Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright: The Long Argument With America

He never joined the American Institute of Architects, calling it "a harbor of refuge for the incompetent" and "a form of refined gangsterism." When the AIA gave him its Gold Medal in 1949 anyway, he told them to their faces why he had stayed out. Forty-two years later the same institute named him the greatest American architect of all time. Wright had been dead since 1959, which spared everyone the reply.

Blocks on a Gridded Table

He was born on 8 June 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin, and spent his life claiming it was 1869. His father William Cary Wright was a musician, preacher and composer; his mother Anna Lloyd Jones a teacher from a Welsh farming clan. They separated in 1881 and divorced in 1885; the critic Ada Louise Huxtable called it "a deeply disturbed and obviously unhappy childhood" marked by "poverty, and anxiety."

In 1876 his mother gave him a set of Froebel Gifts — geometric maple blocks on a four-inch grid. He returned to them for the rest of his life as the origin of everything: "I sat at the little kindergarten table-top... and played upon these 'unit-lines' with the square (cube), the circle (sphere) and the triangle... All are in my fingers to this day." He entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1886 as a special student in civil engineering and left without a degree, taking an honorary doctorate there at eighty-eight.

Lieber Meister

He arrived in Chicago in 1887 and was drafting for Joseph Lyman Silsbee within days. By November he had moved to Adler & Sullivan, where Louis Sullivan — whom he called ever after his *lieber Meister* — handed him extraordinary responsibility. By 1890 Wright had his own office beside Sullivan's and ran all the firm's residential work.

He also ran a private practice on the side, in breach of contract: at least nine "bootlegged" houses, some signed by Cecil Corwin to disguise them. In 1893 Sullivan recognised the Allison Harlan House a few blocks from his own home, and the relationship ended. Wright's version was a dignified walkout; the apprentice Edgar Tafel said Sullivan fired him where he stood.

Independent by 1893, Wright refused Daniel Burnham's offer to fund four years at the École des Beaux-Arts and two in Rome, with a position waiting afterwards. He thought classicism the enemy of an American architecture. It is the most consequential no in the profession's history.

The Prairie

From the Oak Park studio he built in 1898 came the style that made him: long horizontal masses, low-pitched roofs with deep eaves, ribbons of casement windows, a heavy central hearth, open plans and built-in furniture, all in stone and wood. The Willits and Thomas houses of 1901 were the first mature examples; the Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo (1904), the Coonley House and the Robie House followed, the last carrying its cantilevered roof on a 110-foot steel channel. Unity Temple (1904–09) was the turn: "I ceased to be an architect of structure," he said of it, "and became an architect of space."

He designed the whole environment — leaded glass, carpets, lamps, tableware, sometimes his own clothes — patented prism glass tiles for storefronts in 1897, and was among the first architects to design electric light fittings, which gas had made impossible.

Fire, Scandal, Exile

In 1909 he left his wife Catherine and six children for Europe and Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of a client. Out of that year came the Wasmuth Portfolio, published in Berlin in 1911: over a hundred lithographs that detonated across European architecture after the First World War.

He came home in October 1910 and began Taliesin — Welsh for "shining brow" — near Spring Green in May 1911. On 15 August 1914, while Wright was in Chicago, a servant named Julian Carlton set the living quarters alight and killed seven people with an axe: Mamah, her two children John and Martha, and four workmen and apprentices. Carlton drank hydrochloric acid, survived the lynch mob, and starved to death in the Dodgeville jail seven weeks later.

What followed was a decade of wreckage. A second Taliesin fire on 20 April 1925 destroyed a Japanese print collection worth $250,000 to $500,000. A marriage to Miriam Noel lasted under a year; a Mann Act arrest in 1926 came to nothing; the Bank of Wisconsin seized Taliesin in 1928 and sold thousands of his prints at a dollar apiece. He married Olgivanna Lazovich in August 1928 and stayed married. Between 1905 and 1923 he had spent over $500,000 on Japanese woodblock prints, staged the world's first Hiroshige retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1906, and sold prints to the Metropolitan Museum — a second career largely forgotten until a curator found a clump of four hundred acquisition cards in 1980.

The Impossible Third Act

He was sixty-eight and widely written off when Fallingwater was designed for Edgar J. Kaufmann in 1935. Kaufmann's engineers said the cantilevers over the waterfall would not stand; Wright overruled them and the contractor quietly added steel anyway. It cost $155,000, including Wright's $8,000 fee, and has been called the best all-time work of American architecture.

Then the Johnson Wax Administration Building (1936–39), with its Pyrex tubing walls; the first Usonian house for Herbert and Katherine Jacobs in Madison (1937), a gridded slab with radiant heating that seeded the postwar American ranch house; Taliesin West in Scottsdale from 1937; Broadacre City, the decentralised anti-metropolis he pushed from 1932 until his death; the Price Tower, his only realised skyscraper; and the Guggenheim, worked on from 1943 and finished in 1959. He was hospitalised on 4 April that year and died on the 9th, aged ninety-one.

Why Frank Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty is spatial: the ability to conceive a building as one continuous volume rather than a stack of rooms, and to hold that volume — structure, furniture, glass and site together — as a single mental object. He traced it to the Froebel blocks and their four-inch grid, and the claim is credible, because his plans are visibly generated from unit geometries. The AIA, which he spent a career insulting, called him in 1991 the greatest American architect of all time; in its 2000 poll he was the only architect with more than one building among the century's best. UNESCO inscribed eight of his buildings in 2019 for their "innovative solutions to the needs for housing, worship, work or leisure." And the arithmetic of fertility is startling: the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation counts 1,114 designs, 532 of them realised — with Fallingwater and the Guggenheim arriving after he turned sixty-eight, when his reputation was in ruins.

The counter-case is real. Wright routinely claimed his employees' work as his own and dismissed other Prairie School architects as imitators, though Marion Mahony Griffin, Walter Burley Griffin and Barry Byrne were doing original work in his office; his own son wrote that each of them made "valuable contributions to the pioneering of the modern American architecture for which my father gets the full glory." His buildings leak. Fallingwater's cantilevers needed post-tensioning in 2002, because Kaufmann's engineers had been right. Broadacre City was unbuildable. None of it dislodges the central claim — it only means the genius was not a nice man.

Legacy

Roughly three hundred of his buildings survive. The open plan, the slab foundation, the indoor-outdoor blur of the American house are all downstream of the Usonians, absorbed so completely by postwar developers that most people live inside a diluted Wright without knowing it. He designed the Guggenheim's spiral so visitors ride to the top and walk down — still the only major museum that tells you how to see it.

Achievements

• Notable work: Emil Bach House
• Notable work: Pettit Memorial Chapel
• Notable work: Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church
• Notable work: A. D. German Warehouse
• Affiliated with The New School and Royal Leerdam Crystal
• Educated at Madison Central High School and University of Wisconsin–Madison
• Worked as architect, urban planner and writer