Frank Lloyd Wright

Fallingwater
Johnson Wax Building
Solomon R.

Biography

Early years

Frank Lloyd Wright was born in the agricultural town of Richland Center, Wisconsin, United States, on June 8, 1867, just two years after the end of the American Civil War. Wright in his autobiography talks about the influence of these exercises on his approach to design.

Wright began his formal education in 1885 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School for Engineering, where he was a member of a fraternity, Phi Delta Theta. In 1887, Wright left the university without taking a degree (although he was granted an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the university in 1955) and moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he joined the architectural firm of Joseph Lyman Silsbee. Sullivan by Louis Sullivan himself, after Sullivan discovered that Wright had been accepting clients independently from the firm. Wright established his own practice and home in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, IL. Many examples of this work can be found in Buffalo, New York, resulting from a friendship between Wright and an executive from the Larkin Soap Company, Darwin D.

Wright came to Buffalo and designed not only the first sketches for the Larkin Administration Building (completed in 1904, demolished in 1950), but also three homes for the company's executives:

The houses considered the masterpieces of the late Prairie period (1907–9) are the Frederick Robie House and the Avery and Queene Coonley House, both in Chicago. Wright's work, however, was not known to European architects until the publication of the Wasmuth Portfolio in 1910.

Europe and personal troubles

In 1904, Wright designed a house for a neighbor in Oak Park, Edwin Cheney, and immediately took a liking to Cheney's wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Often the two could be seen taking rides in Wright's automobile through Oak Park, and they became the talk of the town. Wright's wife, Kitty, would not grant him a divorce however, and at first, neither would Edwin Cheney grant one to Mamah. In 1909, even before the Robie House was actually completed, Wright and Mamah Cheney eloped to Europe. The scandal that erupted virtually destroyed Wright's ability to practice architecture in the United States.

Architectural historians have speculated on why Wright decided to turn his life upside-down. This argument has been coupled with speculation that Wright was himself having a professional midlife crisis (in 1907 he was already forty years old). Wright was not getting larger commissions for commercial or public buildings, which frustrated him not only because of the desire for bigger and better work, but also because of his immense ego and desire to be recognized as the architectural genius he saw himself as.

Wright and Mamah Cheney traveled extensively throughout Europe, where Wright absorbed a great amount of architectural history. In 1910, during a stop in Berlin, Wright, with virtually all of his drawings, visited the publishing house of Ernst Wasmuth, who had agreed to publish his work there. In two volumes, the Wasmuth Portfolio was thus published, and created the first major exposure of Wright's work in Europe.

Wright remained in Europe for two years, though Mamah Cheney left for the United States a few times, and set up home in Fiesole, Italy. During this time, Edwin Cheney granted her a divorce, though Kitty Wright again refused to grant one to her husband. After Wright's return to the United States in 1911, he moved to Spring Green, Wisconsin, to land that was held by his mother's family, and began to build himself a new home, which he called Taliesin.

More personal turmoil

On August 15, 1914, while Wright was in Chicago completing a large project, Midway Gardens, Julian Carlton, a male servant whom he had hired several months earlier, set fire to the living quarters of Taliesin and murdered seven people with an axe as the fire burned.

In 1923, Wright's mother, Anna, died. Wright wed Miriam Noel in November 1923, but her addiction to morphine led to the failure of the marriage in less than one year. In 1924, after the separation, Wright met Olga (Olgivanna) Lazovich Hinzenburg, at the Petrograd Ballet.

Enduring legacy

Wright is responsible for a concept or a series of extremely original concepts of suburban development united under the term Broadacre City.

It was also in the 1930s that Wright first designed "Usonian" houses.

Wright was awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1941. It was designed according to Wright's desire to place the occupants close to the natural surroundings, with a stream and waterfall running under part of the building. There is a difference of opinion as to whether Wright's original design would have withstood the test of time.

Wright practiced what is known as organic architecture, an architecture that evolves naturally out of the context, most importantly for him the relationship between the site and the building and the needs of the client. Wright's creations took his concern with organic architecture down to the smallest details. From his largest commercial commissions to the relatively modest Usonian houses, Wright conceived virtually every detail of both the external design and the internal fixtures, including furniture, carpets, windows, doors, tables and chairs, light fittings and decorative elements. Wright was also one of the first architects to design and install custom-made electric light fittings, including some of the very first electric floor lamps, and his very early use of the then-novel spherical glass lampshade (a design previously not possible due to the physical restrictions of gas lighting).

As Wright's career progressed, so as well did the mechanization of the glass industry. Wright fully embraced glass in his designs and found that it fit well into his philosophy of organic architecture. In 1928, Wright wrote an essay on glass in which he compared it to the mirror's of nature; One of Wright's earliest uses of glass in his works was to utilize strung panes of glass along whole walls in an attempt to create light screens to join together solid walls. By utilizing this large amount of glass, Wright sought to achieve a balance between the lightness and airiness of the glass and the solid, hard walls. Arguably, Wright's most well-known art glass is that of the Prairie style.

One of his projects, Monona Terrace, originally designed in 1937 as City and County Offices for Madison, Wisconsin, was completed in 1997 on the original site, using a variation of Wright's final design for the exterior with the interior design altered by its new purpose as a convention center. The "as-built" design was carried out by Wright's apprentice Tony Puttnam.

Wright's personal life was a colorful one that frequently made headlines. Gurdjieff, and her experiences with Gurdjieff influenced the formation and structure of Wright's Taliesin Fellowship in 1932. The meeting of Gurdjieff and Wright is explored in Robert Lepage's The Geometry Of Miracles. Olgivanna continued to run the Fellowship after Wright's death, until her own death in Scottsdale, Arizona in 1985. Despite being a high-profile architect and almost always in demand, Wright would find himself constantly in debt thanks in part to his lavish lifestyle.

Wright died on April 9, 1959, having designed an enormous number of significant projects including the Solomon R. Unfortunately, when the museum was completed, a number of important details of Wright's design were ignored, including his desire for the interior to be painted off-white.

Wright built 362 houses. As buildings age their structural deficiencies are increasingly revealed, and Wright's designs have not been immune from the passage of time. (A common joke was once how "Fallingwater" is falling into the water.) Some of these deficiencies can be attributed to Wright's pushing of materials beyond the state of the art, others to sometimes less than rigorous engineering, and still others to the natural wear and tear of the elements over time.

Turmoil followed Wright even many years after his death in 1959. In 1985, following the death of Olgivanna, Wright's third wife and often a source of controversy, it was learned that her dying wish had been that Wright, her daughter by a first marriage and herself all be cremated and relocated to Scottsdale, Arizona. During the nearly 30-year period prior to Olgivanna's death, Wright's body had lain interred near his birthplace and later-life home in Wisconsin. Today, anyone who visits a small cemetery attached to a corn field near Richland Center, Wisconsin to look upon a gravestone marked with Wright's name, will be visiting an empty grave.

In 1992 The Madison Opera in Madison, Wisconsin commissioned and premiered the opera Shining Brow, by composer Daron Hagen and librettist Paul Muldoon based on events early in Wright's life. In 2000, Work Song: Three Views of Frank Lloyd Wright, a play based on the relationship between the personal and working aspects of Wright's life, debuted at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.

One of Wright's sons, Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., known as Lloyd Wright, was also a notable architect in Los Angeles. Lloyd Wright's son, (and Wright's grandson) Eric Lloyd Wright, is currently an architect in Malibu, California.

Another son and architect, John Lloyd Wright, invented Lincoln Logs in 1918.

Wright also designed his own clothing.

Often, Wright designed not only the buildings, but the furniture as well.

Influences on architecture

Wright responded to the transformation of domestic life that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, when servants became a less prominent or completely absent feature of most American households, by developing homes with progressively more open plans. Much of modern architecture, including the early work of Mies van der Rohe, can be traced back to Wright's innovative work. Many features of modern American homes date back to Wright;

Works

Works Cited in Article

Selected books and articles on Wright’s philosophy

Biographies on Wright

Selected survey books on Wright’s work

Trivia