for a year at the university. That was the end of his formal education. To further his architectural training, Wright left Madison in 1887 for Chicago, Illinois, where he obtained employment as a draftsman with Joseph Silsbee, an architect.

Chicago in the late 1880s was booming and Wright was there to take advantage of the wealth of opportunities available. Architects from all over the world had come to Chicago to rebuild the city after it was destroyed in a devastating fire in 1871. Wright, having learned the architectural basics from Silsbee, began to undertake his own commissions and projects for private residential home design. In 1888 he joined the firm of Adler and Sullivan, where he primarily designed homes.

He landed a job with Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, one of the most progressive architectural firms in the country. Here Wright developed a very close relationship with Louis Sullivan (1856–1924), who was known for his "form follows function" ideology. By the time Wright was in his early 20s, he had worked on some of the most impressive buildings in Chicago.

Wright left Sullivan in 1893 and established his own business. From 1893 to 1910 he built approximately 273 houses, many of which were the "Prairie-house style"—a combination of Japanese design elements and American influences.

In 1889 Wright married Catherine Lee Clark Tobin. Frank and Catherine had six children, two of whom became architects. To support his wife and children in the manner to which he was accustomed, Wright took on extra work designing houses. Wright "bootlegged" designs from Sullivan's firm, adding his own ideas— Sullivan subsequently severed his contract with Wright. In 1893 Wright started his own architectural business. In 1909 he abandoned his wife and children, running off to Europe with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of a former client. The couple stayed away from the United States for a year, returning in 1911 to settle in Spring Green, Wisconsin, where Wright built his well-known residence Taliesin ("shining brow" in Welsh). In 1914 a servant at the Taliesin residence set fire to the house and murdered Mamah, two of her children, and four other occupants as they tried to escape the flames. The house was almost completely destroyed. Wright rebuilt Taliesin and later traveled to Tokyo, where he was commissioned to build the Imperial Hotel.

During the 1920s Wright developed a new construction method using pre-cast concrete blocks that were reinforced with metal. Several houses were built with this new method, of which the most notable is the Mallard house in Pasadena, California. Wright's personal life was in a shambles during this decade and his professional life was greatly affected: Commissions were not as numerous and many commissions that Wright did have were postponed or cancelled due to the Great Depression (1929–1939).

In 1922 Wright married the sculptress Miriam Noel. In 1925 Taliesin burned down again. Wright's career suffered because of continual scandal in his personal life, which was continually unraveling. Wright's finances and emotions were depleted. His life was filled with lawsuits, bad publicity, bankruptcy, and bitterness. In 1928 Wright married his fourth wife, Olgivanna Milanoff, a Montenegrin aristocrat, who was at one time a student of G.I. Gurdjieff, a Russian-born esoteric thinker and mystic. This marriage lasted for the rest of Wright's life.

During the early 1930s Wright devoted his time to writing and lecturing. In 1931 Wright set up the Taliesin Fellowship and turned his residence into a studio-workshop for apprentices who would pay to study with him and work on Wright's commissions. As the economy in the country stabilized, building resumed and Wright designed two well known buildings: the Kaufman House, which was cantilevered over a waterfall at Bear Run, Pennsylvania, and an administration building for the S.C. Johnson and Son Company in Racine, Wisconsin. Wright also kept himself busy designing houses and communities that he thought were the perfect answer to modern society; for example, Broadacre City was a decentralized community with no distinction between town and country. He designed homes that would reflect an ideal, democratic America—Usonia. In 1938 he built Taliesin West, a permanent desert camp made of stone, wood and canvas, near Phoenix Arizona.

Wright began to lecture and teach. Although his designs continued to be built at a steady pace for more than two decades, he was not to see fame re-emerge in his life until the 1950s. He was in his eighties then, but he had survived into old age with good energy and a burning passion about his beliefs in radical architecture. Wright wrote several books about architecture. He was idolized in the 1950s as a daring, individualistic genius. The eccentricities for which he was once scorned had helped to make him popular. Clearly, before he died, Frank Lloyd Wright had secured a position in the public imagination as a uniquely American icon; a brilliant, loner, "cowboy"-architect—a genius to architecture, as Albert Einstein was a genius to physics.

During the 1940s and 1950s Wright continued to design and build innovative and impressive structures. During this time his designs were perhaps more varied and radical than previous decades—college campuses, crescent-shaped houses, circular houses, and lastly, the unprecedented concrete, spiral-shaped Guggenheim Museum, his last major work. Although his work has been criticized as impractical and expensive, none of his structures have sustained damages due to faulty engineering.

Wright believed that U.S. architecture should reflect the environment in which it was built, the environment of the frontier and of the abundance of land. Wright described his work as "organic architecture, that which proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man and his circumstances as they both change." He created homes with strong horizontal lines and shapes, with roofs that were low pitched with large overhangs, and with flourishes that created a sense of the horizon and of spaciousness. The inside of his homes, influenced by Japanese designs, had large open spaces, huge central rooms, few closed corners, many large windows, and a geometric emphasis in the room's decor. His homes were unadorned; nothing "fancy" or "fake" or unnecessary was present. His ceilings were built high—cathedral ceilings—and many of his houses were heated with radiant heat (coils built into the concrete slab floors which circulated warm water through the coils to radiate heat into the home evenly). And since automobiles had become easier to start, he stopped building garages and instead attached simple carports that would protect the car from heavy snow but retain the open feel of the total design.

Frank Lloyd Wright's designs of homes and buildings have inspired generations of architects, including much of what is called "modern architecture." His influence has been international—many other countries have considered Frank Lloyd Wright's designs to be a major influence on their contemporary styles. More than 30 states in the United States possess Frank Lloyd Wright structures, and most architectural critics agree that every state in the country has buildings that reflect Wright's style. His many imitators constitute Wright's greatest success. Even if his more severe designs are changed and distorted, the general horizontal style of Wright's prairie architecture created a distinct shape of architectural content that has influenced the way Americans see modern architecture. His brilliant designs of Taliesin West, his Arizona headquarters; the inexpensive Usonian homes; the great Kaufman House, built over a waterfall in Pennsylvania; his designs for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City are all breath-taking examples of his great success as an architect and an artist. Frank Lloyd Wright died in 1959.

See also: Louis Sullivan

FURTHER READING

Blake, Peter. Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture and Space. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964.

Brooks, H. Allen. The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and His Midwestern Contemporaries. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971.

Brooks, H. Allen, ed. The Writings of Wright. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983.

Gill, Brendan. Many Masks. Putnam, 1987.

Wright, Frank Lloyd. An Autobiography. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943.

Wright, Frank Lloyd. See MODERN MOVEMENT.