Bio

Frank Lloyd Wright is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in modern Western architecture. His radically innovative designs, utilising a building style based on natural forms, termed by Wright as organic architecture, have stamped him as a major, respected architect.

Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin., June 8, 1867 and died on April 9, 1959. It is a measure of his passion and commitment to his field that he continued working right up to the time of his death.

After studying civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Wright moved to Chicago in 1887, where he went to work as a draftsman in the office of Adler and Sullivan. While working under Louis Sullivan, he began to design and independently build private houses for some of Adler and Sullivan’s clients. These "bootlegged houses", as Wright called them, soon revealed an independent talent quite distinct from that of Sullivan. Wright’s houses had low, sweeping rooflines hanging over uninterrupted walls of windows; his plans were centred on massive brick or stone fireplaces at the heart of the house; his rooms became increasingly open to one another; and the overall configuration of his plans became more and more asymmetrical, reaching out toward some real or imagined expansive horizon. The architecture of these houses served as the inspirational source for the Prairie School.

In contrast to the openness of those houses and as if in conflict with their immediate city environment, Wright’s urban buildings tend to be walled in with light entering primarily from above, through skylights,. Interestingly, these features contrasted with those of Sullivan’s buildings. Wright’s distaste for urban environments and his embrace of the natural environment are observed in the contrasting features of some of his finest buildings of the early 1900s: the Larkin Company Administration Building (1904; demolished 1950) in Buffalo, New York, and the Unity Church in Oak Park, Illinois; compared with Buffalo’s Martin House and Chicago’s Robie House. The houses are characterised by large, glazed walls, terraces, and low-slung roof overhangs.

After 1893, when the issue of his bootlegged houses finally caused a break with Adler and Sullivan’s office, Wright struck out on his own. During the next 20 years, he became one of the best known architects in the United States. Wright’s fame in European architectural circles was promoted due to the publication in 1910 and 1911 by Berlin’s Wasmuth of two editions of Wright’s work as well as an exhibition that travelled throughout Europe. Wright’s influence now spread to include such key figures in contemporary architecture as Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.

With his reputation assured on both sides of the Atlantic, Wright began to reinforce the philosophical underpinnings of his innovative building style. In keeping with his rural leanings, Wright proclaimed that the structural principles found in natural forms should guide modern American architecture. He praised the virtues of an organic architecture that would use reinforced concrete in the configurations found in sea shells and snails and would build skyscrapers the way trees were "built"; that is, with a central "trunk" deeply rooted in the ground and floors cantilevered from that trunk, like branches. Spaces within such buildings would be animated by natural light allowed to penetrate the interiors and to travel across textured surfaces as the angle of sunlight and moonlight changed.

Wright’s view of architecture was essentially romantic. Although he often paid lip-service to the rational systems called for by mass production (modular planning and prefabrication), his efforts in those directions seemed half-hearted at best. The most spectacular buildings of his mature period were based on forms borrowed from nature, and the intentions were clearly romantic, poetic, and intensely personal. Examples of these buildings are: Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel (1915-22; demolished 1968); Fallingwater (Kaufmann House; 1936), Mill Run, Pa.; the SC Johnson and Son Wax Company Administration Center (1936-50), Racine, Wis.; Taliesin West (1938-59); and New York City’s Guggenheim Museum (completed 1959).

Frank Lloyd Wright has left a rich heritage of completed buildings of almost uniform splendour, but, unlike Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and others, he has nurtured few disciples. Wright can be considered an essentially idiosyncratic architect whose influence was immense but whose pupils were few.

Adapted from the text by Peter Blake and Leli Sudler
1996 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia
Bibliography: Blake, P., The Master Builders (1976); Hitchcock, H. R., In the Nature of Materials: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright 1887-1941, 2d ed. (1969); Kaufmann, E., and Raeburn, B., Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings (1970; repr. 1989); Lind, C., The Wright Style (1992); Pfeiffer, B. B., ed., Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, 2 vols. (1992); Scully, V., Jr., Frank Lloyd Wright (1960); Secrest, M., Frank Lloyd Wright (1992); Twombly, R. C., Frank Lloyd Wright (1979; repr. 1987); Wright, F. L., An Autobiography, 3d ed. (1943)

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