biography
| name: |
Wright, Frank Lloyd
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1867–1959)
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| biography:
| Architect, born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, USA. His irregular education included briefly studying civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin, and after five years in Louis Sullivan's office he started his own Chicago practice (1893). His early work spearheaded the Prairie School; he designed houses influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement and characterized by horizontal lines, overhanging roofs, asymmetrical composition, and use of regional materials, such as Ward Willits House, Highland Park, IL (1902) and Taliesin, Spring Green, WI (1911). Two Berlin publications of his work (1910–11) spread his influence to Europe. The second phase of his career (1918–36) saw only one major building, the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo (1916–22). Finding little work during the Great Depression, he designed experimental projects, lectured widely, published his Autobiography (1932), and established the Taliesin Fellowship, a programme under which he was to train many young architects at Taliesin West. In his prolific third phase (1936–59) he designed many of his most famous buildings. They include Fallingwater, Bear Run, PA (1936), the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1943–6, 56–9), and Taliesin West, Scottsdale, AZ (begun 1938), and he developed the compact ‘Usonian’ house. A gifted designer, he also designed most of the interior details and even the furniture of many of his projects. He was uniquely influential through his love of natural textures, favouring unplaned wood and rough-quarried stone, his mastery of organic architecture, that he said ‘develops from within outward’, and his conception of architectural space and open planning. Autocratic, opinionated, often infuriating, he never saw some of his more grandiose visions - such as a mile-high building - beyond the drawing board, but even his drawings came to be treasured as works of art. In 1949 he received the American Institute of Architects' Gold Medal. |
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