Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center in south-western Wisconsin on June 8, 1867, as Frank Lincoln Wright. His father, William Carey Wright, was a musician and a preacher. His mother, Anna Lloyd Jones was a teacher. Wright spent some of his time growing up at the farm owned by his uncles near Spring Green in Wisconsin. Wright had a Welsh ethnic heritage, he was brought up in the Unitarian faith. Frank Lloyd Wright studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, after he moved to Chicago, where he worked in the architectural firm of J.Lyman Silsbee. He worked also with Louis Sullivan (design) and Dankmar Adler (engineering as a drafts-man. He became the man in charge of the firm's residential designs. Under Sullivan he was called the "Lieber Meister". In 1889 he married with his first wife: Catherine Tobin. Wright's first independently-built project was his own house, which he began in 1889, while he was working for his mentor, Louis Sullivan When Wright finished with the firm, he started his career with the "bootlegged" houses. He grew some ideas: the sheltering rofflines, the prominence of the central fireplace, the destruction of the box with oper floors. The Adler and Sullivan firm was just the right place to be for a young man aspiring to be a great architect. Between 1893 and 1901, 49 buildings designed by Wright were built. Into 1909, he developed and refined the prairie style; he founded the "Praiarie School" of architecture. In the same year he left his wife and 5 children to go in Germany. He was joined there by Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wire or a former client and now his lover. From 1912-l914 they lived together at Taliesin, until a crazy servant murdered Ms. Chaney and 6 other, also setting a fire that destroyed much of Taliesin. From 1914-1932, a time of personal turmoil and change, Wright rebuilt Taliesin, divorced Catherine, married and separated from Miriam Noel and met a Bosnian Sebr, his third wife: Olgivanna Milanoff. During this period he built the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. This construction resisted to earthquake, that it destroyed the city. Wright was an avid collector of Japanese prints. During the same time, he produced the concrete California residences. Few works were completed in this period, but Wright did lecture and publish frequently, one example was "an Autobiography" (1932). The Taliesin Fellowship was founded in 1932, with 30 apprentices who came to live and learn under Wright. The Fellowship was expanded as Taliesin West was built in Arizona as a winter location for the school. The Taliesin Associated Architects, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation are living legacies of what Wright founded in 1932. His most famous work, the Fallingwater, was designed in 1936. Few buildings were produced during the war years. The post war period to the end of Wright's life was the most productive. He received 270 house commissions, designed and built the Price Tower skyscraper, the Guggenheim Museum and the Marin County Civic Center. Wright never retired. He died on April 9, 1959 at the age of ninty-two in Arizona. He was buried at the graveyard at Unity Chapel at Taliesin in Wisconsin. In 1985, Olgivanna Wright's whis was to have Frank Lloyd Wright's ashes placed next to hers at Taliesin West.

The Fallingwater

Bear run, Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania

In Fallingwater, which was built as a weekend retreat for Edgar J. Kaufmann, we see Wright's greatest expression of "organic architecture": the union of the structure and the land upon which it is built. Fallingwater is considerated Wright's masterwork.