Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect and designer. Of his almost 92 years of life, Frank Lloyd Wright spent 72 as an architect. Unlike many of his colleagues, this devoted family man built above all houses. This self-selected focus did not, however, prevent him from designing one of the best-known museum buildings in the world: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Background
Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, on June 8, 1867. He was the son of William Carey Wright, a preacher and a musician, and Anna Lloyd Jones, a teacher whose large Welsh family had settled the valley area near Spring Green, Wisconsin. His early childhood was nomadic as his father traveled from one ministry position to another in Rhode Island, Iowa, and Massachusetts, before settling in Madison, Wisconsin in 1878.
Wright's parents divorced in 1885, making already difficult financial circumstances even more challenging.
Education
Wright attended Madison High School, but no evidence of his graduation has been found. He was admitted to the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a special student in 1886. There, he joined Phi Delta Theta fraternity, took classes part-time for two semesters, and worked with a professor of civil engineering, Allan D. Conover. Wright left the school without taking a degree, although he was granted an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the university in 1955.
To help support the family, eighteen-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright worked for the dean of the University of Wisconsin's department of engineering while also studying at the university. But he wanted to be an architect and in 1887 he left Madison for Chicago, where he found work with two different firms before being hired by the prestigious partnership of Adler and Sullivan, working directly under Louis Sullivan for six years. Anxious to build his own home, he negotiated a five-year contract with Sullivan in exchange for the loan of the necessary money. He purchased a wooded corner lot in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park and built his first house. Remembered by the children as a lively household, filled with beautiful things Wright found it hard to go without, it was not long before escalating expenses tempted him into accepting independent residential commissions. Although he did these on his own time, when Sullivan became aware of them in 1893, he charged Wright with breach of contract. His departure created a rift between the two men that was not repaired for nearly two decades. Wright opened an office and began to design homes that he believed would truly belong on the American prairie.
The Winston House (1893) was Wright’s first independent commission. Determined to create an indigenous American architecture, over the next sixteen years he set the standards for what became known as the Prairie Style. For Wright, a building seemed in harmony with its surroundings when it fitted in as well as possible into its specific natural environment. His "prairie houses", for example, were designed against the background of the endless horizontals of the open prairies of the Midwest. These houses reflected the long, low horizontal prairie on which they sat with low-pitched roofs, deep overhangs, no attics or basements, and generally long rows of casement windows that further emphasized the horizontal theme.
Creatively exhausted and emotionally restless, late in 1909 Wright left his family for an extended stay in Europe with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, a client with whom he had been in love for several years. Wright worked on two publications of his work, published by Ernst Wasmuth, one of drawings known as the Wasmuth Portfolio, Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright, and one of photographs, Ausgeführte Bauten, both released in 1911. These publications brought international recognition to his work and greatly influenced other architects. The same year, Wright and Mamah returned to the States and began construction of Taliesin near Spring Green as their home and refuge. There he also resumed his architectural practice and over the next several years received two important public commissions: the first in 1913 for an entertainment center called Midway Gardens in Chicago; the second, in 1916, for the new Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Japan. In August 1914, while Wright was in Chicago working on Midway Gardens, an insane servant set fire to the living quarters of Taliesin, and murdered Mamah Cheney, her two children, and four others. Emotionally and spiritually devastated by the tragedy, Wright was able to find solace only in work and he began to rebuild Taliesin in Mamah’s memory.
The years between 1922 and 1934 were both architecturally creative and fiscally catastrophic. Wright had established an office in Los Angeles, but following his return from Japan in 1922 commissions were scarce, with the exception of the four textile block houses of 1923–1924 (Millard, Storer, Freeman and Ennis). He soon abandoned the West Coast and returned to Taliesin. While only a few projects went into construction, this decade was one of great design innovation for Wright.
In 1928, Wright married Olga Lazovich (known as Olgivanna), daughter of a Chief Justice of Montenegro, whom he had met a few years earlier in Chicago. She proved to be the partner and stabilizing influence he needed in order to refocus on "the cause of architecture" he had begun decades earlier.
With few architectural commissions coming his way, Wright turned to writing and lecturing which introduced him to a larger national audience. Two important publications came out in 1932: An Autobiography and The Disappearing City. The first received widespread critical acclaim and would continue to inspire generations of young architects; the second introduced Wright’s scheme for Broadacre City, a utopian vision for decentralization that moved the city into the country. Although it received little serious consideration at the time, it would influence community development in unforeseen ways in the decades to come. At about this same time, Wright and Olgivanna founded an architectural school at Taliesin, the "Taliesin Fellowship," an apprenticeship program to provide a total learning environment, integrating not only architecture and construction, but also farming, gardening, and cooking, and the study of nature, music, art, and dance.
In 1936, Wright staged a remarkable comeback with several important commissions, including the S.C. Johnson and Son Company Administration Building in Racine, Wisconsin; Falling Water, the country house for Edgar Kaufmann in rural Pennsylvania; and the Herbert Jacobs House (the first executed "Usonian" house) in Madison, Wisconsin.
At this same time, Wright decided he wanted a more permanent winter residence in Arizona, and he acquired some unwanted acreage of raw, rugged desert in the foothills of the McDowell Mountains in Scottsdale. Here he and the Taliesin Fellowship began the construction of Taliesin West as a winter camp, a bold new endeavor for desert living where he tested design innovations, structural ideas, and building details that responded to the dramatic desert setting. Wright and the Fellowship established migration patterns between Wisconsin and Arizona, which the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture continues to this day.
Acknowledging Wright’s stunning reentry into the architectural spotlight, the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged a comprehensive retrospective exhibition that opened in 1940. In June 1943, undeterred by a world at war, Wright received a letter that initiated the most important, and most challenging commission of his late career. Baroness Hilla von Rebay wrote asking him to design a building to house the Solomon R. Guggenheim collection of non-objective paintings. Wright responded enthusiastically, never anticipating the tremendous amount of time and energy this project would consume before its completion sixteen years later.
With the end of the war in 1945, many apprentices returned and work again flowed into the studio. Completed public projects over the next decade included the Research Tower for the SC Johnson Company, a Unitarian meeting house in Madison, a skyscraper in Oklahoma, and several buildings for Florida Southern College.
Wright opened his last decade with work on a large exhibition, Frank Lloyd Wright: Sixty Years of Living Architecture, which was soon on an international tour traveling to Florence, Paris, Zurich, Munich, Rotterdam, and Mexico City, before returning to the United States for additional venues. Impressively energetic for man in his eighties, he continued to travel extensively, lecture widely, and write prolifically. He was still actively involved with all aspects of work including frequent trips to New York to oversee construction of the Guggenheim Museum when, in April of 1959, he was suddenly stricken by an illness which forced his hospitalization.
Achievements
During his seventy-year career, Wright created over 1,100 designs nearly half of which were realized. These included commercial buildings, apartment towers, recreational complexes, museums, religious houses, residences for the wealthy and those of more modest income, furniture, lighting features, textiles, and art glass. In creating what he called an "architecture for democracy," he redefined our concept of space, offering everyone the opportunity to live and grow in nourishing environments, connected physically and spiritually to the natural world.
In 1991, the American Institute of Architects named Frank Lloyd Wright the greatest American architect of all time and Architectural Record published a list of the one hundred most important buildings of the previous century that included twelve Wright structures.
Twenty-five Wright projects (including the recently named Florida Southern College campus) have been designated National Historic Landmarks, and ten have been named to the tentative World Heritage Site list. Such recognition - in addition to the international honors he received during his lifetime, the dozens of major exhibitions that have been mounted, and the multitude of books and articles that have been written about his life and work - confirms Wright’s critical contribution to architectural history and the architectural profession at the same time that we draw upon the same legacy to find direction for the future.
To Wright, architecture was not just about buildings, it was about nourishing the lives of those sheltered within them. What were needed were environments to inspire and offer repose to the inhabitants. He called his architecture "organic" and described it as that "great living creative spirit which from generation to generation, from age to age, proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man and his circumstances as they both change."
Wright’s anchor and muse was Nature, which he spelled with a capital "N." This was not the outward aspect of nature, but the omnipresent spiritual dimension. He wrote: Using this word Nature…I do not of course mean that outward aspect which strikes the eye as a visual image of a scene strikes the ground glass of a camera, but that inner harmony which penetrates the outward form…and is its determining character; that quality in the thing that is its significance and it’s Life for us,- what Plato called (with reason, we see, psychological if not metaphysical) the "eternal idea of the thing."
Quotations:
What is architecture anyway? Is it the vast collection of the various buildings which have been built to please the varying tastes of the various lords of mankind? I think not. No, I know that architecture is life; or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived…So, architecture I know to be a Great Spirit.
Connections
Frank Lloyd Wright was married three times. In 1889, at age twenty-two, Wright married Catherine Lee Tobin. They divorced in November 1922. Wright met Miriam Noel in 1914. They married in November 1923 and divorced in August 1927. Olgivanna Lloyd Wright (1898–1985) was the third and final wife of Frank Lloyd Wright. They married in August 1928 in California. He had seven children, four sons and three daughters. He also adopted Svetlana Milanoff, the daughter of his third wife, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright.
Father:
William Carey Wright
William Carey Wright (1825-1904), was a locally admired orator, music teacher and itinerant preacher. Originally from Massachusetts, William Wright had been a Baptist minister, but he later joined his wife's family in the Unitarian faith. He died in 1904 and was buried in small graveyard in Bear Valley near Lone Rock, WI.
Mother:
Anna Lloyd Jones
Anna Lloyd Jones, was a member of the large, prosperous and well-known Lloyd Jones family of Unitarians, who had emigrated from Wales to Spring Green, Wisconsin. One of Anna's brothers was Jenkin Lloyd Jones, who would become an important figure in the spread of the Unitarian faith in the Western United States. Wright's mother died in 1923 and was buried in Unity Chapel cemetery.
Spouse:
Catherine (Tobin) Wright
(1871–1959)
Spouse:
Miriam (Noel) Wright
(1869–1930)
Spouse:
Olgivanna (Olga Ivanovna) Lloyd Wright
(1897–1985)
Son:
Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr. (March 31, 1890 – May 31, 1978) commonly known as Lloyd Wright, was an American architect, active primarily in Los Angeles and Southern California. He was a landscape architect for various Los Angeles projects (1922-1924), provided the shells for the Hollywood Bowl (1926-1928), and produced the Swedenborg Memorial Chapel (or Wayfarer's Chapel) at Rancho Palos Verdes, California (1946-1971). His name is frequently confused with that of his more famous father, Frank Lloyd Wright.
Catherine Wright Baxter (1894-1979) was a homemaker and the mother of Oscar-winning actress Anne Baxter.
Son:
David Samuel Wright
David Samuel Wright (1895-1997) was a building-products representative for whom Wright designed the David & Gladys Wright House, which was rescued from demolition and given to the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.
Daughter:
Frances Wright Caroe
Frances Wright Caroe (1898-1959) was an arts administrator.
Son:
Robert Llwellyn Wright
Robert Llwellyn Wright (1903-1986) was an attorney for whom Wright designed a house in Bethesda, Maryland.
Daughter:
Iovanna Lloyd Wright
Iovanna Lloyd Wright (1925-2015) was an artist and musician.
adopted daughter:
Svetlana Peters
Svetlana Peters (1917-1946) was a musician who died in an automobile accident with her son Daniel. After Svelana's death her other son, Brandoch Peters (1942- ), was raised by Frank and Olgivanna. Svetlana's widower, William Wesley Peters, was later briefly married to Svetlana Alliluyeva, the youngest child and only daughter of Joseph Stalin. Peters served as chairman of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation from 1985 to 1991.
