With more than 1,000 projects to his credit (from prairie-style houses to an impressive organic museum building), he blazed trails, set trends, pushed the boundaries of architecture. Did Frank Lloyd Wright - called the forerunner of organic architecture (and the greatest American architect!) - really strive for harmony between man and nature, and why was it about him that the duo Simon & Garfunkel∗ sang?
Who was Frank Lloyd Wright?
FLW was born on June 8, 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin, in the United States. His parents - pastor and musician William Cary Wright and Anna Lloyd Jones, a teacher with Welsh roots - would give him his middle name at the time, Lincoln, which he changed to Lloyd only after his parents divorced in 1885.
Rumor has it that his mother foresaw Wright's career and, to set him on an architectural path, decorated his room with engravings of English cathedrals cut out of magazines. She also slipped him educational blocks with geometric shapes to play with.
The family lived poorly, and after his parents separated, Wright was never to see his father again. There is no evidence that he graduated from high school, but it is known that as a 19-year-old he was accepted to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied under Allan D. Conover, a professor of civil engineering. Wright, however, did not earn a college degree; he received an honorary doctorate much later, at the age of 88.
Frank Lloyd Wright in 1926
United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division | public domain
Wright quickly began a career as an architect. When his uncle, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, a Unitarian clergyman, commissioned Joseph Lyman Silsbee's studio to design the family's chapel in Wyoming(Unity Chapel) in 1886, Wright arranged its interior. Thanks to this fruitful collaboration, the then 20-year-old architect moved to Chicago and was hired at Silsbee's studio.
The year was 1887, so it was only sixteen years after the Great Chicago Fire, a conflagration that consumed more than 10 square kilometers of the city's built-up area. The tragedy of years before, however, meant an investment boom, and thus a demand for architects' work.
A plaque on the walls of Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio
Photo: By Golbez | Wikimedia Commons © CC BY-SA 4.0
What was Frank Lloyd Wright known for?
After gaining experience at the Silsbee studio, Wright went to work at the Adler & Sullivan office founded by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan (the same one credited with the maxim "form follows function"). At the time, after hours, Wright (despite a provision in his contract that prevented him from working outside the studio) also accepted his own commissions for single-family home designs. Sullivan, however, recognized the architect's style in one of the projects located adjacent to his own home, which led to a rather tumultuous end to their collaboration in 1893.
Frank Lloyd Wright's house and studio
Photo: Philip Turner | Library of Congress, Prints and Photograph Division, Historic American Building Survey HABS: ILL,16-OAKPA,5-2, public domain
prairie style
This course of events was the impetus for Wright to establish his own studio.... on the top floor of a Sullivan-designed building. After a few years, however, he and other architects moved to the Steinway Hall building, where together they created the Prairie School, a movement that sought a North American style(prairie style): maximum two-story houses with flat or hipped roofs with wide eaves, a centrally located chimney, ribbon windows, natural materials (especially wood and stone) and crisp, horizontal lines meant to evoke the flat, treeless spaces of the American prairie landscape. Isn't this the vision that comes to mind when we think of American single-family homes?
Robie House in Chicago, a prairie-style house (1910)
Photo credit: Teemu08 | Wikimedia Commons © CC BY-SA 3.0
block system
For a while the architect worked in Japan, where he designed, among other things, the Imperial Hotel (completed in 1923 and demolished in 1968). In the early 1920s, the architect also reached for the TextileBlock System, a construction of (often concave, coffered or decorated) concrete blocks reinforced with steel bars. The technique evolved over the years to eventually be called the Usonia automatic system (the term Usonia FLW used to describe the United States): the concrete blocks contained reinforcing bars arranged vertically and horizontally in semicircular grooves. After several layers were assembled, the whole thing was poured with mortar.
Ennis House in Los Angeles (1924)
Photo: Pom 49 | Wikimedia Commons © CC BY-SA 4.0
Throughout this period Wright was accompanied by Catherine Lee "Kitty" Tobin, whom he married in 1889. They lived to have six children and spent many years together until.... The architect fell in love with his client's wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. The story of their relationship, however, turned out to be tragic. Wright and Mamah moved in together in a house that the architect named Taliesin (after a hero of Welsh mythology who was endowed with the gift of prophecy). The press decried their "indecent" relationship and called their house the "bungalow of love." The scandal affected the architect's work - he did not receive any serious commissions until 1913.
Unfortunately, on August 15, 1914, while Wright was away, one of the family's servants set fire to the house and murdered seven people staying there, including the architect's beloved. Another woman - Miriam Noel - Wright married in 1923. The marriage quickly fell apart, however, and shortly thereafter the architect met Olga Lazovich Hinzenburg, a disciple of philosopher and spiritual leader Georgi Gurdjieff, from Montenegro, and it was with her that he spent the rest of his life. The couple lived to see a daughter, Iovanna.
© Taliesin Preservation
In 1932, together they started the Taliesin Fellowship initiative, inviting students to Teliesin to learn architecture and work under Wright's tutelage. Over the course of the architect's life, more than 600 people joined the fellowship, and the program evolved into a school of architecture that still operates today.
Frank Lloyd Wright died at the age of 91, on April 9, 1959.
Frank Lloyd Wright's most important projects
From the huge pool of Frank Lloyd Wright projects, we have selected five particularly important projects:
The architect's own house and studio in Oak Park (1889)
The architect's own home and studio in Oak Park (1889)
Photo: cygnusloop99 | Wikimedia Commons © CC BY-SA 3.0
Home ofOne 'sOwn is the showcase and experimental field of the architect's early work (by 1901 Frank Lloyd Wright had completed nearly 50 projects!). Among other things, he realized here the idea of an open-plan living space. Expanded and remodeled over the years, it was declared a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1976 and functions today as a museum.
The Ennis House in Los Angeles (1924).
© Hilton & Hyland
The house, built from 27,000 concrete blocks, was reportedly one of his favorite structures. Inspired by Mayan temples, the modular building is decorated with reliefs that add intriguing tectonics to the block. The house is also one of the most popular buildings in cinematography - scenes from "Blade Runner" (1982), "Karate Kid III" (1989) and the TV series "Buffy: Fear of the Vampires" (1992), among others, were filmed here.
Fallingwater, a house by a waterfall in Pennsylvania (1939)
© This House
The concept for the most famous of Wright's design houses was reportedly created in two hours. It is cited by some as an exemplary example of organic architecture (which involves creating architecture in analogy to nature) by others, on the contrary, as an example of the destruction of nature by architecture. Built of broken stone, the modernist house seems to grow out of the landscape and float above a flowing waterfall. As of 2019, the building is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Johnson Wax headquarters in Racine (1939)
The reading room at the Johnson Wax company headquarters in Racine (1939)
photo: Carol M. Highsmith | Library of Congress, public domain
The most distinctive feature of the company's headquarters is a hall with imposing, slender columns shaped like water lily leaves - a structural challenge (their width varies from 23 centimeters at the base to 550 at the top!) that allowed Wright to push the boundaries of architecture one step further.
Guggenheim Museum in New York (1959)
Guggenheim Museum in New York (1959)
Photo: Ajay Suresh | Wikimedia Commons © CC BY 2.0
Another architectural icon - the building's organic form is considered one of the most important architectural structures of the 20th century - and Wright's last great work. Crowned with a glass dome, the snow-white spiral aroused extreme opinions - I guess that's how white museum edifices have it.
∗ Well, Art Garfunkel, who studied architecture, asked Paul Simon to write a song about Frank Lloyd Wright. The latter, unfortunately, didn't know much about his work, so he wrote a nostalgic song about his friend, changing only the name Frank Lloyd Wright.
