Frank Lloyd Wright remains America’s most original, influential, and significant architect. His works are more popular today, more than a century after he began his practice in 1893 and more than 40 years after his death, than they were at any time during his lifetime. During his 72-year career, Wright designed more than 600 built works and 600 unbuilt projects, employing an astonishing range of forms and methods, yet he always described his life’s work as being one singular effort, emphasizing the fundamental and unchanging ordering principles that consistently determined his work from beginning to end.

The first of these fundamental ordering principles, and by far the most important, was the primacy of the space of inhabitation, which he called “the space within.” Wright’s concepts for architectural space evolved first in his designs for interior spaces and were only later projected or expressed in the exterior forms. For Wright, the spatial composition must be determined by the experience of the inhabitants and not by some preconceived formal order. The second principle was that space is given its essential character through its construction. Wright believed that the way a space is experienced is directly related to the way it is constructed and that the architect must work with “the nature of materials.” The third principle was that architecture takes place in nature, where interior and exterior space are woven together to make an integral whole. The relationship between architecture and the landscape was of fundamental importance to Wright, and he believed that the design of a building should start with the ground from which it was to grow. Wright designed buildings not simply as freestanding forms but as contributing elements in the larger order of both the landscape and the city.

Wright was raised in a household where the rigorously structured study of natural forms, the Unitarian faith, the ideas of American Transcendental philosophy, and the Froebel kindergarten training methods were all powerfully present. These complementary systems of thought had in common the belief that the material and spiritual worlds could not be separated but were in fact one and the same. Emerson had written that “all form is an effect of character,” and Wright came to believe that every physical form had spiritual and moral meaning. Wright’s development as an architect involved the evolution of this moral imperative through the search for a more principled relation to historical form, for a monumentality appropriate to the young American nation, and for a systematic yet personal process of architectural design.

Wright’s education as an architect took place in Chicago from 1888 until 1893, when he apprenticed for his mentor, Louis Sullivan. In his public lectures at this time, Sullivan was calling attention to the absence of an appropriate American architecture but also warning against efforts to speed its arrival by transplanting European historical styles onto the American continent. Rejecting imported Beaux-Arts classicism, Sullivan held that any truly organic American architecture would develop only on a regional basis, with variations dependent on local climate, landscape, building methods, and materials. Wright, who would later fulfill this prophecy of Sullivan’s, assisted Sullivan in his search for alternatives to what they believed to be the exhausted European classical tradition, analyzing the patterns from Islamic, Oriental, and Celtic sources presented by Owen Jones in The Grammar of Ornament.

In 1893, the year Wright started his own practice, he saw the efforts of Sullivan’s Chicago School style overwhelmed by the classical architecture dictated for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. This academic classicism, as defined by the Beaux-Arts School in Paris, was canonically uniform, explicitly noncontextual, and intended to be the same around the world—the first true “International Style.” For Wright, it was this universal applicability, as something that had nothing to do with the particular character of a place, that would always be unacceptable and that led him to later oppose International Style modernism as forcefully as he now opposed BeauxArts classicism.

Yet, even as Wright attacked the Beaux-Arts as a superficial style, he was directly engaging its source, integrating the formal order underlying the architecture of classical antiquity into his work of the Prairie period (1895–1915). In the first comprehensive national publication of his work in 1908, “In the Cause of Architecture,” written when he was 40 years old, Wright challenged the academic classicists’ exclusive control over historical form. He argued that his designs, with their symmetry, axial planning, and hierarchical ordering from earth to sky, but without any classical forms, demonstrated a more principled manner of relating and remaining true to the architectural forms inherited from history. Although Wright characterized the appearance of his buildings as radical in comparison with the prevalent classicism, he noted that his designs were the result of reverential yet rigorous analyses of the great architecture of the past.

While this battle raged in the professional publications, Wright was in fact well on his way to winning the war by establishing a truly American architecture, one based on his perfection of a particularly American building type, the single-family suburban house. By 1910, when his designs were first extensively published in Europe, Wright had completed more than 150 built works, the vast majority of them houses. The prairie house was first defined in Wright’s two prototypes published in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1901 and built out in the Ward Willits House (1902), the Thomas Hardy House (1905), the Robert Evans House (1908), and the Avery Coonley House (1908). The Frederick Robie House (1909) was Wright’s greatest urban residential design, engaging its compressed site to create a dynamic sequence of interlocking spaces, culminating in the famous living room and dining room, joined by their common ceiling, which passes through the open center of the fireplace. The Darwin Martin House (1904), five structures comprising a series of interpenetrating cruciform spaces woven into the landscape, was Wright’s greatest suburban residential design, its plan an astonishingly resolved masterpiece of formal composition and the inhabitation of its exquisitely articulated interior spaces a comforting yet profoundly meaningful experience.

In Wright’s prairie house, the solid fireplace mass anchored the center while the space opened out in all directions at eye level, the outriding walls and overhanging eaves acting to layer the house into the earth, giving the suburban site a geometric order so that the house and the landscape were inextricably bound to each other. Wright’s prairie houses combined the formal order of symmetrical planning with the dynamism of interpenetrating spaces to produce the open, multifunctioning interiors, integrated with surrounding nature, that have since become the most popular characteristic of modern domestic architecture. Wright’s prairie houses crystallized a uniquely American interpretation of the dwelling place, allowing the inhabitant to experience both comfort and inspiration, shelter and outlook, freedom and order.

In addition to the reinvention of the American house, Wright’s Prairie period also produced new forms for public architecture. At the time Wright left Sullivan’s office, an appropriate monumental form for American public architecture had not yet emerged. The legacy of the steel-framed office tower, which Wright had received from Sullivan and the Chicago School, had proved totally incapable of giving monumental form to the architecture of the public realm. As a manifestation of the economic determinism of scale and massing, the universal planning grid, and the production of uniform interior spaces to be “styled” later by tenants, the Chicago frame skyscraper was a projection of private commercial interests at a scale heretofore given only to public buildings yet without any of the essential qualities necessary for monumentality.

Wright understood monumentality to originate in the fundamental uniqueness of each place, regardless of its scale within the city. This understanding was reflected in Wright’s work only a year after leaving Sullivan’s office with his project for the Monolithic Concrete Bank (1894), a diminutive single-room edifice that nevertheless had the powerful presence of an Egyptian temple. In his repeatedly revised designs for the All Souls Church, later renamed the Abraham Lincoln Center (1897–1905), Wright transformed the spatial uniformity of Sullivan’s skyscrapers into a monumental form that precisely articulated on the exterior the diverse functional spaces of the interior.

Wright achieved his fully developed vision of an appropriate monumentality for public buildings with his design and construction of the Larkin Building (1904) and Unity Temple (1906). The plans of these two buildings were simple rectangles, with mezzanines surrounding and overlooking a central multistory space, lit by high clerestory windows and continuous skylights and allowing no views out at eye level. On the exterior these buildings were closed and solid and possessed a severity of form unlike anything else of their time, seeming to relate more to the stark rectilinearity of ancient monuments.

For Wright the monumentality appropriate to American public spaces would inevitably take the form of an introverted compound, seen from the outside as a grouping of powerful independent masses bound together by mutual purpose. Entry occurred between these masses, leading to a low, dark, horizontal, rotating movement sequence that compressed and then released the occupant into the tall, light, hidden, vertical central space. The singularity of the central space, and the manner in which it fused form, structure, material, and experience, were profoundly monumental. The entire spatial and ornamental program for Wright’s public buildings, from plans and massing to furniture and carpet patterns, was given order through developments of the square and cube, which Wright considered to be the most perfect of geometries. Wright intended that his public buildings be experienced as sacred spaces, whatever their function, their introspective interiors flooded from above with transcendent light to create a morally edifying effect for those inhabiting the public place.

Wright went through a personal and professional crisis in 1909, closing his Oak Park office, abandoning his family, and taking up residence in Italy. There, he and a select group of draftsmen prepared drawings for publication by the Wasmuth Company, a German publishing house that was to issue a set of drawings of Wright’s work in 1910 and a book of photographs of Wright’s built works in 1911 that together were to exercise considerable influence in Europe. That year, Wright returned to the United States and began construction on his home and studio, called Taliesin (1911), outside Spring Green, Wisconsin. Like his favorite of the prairie houses, the Coonley House, Taliesin was organized around an exterior garden courtyard, framing but not completely enclosing the brow of the hill on which it was built. This courtyard house type was developed by Wright in response to commissions, such as those for the unbuilt Henry Ford (1909) and Harold McCormick (1907) Houses and the Aline Barnsdall “Hollyhock” House (1917– 20), built around the brow of Olive Hill in Los Angeles, which called for far larger compositions than what could be organized within the pyramidal massing of the prototypical prairie house.

During this same period, from 1909 to 1920, Wright designed a series of public buildings that focused on interior garden courtyards. In contrast to his courtyard houses, which were inevitably asymmetrical and informal in plan, these public courtyard buildings were rigorously symmetrical, illustrating Wright’s use of symmetry to distinguish between the public and the private realms. The Midway Gardens (1913), an indoor and outdoor garden for music and dining, is perhaps Wright’s most completely resolved total work of art, for here he designed not only the architecture but also the band shell, interiors, furniture, dishes, sculpture, decorations, and landscaping. The Imperial Hotel (1914–22), a commission that required Wright to live in Japan during its construction, was a composition of monumental grandeur, unlike anything else in Wright’s opus. This massive building was designed by Wright to float on a field of structural piers sunk into the unstable soil, an innovative seismic precaution almost immediately tested when the Imperial Hotel survived the devastating 1923 Tokyo earthquake.

Wright engaged new materials with almost every design, yet reinforced concrete proved to be the most consistently challenging to him. Despite his early success with reinforced concrete in Unity Temple, Wright remained critical of concrete’s lack of inherent order and its ability to be formed into any shape at the whim of the designer; unlike all other construction materials, concrete did not exhibit a “nature” that would determine its appropriate use. In 1906, the same year that construction began on Unity Temple, Wright designed what he later called “the first block house,” developing the concrete-block system of construction that he would realize 17 years later. The Alice Millard House (1923), the John Storer House (1923), the Charles Ennis House (1923), and the Samuel Freeman House (1923), all built in Los Angeles, were constructed using concrete blocks cast in custom-designed forms. In these houses, Wright succeeded in finding a means of expression suitable to reinforced concrete, the modular order imparted to the concrete blocks giving character to this previously formless material.

In 1932, during the Great Depression in the United States, Wright was already 65 years old, having written his autobiography while building only two houses since 1923. It is thus understandable that both the American public and the architectural establishment assumed that Wright had retired from active practice. However, Wright was already laying the foundations for the most remarkable resurgence in architectural history, and he would go on to construct almost twice as many designs in the next 27 years as he had built in the preceding 40. Pivotal in this resurgence were the publication of Wright’s Autobiography, which brought new clients, and Wright’s opening of the Taliesin Fellowship, an apprenticeship school and office housed in the new Drafting Room (1932) addition to Hillside School (1902) at Taliesin, which provided both the architectural and the farming workforce. The astonishing works that Wright designed in 1934–37 effectively reestablished his dominance of the American architectural profession. With their publication in the January 1938 issue of Architectural Forum and Time magazine, Wright was again hailed as the greatest living architect.

The Edgar Kaufmann House (1937), called Fallingwater, together with his own winter home and studio, Taliesin West (1938), exemplified Wright’s belief that architecture is born of its place and thus can never be the product of an “International Style,” as European modernism was represented in 1932 at the Museum of Modern Art. Fallingwater, built above a mountain stream in southwestern Pennsylvania, is Wright’s greatest “natural” house, a place where man can truly be at home in nature. Taliesin West, built in the desert outside Scottsdale, Arizona, celebrated both the ephemerality of life, with its canvas roofs that had to be replaced seasonally, and the permanence of place, with its boulders cast into the concrete walls, still showing the carvings of the original Native American inhabitants of this land-scape.

The Johnson Wax Building (1939) is Wright’s great “cathedral of work,” with its innovative thin-shell concrete columns standing in small brass shoes that delicately touch the floor of the central top-lit workroom, clad in streamlined brick and lit by tube glass laid up like bricks in clerestories and skylights. Like his own Drafting Room at Taliesin, employees work here in a room that feels as if it is in the forest, among the column trees, in the light filtering down through the skylight leaves. Although dedicated to work and not worship, the central room of the Johnson Wax Building illustrates the way in which Wright celebrated everyday rituals and functions by housing them in sacred spaces. It is without question one of the greatest spaces in architectural history.

Broadacre City (1934) was Wright’s visionary proposal for a pattern of land development that sought to establish an ordered pattern of cultivation and inhabitation for the enormous scale of the Jeffersonian grid while providing every household a place in nature. A complete plan for the future expansion of America’s communities, it had public, commercial, and religious structures woven into its underlying fabric of singlefamily houses, giving the suburb an appropriate and precise spatial and social order. The Herbert Jacobs House (1937) was the first of Wright’s “Usonian” houses, small and affordable homes for the rapidly growing American middle class that were to be placed on oneacre sites to form the basic pattern of Broadacre City. In the last 20 years of his life, Wright designed hundreds of these Usonian houses for various climates and construction types, each one a masterpiece of spatial generosity within remarkably small total floor areas. Broadacre City was Wright’s counterproposal to the traditional city, to the isolation of agrarian life, and to the sprawling spread of the developer’s speculative suburb.

The last ten years of Wright’s life were incredibly productive, with hundreds of designs emerging from Taliesin for virtually every conceivable building type. Among the best of this last period was the Solomon Guggenheim Museum (1943–59), built facing Central Park in New York City. A glorious expression of the plastic formal possibilities of reinforced concrete, the Guggenheim Museum also explored dynamic spatial and experiential territory, suspending the art and its spectators in a continuously spiraling volume that opens toward the sky. The Beth Sholom Synagogue (1954), with its seating within a folded concrete base anchored to the earth and its roof a translucent tent scaled to the heavens, is a powerful summary of man’s condition as both permanent dweller and perpetual wanderer. Finally, the Marin County Civic Center (1957–66), a series of horizontal planes bridging between the low hills, although unfinished at his death, is perhaps Wright’s most brilliant site design.

Despite the extraordinary public commissions of his last years, it could be argued that Wright’s greatest accomplishment remained his designs for hundreds of modest, inexpensive, yet spatially rich and experientially powerful Usonian houses. In a surprisingly humble definition, Wright had early on stated his belief that architecture was the background or framework for the daily life that takes place within it. Wright’s system of design was measured, scaled, and calibrated precisely by the human body and its experience, and although the geometric rigor of Wright’s planning is well known, the esteem in which he held the concepts of use and comfort is not widely understood. The intellectual and formal order of Wright’s designs was balanced by the physical and spiritual engagement of the inhabitant: For Wright, architecture was understood to be the shared discipline of principled place making. It could be argued that Wright’s achievement was virtually unmatched in the 20th century, which produced a rich assortment of new architectural forms but few systematic conceptions that link spatial form and order to human occupation and experience.

ROBERT McCARTER

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.3 (P-Z).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.

8 June 1867 Born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, USA;

1885–87 Attended the School of Engineering, University of Wisconsin, Madison;

1885–87 Junior draftsman for Allen D.Conover, Madison;

1887 junior draftsman for Lyman Silsbee, Chicago;

1888–89 assistant architect, Lyman Silsbee, Chicago;

1889 Married 1) Catherine Lee Tobin (separated 1909; divorced): 6 children;

1889–93 head of planning and design department, Lyman Silsbee, Chicago;

1893–96 Adler and Sullivan, Chicago. Partnership with Cecil Corwin, Chicago ;

1896–97 private practice in Oak Park, Illinois;

1897–1909 private practice in Chicago;

1909–11 traveled in Europe and stayed in Fiesole, Italy;

1909– 1914 lived with Mrs. Mamah Bortwich Cheney (died in Taliesin fire);

1911 Built first Taliesin house and studio and resumed practice, Spring Green, Wisconsin;

1912 reopened Chicago office;

1914 Taliesin partially destroyed by fire and rebuilt as Taliesin II;

1915 married 2) Miriam Noel (separated 1924; died 1927);

1915–20 established an office in Tokyo in conjunction with work on the Imperial Hotel ; compiled the Spaulding Collection of Japanese Prints while in Japan;

1921–24 worked on the first concrete “texture block” houses, California;

1925 Taliesin II partially destroyed by fire and rebuilt as Taliesin III;

1925 married 3) Olgivanna Lazovich :1 child;

1927 Honorary member, Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels;

1928 worked in La Jolla, California;

1928–29 established his southwestern headquarters, Ocatillo, in Chandler, Arizona;

1929 honorary member, Akademie Royal der Künste, Berlin;

1932 founded the Wright Foundation Fellowship at Taliesin;

1932 honorary member, National Academy of Brazil;

1933–38 annual winter transfers of fellowship activities from Wisconsin to Chandler, Arizona and Scottsdale, Arizona after 1938;

from 1933 worked on major theoretical studies for Broadacre City;

1938 built Taliesin West, near Scottsdale, Arizona;

1941 honorary member, Royal Institute of British Architects;

1941 Royal Gold Medal, Royal Institute of British Architects;

1942 honorary member, National Academy of Architects, Uruguay;

1943 honorary member, National Academy of Architects, Mexico;

1946 honorary member, National Academy of Finland;

1949 member, National Institute of Arts and Letters;

1949 Gold Medal, American Institute of Architects;

1953 honorary member, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm;

until 1959 continued to practice in Wisconsin and Arizona;

9 April 1959 Died in Phoenix, Arizona;

his students formed Taliesin Associated Architects to complete works after his death;

Sons Lloyd and John became architects, son David joined a firm manufacturing concrete blocks like those used by Wright.

Three comprehensive monographs exist on Wright. The earliest, Hitchcock, although not including the work of Wright’s last two decades, is the only monograph written with Wright’s direct involvement and approval. Levine 1996 and McCarter 1997 vary dramatically in approach, with the former placing Wright in the larger context of arthistorical interpretations, whereas the latter documents the experience of inhabiting the spaces of Wright’s built works. Both of these monographs benefit from access to Wright’s archival material after its organization and selected publication by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, documented in Futagawa 1984–88 (12 vols.). Wright’s own writings, including his An Autobiography, are collected in Wright 1992–95 (5 vols.). A comprehensive catalog of all Wright’s built work is contained in Storrer. Several essay collections offer appropriately varied views of Wright, including Riley 1994, McCarter 1991, and Bolon, Nelson, and Seidel 1988. Finally, a number of excellent single-building or building-type studies exist, such as Sergeant 1976, which, due to their narrow focus, allow a sufficiently extended analysis to capture the richness of Wright’s individual designs.

Bolon, Carol, Robert Nelson, and Linda Seidel (editors), The Nature of Frank Lloyd Wright, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988

Futagawa, Yukio (editor), Frank Lloyd Wright Monograph, text by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, 12 vols., Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita, 1984–88

Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, In the Nature of Materials, 1887–1941: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1942; with new foreword and bibliography, New York: Da Capo Press, 1973

Levine, Neil, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996

McCarter, Robert, Frank Lloyd Wright, London: Phaidon Press, 1997

McCarter, Robert (editor), Frank Lloyd Wright: A Primer on Architectural Principles, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991

Riley, Terrance (editor), Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994

Sergeant, John, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian Houses, New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1976

Storrer, William Allin, The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993

Wright, Frank Lloyd, Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings, edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, 5 vols., New York: Rizzoli, 1992–95

Selected Publications

The Japanese Print: An Interpretation, 1912

Experimenting with Human Lives, 1923

The Life Work of the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, 1925

Modern Architecture, 1931

Two Lectures on Architecture, 1931

An Autobiography, 1932

The Disappearing City, 1932; revised edition as When Democracy Builds, 1945; as The Living City, 1958

Architecture and Modern Life (with Baker Brownell), 1937

An Organic Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy, 1939

Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture: Selected Writings 1894–1940, edited by Frederick Gutheim, 1941

Genius and the Mobocracy, 1949

The Future of Architecture, 1953

The Natural House, 1954

An American Architecture, edited by Edgar Kaufmann, 1955

The Story of the Tower, 1956

A Testament, 1957

Drawings for a Living Architecture, 1959

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1960

Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings, edited by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., and Ben Raeburn, 1960

The Drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright, edited by Arthur Drexler, 1962

Buildings, Plans and Designs, 1963

Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life, His Work, His Words, edited by Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, 1966

Architectural Essays from the Chicago School, 1967

Frank Lloyd Wright: The Early Work, 1968

In the Cause of Architecture: Essays by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Architectural Review 1908–1952, edited by Frederick Gutheim, 1975

Letters to Apprentices: Frank Lloyd Wright, edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, 1982

Letters to Architects: Frank Lloyd Wright, edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, 1984

The Guggenheim Correspondence, edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, 1986

Frank Lloyd Wright: Letters to Clients, edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, 1986

Studies and Executed Buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, edited by Vincent Scully, 1986

Modern Architecture: Being the Kahn Lectures for 1930, 1990

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