Frank Lloyd Wright

• 1. Introduction

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  Frank Lloyd Wright designed more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years. He was born on the 8th of June 1867, yet he insisted throughout his life that the year was 1869. The lie was small. The ambition behind it was not. His mother decorated his nursery with engravings of English cathedrals torn from periodicals, certain her first child would grow up to build beautiful buildings. He nearly did the opposite of what the world expected. When the famed planner Daniel Burnham offered to pay for a four-year education in Paris and two years in Rome, with a guaranteed job afterward, Wright refused. How does a man who walked away from the establishment become, in 1991, the figure the American Institute of Architects would name "the greatest American architect of all time"? Why did the same man call that very institute "a harbor of refuge for the incompetent"? And what did a set of wooden kindergarten blocks have to do with any of it? This is the story of organic architecture, of a house built over a waterfall, and of a private life that kept making headlines for reasons that had nothing to do with buildings.

• 2. Kindergarten Geometry

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  In 1876, Wright's mother Anna discovered an exhibit of educational blocks called the Froebel Gifts, the foundation of an innovative kindergarten curriculum. She was a trained teacher, and she bought a set. The 9-year-old Wright spent much time playing with them. The blocks were geometrically shaped, smooth maple wood, and could be assembled into two- and three-dimensional compositions. Decades later, in his autobiography, he wrote that he sat at the little kindergarten table-top and played with the cube, the sphere, and the triangle. "All are in my fingers to this day," he said. Among the five major influences that historians and scholars agree shaped his work, the Froebel gifts sit alongside Louis Sullivan, nature, music, and Japanese art. Wright credited the blocks with awakening the child-mind to rhythmic structures in nature. He wrote that he soon became susceptible to constructive pattern evolving in everything he saw. His favorite composer was Ludwig van Beethoven, and the rhythm of music ran parallel to the geometry of the blocks in how he thought about form. The boy who learned the square, circle, and triangle at that little table would later receive, in 1955, an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the University of Wisconsin at the age of 88.

• 3. Master And Apprentice

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  Around November 1887, Wright joined the Chicago firm of Adler & Sullivan, which was looking for someone to make the finished drawings for the interior of the Auditorium Building. He proved himself a competent impressionist of Louis Sullivan's ornamental designs, and after two short interviews he was an apprentice. He did not get along with the other draftsmen, and several violent altercations occurred during his early years there. Out of respect, Wright later called Sullivan lieber Meister, German for "dear master." By 1890, Wright had an office next to Sullivan's and had risen to head draftsman, handling all the residential work the firm took on. The firm generally did not build houses, so Wright designed them at home on evenings and weekends. Short on funds because of expensive tastes in wardrobe and vehicles, he accepted at least nine independent commissions he later called his "bootlegged" houses. His five-year contract forbade outside work. In 1893, Sullivan recognized one house, built for Allison Harlan only blocks from his own townhouse in Kenwood, as unmistakably a Wright design. The break that followed was bitter. Wright told two different versions of it. In one he threw down his pencil and walked out, never to return. In another, recorded by apprentice Edgar Tafel, Sullivan fired him on the spot. Tafel also said Wright had Cecil Corwin sign several bootleg jobs, suggesting he knew the work was forbidden. Wright and Sullivan did not meet or speak for 12 years.

• 4. Organic Architecture

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  Wright believed in designing in harmony with humanity and the environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture. According to his theory, all components of a building should appear unified, as though they belong together, with nothing attached without considering the effect on the whole. He pursued this through glass. To blur the boundary between indoors and outdoors, he strung panes along whole walls to create what he called light screens that joined solid walls. In 1928, he wrote an essay comparing glass to the mirrors of nature: lakes, rivers, and ponds. His pursuit of unity began with the Prairie School movement, which he pioneered. Prairie Style houses often combined one or two stories with one-story projections, open floor plans, low-pitched roofs with broad overhanging eaves, strong horizontal lines, ribbons of casement windows, a prominent central chimney, and a wide use of stone and wood. He called such homes prairie houses because their designs complemented the land around Chicago. Of the Unity Temple in Oak Park, completed during years of work from 1905 to 1909, Wright later said it was the building in which he ceased to be an architect of structure and became an architect of space. His Prairie houses repeated themed design elements, often based on plant forms, across windows, carpets, and other fittings. In 1897 he received a patent for "Prism Glass Tiles" used in storefronts to direct light inward, an early sign of how far he would push a material toward an idea.

• 5. The House Over The Waterfall

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  Fallingwater was constructed over a 20-foot waterfall at Mill Run, Pennsylvania, and completed in 1937 for Mr. and Mrs. Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr. Wright designed it to place the occupants close to their natural surroundings, intending it as a family getaway rather than a live-in home. The construction is a series of cantilevered balconies and terraces, with sandstone for all verticals and concrete for the horizontals. It cost $155,000, including the architect's fee of $8,000, making it one of his most expensive pieces. Kaufmann's own engineers argued the design was not sound. Wright overruled them, but the contractor secretly added extra steel to the horizontal concrete elements. The doubts proved durable. In 1994, Robert Silman and Associates examined the building and developed a plan to restore it. In the late 1990s, steel supports were added under the lowest cantilever until a detailed structural analysis could be done, and in March 2002 post-tensioning of the lowest terrace was completed. Fallingwater has been called "the best all-time work of American architecture." In 2000, members attending the AIA annual convention in Philadelphia named it "The Building of the 20th century" in an unscientific poll. Wright was the only architect on that list with more than one building, the others being the Guggenheim Museum, the Robie House, and the Johnson Wax Building.

• 6. Tragedy At Taliesin

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  In 1903, while designing a house for his Oak Park neighbor Edwin Cheney, Wright became enamored with Cheney's wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, an early feminist he viewed as his intellectual equal. In 1909 the two met up in Europe, leaving their spouses and children behind. Wright stayed nearly a year, living with Mamah in Fiesole, Italy. After returning to the United States, he persuaded his mother to buy him land in Spring Green, Wisconsin, on the 10th of April 1911, and by May he had begun building a new home he called Taliesin. The name came from his mother's side: Taliesin was a Welsh poet, magician, and priest. On the 15th of August 1914, while Wright was working in Chicago, a servant named Julian Carlton set fire to the living quarters of Taliesin and murdered seven people with an axe as the fire burned. The dead included Mamah, her two children John and Martha Cheney, a gardener, a draftsman, a workman, and another workman's son. Two people survived. One of them, William Weston, helped put out the fire that almost completely consumed the residential wing. Carlton swallowed hydrochloric acid in an attempt to kill himself and was taken to the Dodgeville jail. He died from starvation seven weeks after the attack. The house Wright rebuilt would burn again on the 20th of April 1925, this time from crossed wires in a newly installed telephone system, destroying a collection of Japanese prints he valued at $250,000 to $500,000.

• 7. Enslaved By Prints

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  Wright once proclaimed Japan to be "the most romantic, artistic, nature-inspired country on earth." He was particularly interested in ukiyo-e woodblock prints, to which he claimed he was "enslaved." He first traveled to Japan in 1905, where he bought hundreds of prints, and the following year he helped organize the world's first retrospective exhibition on Hiroshige at the Art Institute of Chicago. He considered Hiroshige "the greatest artist in the world." Between 1905 and 1923, Wright spent more than $500,000 on prints. For a time he made more money selling art than he made from architecture, often serving as both architect and dealer to the same clients, designing a home and then providing the art to fill it. He penned a book, The Japanese Print: An Interpretation, in 1912. The art world turned against him. In 1920, many prints he had sold were found to show signs of retouching, including pinholes and unoriginal pigments, likely the work of disgruntled Japanese dealers angered by his under-the-table sales. Wright took one dealer, Kyugo Hayashi, to court, and Hayashi was sentenced to a year in prison. Forced to sell off his collection to pay debts, Wright watched the Bank of Wisconsin claim Taliesin in 1928 and sell thousands of his prints for one dollar apiece to collector Edward Burr Van Vleck. The full extent of his dealing stayed largely unknown for decades. In 1980, Julia Meech, then associate curator of Japanese art at the Metropolitan Museum, found a three-inch-deep clump of 400 cards from 1918, each listing a print bought from the same seller: "F. L. Wright."

• 8. The Fellowship And The Spiral

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  In 1932, Wright and his wife Olgivanna put out a call for students to come to Taliesin to study and work under Wright while they learned architecture and spiritual development. Twenty-three came that first year, including John H. Howe, who would become Wright's chief draftsman. A total of 625 people joined the Taliesin Fellowship in his lifetime, and the Fellowship supplied workers for his later projects. One apprentice captured the strain of working for him: "He is devoid of consideration and has a blind spot regarding others' qualities. Yet I believe that a year in his studio would be worth any sacrifice." The Fellowship's labor flowed into the buildings that closed Wright's career. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City occupied him from 1943 until 1959. Its central geometry lets visitors take an elevator to the top and then view the collection by walking down a slowly descending central spiral ramp. He died before it was finished. On the 4th of April 1959, Wright was hospitalized for abdominal pains and operated upon, and he died quietly on April 9 at the age of 91. His body was first laid in the Lloyd-Jones cemetery in Wisconsin, within view of Taliesin. In 1985, members of the Taliesin Fellowship removed his remains, had them cremated, and sent them to Scottsdale to be interred per Olgivanna's dying wish. The original Wisconsin grave is now empty but still marked with his name. In July 2019, eight of his buildings were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognition that arrived sixty years after the man who walked out of Sullivan's office was gone.