Wright, Frank Lloyd

Arguably the best known architect in American history, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) worked most frequently and successfully in residential architecture but studied, lectured, and designed in all realms of architecture throughout a long career. His contributions to architecture and urban design include the Prairie and Usonian styles, Broadacre City, numerous publications, and many other innovations in design in residential architecture.

Wright was born June 8, 1867, in Richland Center, Wisconsin, to a mother who told him that he would become a renowned architect. Wright never completed high school and briefly studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin, ever afterward criticizing higher education as suppressing originality. In 1887, Wright moved to Chicago and came under the tutelage of Louis Sullivan. Working for the firm of Adler and Sullivan, Wright began to develop unique residential designs that prefigured the Prairie Style. Fired in 1893 for accepting independent commissions, Wright formed his own firm in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park and further developed his Prairie Style.

The Prairie Style was a sought-after suburban residential design for upper-middle-class clients, one that broke the turn-of-the-century housing mold. The characteristic shallow pitch and deep, overhanging roofs mimicked the low, flat terrain of the Midwest prairie; the open floor plan and interior spatial arrangement disdained Victorian representations of social life; Wright's siting and landscaping promoted a private and natural expression of life in the suburbs.

After fleeing to Europe with the wife of a client, in 1911 Wright returned to the United States and built Taliesin, a rural estate and studio, near his birthplace in Wisconsin. Over the next two decades, a tumultuous period for Wright personally and professionally, his career suffered. He was able, however, to produce several notable commissions, including Hollyhock House in Los Angeles (1921), the SC Johnson Wax headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin (1939), and Fallingwater, near Mill Run, Pennsylvania (1939); he also developed another studio in Arizona, Taliesin West (1937). Additionally, he wrote copiously and pursued innovations in prefabricated materials and urban design.

Recognizing the ascendance of the automobile, Wright advocated a low-density, decentralized metropolis exploiting the availability and accessibility of the country's open land. Calling it Broadacre City (1935), Wright's vision included an acre of land for every homeowning citizen of Usonia, as he called the United States. Targeting middle-class professionals, Wright developed an economical style of architecture based upon his principles of organic design, which integrated residential life into a natural setting.

Fallingwater and Broadacre City reawakened interest in Wright's work, inspiring exhibitions and critical acclaim, and kept him busy designing and building for the rest of his life. Wright's Usonian innovations, however, made it difficult for clients to implement his vision of a natural community. Cooperative ownership, circular lots, and plywood core walls ran afoul of established thinking in building practices and home financing and prevented the spread of Broadacre City, but elements of his designs have since been widely incorporated into suburban homes. Toward the end of his life, Wright was drawn back to the city to design [Page 901]New York's Guggenheim Museum (1959), completed after his death, which was on April 9, 1959, in Phoenix, Arizona.

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