Career
Before Frank Lloyd Wright was born, his mother decided he was going to be a great architect so she placed pictures of buildings in his nursery and bedroom during his younger years to inspire him. Considered to be America’s greatest architect, Wright was born June 8, 1867, in Richland Center, Wisconsin.
To help support the family while in his teens, Wright worked for a dean of the University of Wisconsin’s department of engineering and spent two semesters studying civil engineering at the University.
In 1887, Wright moved to Chicago and took his first architectural job with Joseph Silsbee, who would later design a number of projects in Buffalo. He then moved to the firm of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan a year later as a draftsman.
Wright worked under Sullivan’s direction for six years, later acknowledging him to be his greatest influence and referring to Sullivan as his "Lieber Meister," or beloved master. Sullivan rejected classical architectural themes and European traditions and became known for what one writer has described as "integrated ornamentation based on natural themes." He developed the maxim "Form Follows Function" which Wright later revised to "Form and Function Are One."
In 1889, at age 22, Wright married Catherine Lee Tobin,18, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Together with Sullivan and his other contacts she gave him social polish and the cultural background he lacked. The couple had six children.
Wright and Sullivan parted company in 1893 when Sullivan discovered that Wright had been accepting commissions for house designs on his own, a violation of an earlier agreement between the two. The moonlighting work was important, however, because it foreshadowed Wright’s low, sheltering roof lines, the prominence of the central fireplace and open floor plans.
He opened his own practice in his home and studio complex in the nearby suburb of Oak Park, where he conceived the Prairie style of architecture. It was said that he seemed to possess a skill of site memorization, visiting a location sometimes only once before creating a building that blended with and complemented the grounds. Wright designed more than 150 structures over the next decade, planning their interior furnishings as well. He passed on his principles to the architects who worked with him, and many of them went on to significant architectural careers of their own.
Wright created what he called "organic architecture" that reflected the needs of the client, the nature of the site and the native materials that were available. "There were no off-the-shelf products, no standardized procedures, for his unconventional buildings," biographer Ada Louise Huxtable wrote. "Whatever it took in time and money for the right solution or proper finish was justified in his mind."
His emphasis on simplicity and his insistence that natural materials be used naturally became a hallmark of his work. Some of Wright’s most notable designs during this period were for "Prairie Houses" that complemented the long, low horizontal prairie on which they were found. They had low pitched roofs, deep overhangs, no attics or basements, and generally long rows of casement windows that further emphasized the horizontal theme. To bring out its natural beauty, woodwork was stained, never painted.
The Buffalo years began in 1903 when Wright designed the Larkin Soap Company Administration Building on Seneca Street. He designed the Prairie-style Darwin Martin house for a Larkin Company executive who became a principal benefactor for the next 37 years. The adjacent George Barton house was designed for Martin’s sister and her husband, and Wright also drew the plans for the nearby Gardner’s Cottage. He designed a house for William R. Heath, a lawyer and Larkin company executive who was company president John Larkin’s brother-in law. The Walter V. Davidson house was designed for another Larkin executive. Wright also designed Graycliff in 1926, the Isabelle and Darwin Martin summer house at Lake Erie in Derby, south of Buffalo.
Wright was associated with the Oak Park Unitarian Universalist congregation when they asked him to design a new church after their wooden church burned during a storm. His Unity Temple in Oak Park is one of the earliest public buildings constructed of concrete, poured in place into wooden molds. Wright said he chose concrete because it was, in his words, "cheap," and yet could be made as dignified as more traditional masonry. His desire to create a house of worship expressing the powerful simplicity of ancient temples prompted his suggestion to call it a "temple" rather than a church.
Wright’s genius as an architect was matched by the turmoil of his personal life. In 1909 Wright left his family for Europe with Mamah Cheney, the wife of one of his clients. While he was in Germany, two portfolios of his work were published there that brought him international recognition and greatly influenced other architects.
In 1911 he began building a new home and studio near Spring Green, Wisconsin. The complex, called Taliesin, was located on ancestral farmland. Following Mamah Cheney’s divorce, he announced she would live there with him. Tragedy struck in 1914, however, when Taliesin was set afire by a crazed servant who, newspapers reported, was underpaid and driven mad by the unconventional lovers. He killed Mamah, her two children and four of Wright’s leading workmen.
Although stunned by the event, Wright immediately began rebuilding Taliesin, finishing in about a year. Following the completion of "Taliesin II," he met sculptress Miriam Noel who joined him there, beginning a turbulent seven-year relationship.
He opened an office in Tokyo where he spent approximately six years (1916-22) working on Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel. It featured a "floating foundation" and combined oriental simplicity with modern-world comfort. The structure was initially criticized for its aesthetic design, but when it survived a 1923 earthquake that left most of Tokyo in rubble, the criticism turned to praise.
Returning to the United States in 1922, Wright opened an office in Los Angeles and turned to the use of concrete, a new material in residential homes. Most of these "textile block" houses, carrying a Mayan and Japanese influence, were built in California.
In 1922, Wright was formally divorced from Catherine. He married Miriam Noel the following year, but she left Wright in 1924, less than one year after their marriage. Soon after, quite by chance, at a performance of the Petrograd Ballet, he met Olga (Olgivanna) Lazovich Hinzenburg, the daughter of Montenegro’s chief justice.
In February 1925, Olgivanna and her 8-year-old daughter moved into Taliesin, but another disaster followed two months later. A fire started by defective telephone wiring caused nearly $500,000 damage. Undaunted, Wright began construction of Taliesin III. In 1927, a third fire at Taliesin caused the loss of significant pieces of Asian artwork and damaged the studio. Part of Wright’s remaining Japanese art collection was auctioned to pay debts and, bankrolled by friends, "Wright, Incorporated" took legal ownership of Taliesin. Following his divorce from Miriam, Wright married Olgivanna in 1928, his third and final marriage.
Wright’s last style, "Usonian," (the phrase stood for the United States of North America) adapted architecture to the simple and economically tight lives of families of the Depression-era1930s. Usonian homes were moderate cost, single story houses that featured innovations such as radiant heating through hot water pipes in the cement slab floor, prefabricated walls of boards and tar paper, an open plan with greater flow of space, and a new invention, the carport. In 1954 Wright wrote The Natural House that discussed the Usonian home and introduced a new concept, the "Usonian Automatic," a hollowstone block house that could be owner-built.
During the Great Depression, with almost no architectural commissions coming his way, Wright and his wife founded an architectural apprenticeship program known as the "Taliesin Fellowship," established, they said, to provide a total learning environment, integrating all aspects of the apprentices’ lives in order to produce responsible, creative and cultured human beings. Wright taught the principles and philosophies of architecture, and the Fellowship opened with thirty apprentices who were to gain experience not only in architecture but also in construction, farming, gardening and cooking, and the study of nature, music, art and dance.
He published An Autobiography and The Disappearing City in 1932 at the age of 65. Both influenced several generations of young architects. It was also at this time that Wright did some of the most significant work of his later career. He designed Fallingwater in Bear Run, Pennsylvania, in 1935 and the S.C. Johnson & Son Administration Building in Racine, Wisconsin, the following year. He began design of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 1943, but would not live to see its completion two months after his death in 1959.
Wright decided in 1937 that he wanted a more permanent winter residence in Arizona. He acquired several hundred acres of raw, rugged desert in the foothills at Scottsdale, Arizona, where the Fellowship had moved every winter from Wisconsin, and began the construction of Taliesin West as a "Desert Camp." For more than 20 years it would serve as Wright’s architectural laboratory for testing design innovations, structural ideas and building details. Of the more than 1,100 projects Wright designed during his lifetime, nearly one-third were created during the last decade of his life.
Wright died in 1959 at age 91 in Phoenix, Arizona. The Fellowship and its activities continued under Olgivanna’s leadership until her death in 1985 and then evolved into the present-day Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, dedicated to conserving Wright’s work and advancing his principles of organic architecture.
REFERENCES:
"Brief Biography of Frank Lloyd Wright," and "Frank Lloyd Wright" City of Chicago Department of Planning and Development, Landmarks Division.
Books about Wright include Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Knopf, 1992); Ada Louise Huxtable, Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Penguin Books, 2004); and Wright’s Autobiography (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943).
For pictures of Wright’s creations, see "Frank Lloyd Wright" in "A Digital Archive of American Architecture," and Henry Russell Hitchcock, In the Nature of Materials: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright 1887-1941 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1982; first edition published 1942 by Hawthorn Books).
