One of the most recognizable names in history, Frank Lloyd Wright was voted in 1991 as "the greatest American architect of all time" by the American Institute of Architects.
Born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, June 8, 1867 to William Carey Wright and Anna Lloyd Jones Wright, he grew up around his mother’s family who were farmers, educators, and Unitarian preachers.
It is his experiences as a young boy growing up in the heartland of America that had major influence on his later architecture. At a young age his mother introduced him to the Froebel gifts, a set of building blocks and paper for construction, which taught him to see that nature was composed of geometric forms and patterns. His love of nature was further influenced by the many summers spent working at his uncle’s farm and the writings of American transcendentalists of the time, Melville, Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau. Later, his study of geometric ornament during his apprenticeship to architect Louis Sullivan also had an effect on his architecture. Sullivan, whom he considered his 'Lieber Meister' (dear master) believed that to create truly organic architecture, ornament must be of the surface not on the surface.
Wright started his career in 1887, after two semesters studying engineering at the University of Wisconsin. He moved to Chicago and was briefly employed by the architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee until moving to the architectural firm of Adler and Sullivan. During his tenure he was involved in almost all the firm’s designs and designing homes in his free time. He began to incorporate Sullivan's idea that “form follows function” into his own philosophy that buildings should be organic and harmonious with the environment surrounding them. In 1889, he negotiated a loan with his employers, designed and built a home in Oak Park, Illinois, for his new bride Catherine Lee Tobin. Wright worked with Sullivan from 1887 to 1892 until he was let go after Sullivan discovered he was doing freelance work on the side.
In 1893, he built a studio adjacent to his home and set up his own practice in Chicago. It was here between 1900 and 1917 that he developed the Prairie House style of architecture, so-called because the design is considered to complement the land around Chicago. The Prairie House style, for which he is best known, was a reaction against the historical revivalism present in American architecture at the time and was opposed to the attitude of dominating nature that characterized the industrial age. Wright’s designs aspired to achieve harmony with nature by featuring horizontal lines, long, low, sloping roofs, and the use of unfinished materials.
The Frederick Robie House, 1908, a Chicago Architectural Landmark, is one of the best known masterpieces of the Prairie House style. Its living and dining areas, organized around a great hearth, form virtually one uninterrupted space that opens to the outdoors. The Robie House is one of the first examples of an "open plan" layout. Wright believed that the occupants’ movement throughout the house determines the floor plan and the floor plan determines the architecture. This building had great influence on young European architects after World War I, when Wright's work was published in the Wasmuth Portfolio, and is sometimes called the "cornerstone of modernism.”
The inspiration of nature is evident not only in the relationship of the houses to the landscape, but through the use of wood throughout the home, a natural color palette, geometric patterns from nature in the windows and furnishings, the and the use of different types of indigenous construction materials.
Wright continually reimagined how people could best use the space they worked. Although he designed over 1100 projects resulting in 532 completed works, it is his Prairie House style that best exemplifies the influences of his youth. His revolutionary ideas, open plan, the atrium, the carport, the picture window, and most importantly the buildings themselves, continue to be influential today.
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