A brief history of America's greatest Architect

1. FRANK LLOYD
WRIGHT
An American Genius

2. AN INTRODUCTION
Frank Lloyd Wright (born Frank Lincoln Wright, June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959)
was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who
designed more than 1000 structures and completed 532 works. Wright
believed in designing structures which were in harmony with humanity
and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture. This
philosophy was best exemplified by his for Fallingwater (1935), which has
been called "the best all-time work of American architecture". Wright was
a leader of the Prairie School movement of architecture and developed
the concept of the Usonian home, his unique vision for urban planning in
the United States.
His work includes original and innovative examples of many different
building types, including
offices, churches, schools, skyscrapers, hotels, and museums. Wright also
designed many of the interior elements of his buildings, such as the
furniture and stained glass. Wright authored 20 books and many articles
and was a popular lecturer in the United States and in Europe. His colorful
personal life often made headlines, most notably for the 1914 fire and
murders at his Taliesin studio. Already well known during his
lifetime, Wright was recognized in 1991 by the American Institute of
Architects as "the greatest American architect of all time

3. THE EARLY YEARS
Frank Lloyd Wright was born Frank Lincoln Wright in the farming town of
Richland Center, Wisconsin in 1867. His father, William Carey Wright was a
locally admired orator, music teacher, occasional lawyer, and itinerant
minister. William Wright had met and married Anna Lloyd Jones, a county
school teacher.. Originally from Massachusetts, William Wright had been
a Baptist minister, but he later joined his wife's family in the Unitarian faith.
Anna was a member of the large, prosperous and well-known Lloyd
Jones family of Unitarians. Both of Wright's parents were strong-willed
individuals with idiosyncratic interests that they passed on to him.
According to his biography his mother declared, when she was
expecting her first child, that he would grow up to build beautiful
buildings. She decorated his nursery with engravings of English cathedrals
torn from a periodical to encourage the infant's ambition

4. GROWING UP
Wright attended a Madison high school, but there is no evidence he ever
graduated. He was admitted to the University of Wisconsin–Madison in
1886.There he joined Phi Delta Theta fraternity, took classes part-time for
two semesters, and worked with a professor of civil engineering. In 1887,
Wright left the school without taking a degree) and arrived in Chicago in
search of employment.
As a result of the devastating Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and recent
population boom, new development was plentiful in the city. He later
recalled that his first impressions of Chicago were that of grimy
neighborhoods, crowded streets, and disappointing architecture, yet he
was determined to find work. Within days, and after interviews with several
prominent firms, he was hired as a draftsman with the architectural firm of
Joseph Lyman Silsbee
Although Silsbee adhered mainly to Victorian and
revivalist architecture, Wright found his work to be
more "gracefully picturesque" than the other
"brutalities" of the period. Still, Wright aspired for more
progressive work.

5. 1888 -1893 SOME HIGHLIGHTS
In 1889, Wright married his first wife, Catherine Lee "Kitty" Tobin. The two had
met around a year earlier during activities at All Souls Church. Sullivan (his
new boss) did his part to facilitate the financial success of the young
couple by granting Wright a five-year employment contract. Wright made
one more request: "Mr. Sullivan, if you want me to work for you as long as
five years, couldn't you lend me enough money to build a little house?"
With Sullivan's $5,000 loan, Wright purchased a lot at the corner of Chicago
and Forest Avenues in the suburb of Oak Park. The existing Gothic Revival
house was given to his mother, while a compact Shingle style house was
built alongside for Wright and Catherine
Wright’s home in
Oak Park, IL 1890
The Walter Gale House (1893) is Queen
Anne in style yet features window bands
and a cantilevered porch roof which
hint at Wright's developing aesthetics

6. TRANSITION AND EXPERIMENTATION
(1893–1900)
After leaving Louis Sullivan, Wright established his own practice on the
top floor of the Sullivan designed Schiller Building in Chicago
Wright's projects during this period followed two basic models. On one
hand, there was his first independent commission, the Winslow
House, which combined Sullivanesque ornamentation with the emphasis
on simple geometry and horizontal lines that is typical in Wright houses.
The Francis Apartments (1895, demolished 1971), Heller House
(1896), Rollin Furbeck House (1897), and Husser House (1899) were
designed in the same mode. For more conservative clients, Wright
conceded to design more traditional dwellings. These included the
Dutch Colonial Revival style Bagley House (1894), Tudor Revival style
Moore House I (1895), and Queen Anne style Charles E. Roberts House
(1896). As an emerging architect, Wright could not afford to turn down
clients over disagreements in taste, but even his most conservative
designs retained simplified massing and occasional Sullivan inspired
details

7. PHOTO GALLERY FOR THIS PERIOD
Nathan G. Moore
House (1895), Oak
Park, IL
Wright's studio
(1898) viewed from
Chicago Avenue
William H. Winslow
House (1893) in
River Forest, Illinois
Parker House, 1892 Francis Wooley
House. 1890’s

8. THE PRAIRIE HOUSES
Wright's residential designs were known as "prairie houses" because the
designs complemented the land around Chicago. These houses featured
extended low buildings with shallow, sloping roofs, clean sky lines,
suppressed chimneys, overhangs and terraces all using unfinished
materials. The houses are credited with being the first examples of the
"open plan". Windows whenever possible are long, and low, allowing a
connection between the interior and nature, outside, that was new to
western architecture and reflected the influence of Japanese
architecture on Wright. The manipulation of interior space in residential
and public buildings are hallmarks of his style.

9. PRAIRIE STYLE CONTINUED..
Wright's residential designs were known as "prairie houses" because the
designs complemented the land around Chicago. These houses
featured extended low buildings with shallow, sloping roofs, clean sky
lines, suppressed chimneys, overhangs and terraces all using unfinished
materials. The houses are credited with being the first examples of the
"open plan". Windows whenever possible are long, and low, allowing a
connection between the interior and nature, outside, that was new to
western architecture and reflected the influence of Japanese
architecture on Wright. The manipulation of interior space in residential
and public buildings are hallmarks of his style.
Public buildings in the Prairie style include Unity Temple, the home of the
Unitarian Universalist congregation in Oak Park. As a lifelong Unitarian
and member of Unity Temple, Wright offered his services to the
congregation after their church burned down in 1905. The community
agreed to hire him and he worked on the building from 1905 to 1909.
Wright later said that Unity Temple was the edifice in which he ceased to
be an architect of structure, and became an architect of space. Many
architects consider it the world's first modern building, because of its
unique construction of only one material: reinforced concrete. This would
become a hallmark of the modernists who followed Wright, such as Mies
van der Rohe, and even some post-modernists, such as Frank Gehry.

10. PRAIRIE STYLE PHOTO GALLERY
Hillside Home
School, 1902, Taliesin, Sp
ring Green, Wisconsin
Darwin D. Martin
House, Buffalo, New York
Chicago, IL
Talesin West
The Mercer Home

11. THE STORY CONTINUES
Family abandonment
Local gossips noticed Wright's flirtations, and he developed a
reputation in Oak Park as a man-about-town. His family had grown to
six children, but Wright was not paternal and the brood required most
of Catherine's attention. In 1903, Wright designed a house for Edwin
Cheney, a neighbor in Oak Park, and immediately took a liking to
Cheney's wife, Mamah Cheney. Cheney was a modern woman with
interests outside the home. She was an early feminist and Wright viewed
her as his intellectual equal. The two fell in love, and they became the
talk of the town, as they often could be seen taking rides in Wright's
automobile through Oak Park. Wright's wife, Kitty, sure that this
attachment would fade as the others had, refused to grant him a
divorce. Neither would Edwin Cheney grant one to Mamah.
In 1909, even before the Robie House was completed, Wright and
Mamah Cheney went together to Europe, leaving their own spouses
and children behind. Scholars argue that Wright felt by 1907 that he
had done everything he could do with the Prairie Style, particularly from
the standpoint of the single-family house. He was not getting larger
commissions for commercial or public buildings, which frustrated him.
Mamah Cheney

12. THE EUROPEAN MOVE & RETURN
Wright remained in Europe for almost a year and set up home first in
Florence, Italy — where he lived with his eldest son Lloyd — and later in
Fiesole, Italy where he lived with Mamah. During this time, Edwin
Cheney granted Mamah a divorce, though Kitty still refused to grant
one to her husband. After Wright's return to the United States in October
1910, Wright persuaded his mother to buy land for him in Spring
Green, Wisconsin. The land, bought on April 10, 1911, was adjacent to
land held by his mother's family, the Lloyd-Joneses. Wright began to
build himself a new home, which he called Taliesin, by May 1911.
In 1922, Kitty Wright finally granted Wright a divorce. Under the terms of
the divorce, Wright was required to wait one year before he could marry
his then-partner, Maude "Miriam" Noel. In 1923, Wright's mother, Anna
(Lloyd Jones) Wright, died. Wright wed Miriam Noel in November 1923, but
her addiction to morphine led to the failure of the marriage in less than
one year. In 1924, after the separation but while still married, Wright met
Olga (Olgivanna) Hinzenburg at a Petrograd Ballet performance in
Chicago. They moved in together at Taliesin in 1925, and soon Olgivanna
was pregnant with their daughter, Iovanna, born on December 2, 1925

13. CALIFORNIA OR TEXTILE BLOCK STYLE
In the 1920s, Wright designed a number of houses in California using
precast "textile" concrete blocks reinforced by an internal system of bars.
Wright first used his textile block system on the John Storer House in
Hollywood, California, in 1923. The house is now used in films, television,
and print media to represent the future. Typically Wrightian is the joining of
the structure to its site by a series of terraces that reach out into and
reorder the landscape, making it an integral part of the architect's vision.
According to Wright's organic theory, all components of the building
should appear unified, as though they belong together. Nothing should
be attached to it without considering the effect on the whole. To unify the
house to its site, Wright often used large expanses of glass to blur the
boundary between the indoors and outdoors. This style, known as the
"textile block system", is exhibited in the his textile block designs. The
system arose from Wright's desire to wed machine-age production
techniques with organic architecture-the principle that a structure should
look as though it naturally grew on a site-so as to make his designs
affordable to people of modest means.

14. PHOTO GALLERY – CALIFORNIA STYLE
The Ennis House, Los Angeles, CA
The Storer House, Los Angeles, CA

15. THE ORGANIC STYLE
During the later 1920s and 1930s Wright's Organic style had fully matured
with the design of Graycliff, Fallingwater and Taliesin West.
One of Wright's most famous private residences was built from 1934 to 1937—
Fallingwater—for Mr. and Mrs. Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr., at Mill Run, Pennsylvania, near
Pittsburgh. It was designed according to Wright's desire to place the occupants close
to the natural surroundings, with a stream and waterfall running under part of the
building. Wright wanted the new residents to live with the waterfalls, to make them
part of their everyday lives. He didn't want them to just look at them every now and
again. Constructed over a 30-foot waterfall, the house may look very big on the
outside but on the inside it is quite small, which surprises some visitors.[51] It was made
with three bedrooms, a massive living room and a dining room. The house was more
of a design for a family getaway, not for a live-in family. The construction is a series of
cantilevered balconies and terraces, using limestone for all verticals and concrete for
the horizontals. The house cost $155,000, including the architect's fee of $8,000. It was
one of Wright's most expensive pieces. Kaufmann's own engineers argued that the
design was not sound. They were overruled by Wright, but the contractor secretly
added extra steel to the horizontal concrete elements. In 1994, Robert Silman and
Associates examined the building and developed a plan to restore the structure. In
the late 1990s, steel supports were added under the lowest cantilever until a detailed
structural analysis could be done. In March 2002, post-tensioning of the lowest
terrace was completed.

16. FALLING WATER, MILL RUN, PA

17. USONIAN HOUSES
Intended to be highly practical houses for middle-class clients, and designed to
be run without servants, Usonian houses often featured small kitchens — called
"workspaces" by Wright — that adjoined the dining spaces. These spaces in turn
flowed into the main living areas, which also were characteristically outfitted with
built-in seating and tables. As in the Prairie Houses, Usonian living areas focused
on the fireplace. Bedrooms were typically isolated and relatively
small, encouraging the family to gather in the main living areas. The conception
of spaces instead of rooms was a development of the Prairie ideal; as the built-in
furnishings related to the Arts and Crafts principles from which Wright's early
works grew. Spatially and in terms of their construction, the Usonian houses
represented a new model for independent living, and allowed dozens of clients
to live in a Wright-designed house at relatively low cost. The diversity of the
Usonian ideal can be seen in houses such as the Gregor S. and Elizabeth B.
Affleck House (1941) in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, which projects over a ravine;
and the Hanna-Honeycomb House (1937) in Palo Alto, California, which features
a honeycomb planning grid. Gordon House, completed in 1963, was Wright's last
Usonian design. Fewer than 60 of Wright's Usonian houses were built.

18. USOINIAN PHOTO GALLERY
His Usonian homes set a new style for suburban design that was a feature
of countless developers. Many features of modern American homes date
back to Wright, including open plans, slab-on-grade foundations, and
simplified construction techniques that allowed more mechanization and
efficiency in building.
Charles Weltzheimer
Residence (1948) in
Oberlin, Ohio

19. THE MIDDLE YEARS
THE LEAN YEARS
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. Among the unbuilt commissions
were the National Life Insurance Building (Chicago, 1924), the Gordon
Strong Automobile Objective (Sugarloaf Mountain, Maryland, 1925), San
Marcos-in-the-Desert resort (Chandler, Arizona, 1928), and St. Mark’s-in-the-
Bowerie apartment towers (New York City, 1928).
In 1928, Wright married Olga Lazovich (known, 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.

20. BERNARD SCHWARTZ HOUSE
The Bernard Schwartz House, also known as Still
Bend, is a Frank Lloyd Wright designed house in
Two Rivers, Wisconsin. It is considered to be
Wright's Life magazine "Dream House". Wright
originally developed the design for the house for
Life in 1938. The Schwartz House is one of the few
Wright homes that allow guests to spend the
night. This property is believed to have the
oldest, continuously operating in-floor heating
system in the country
Richard C. Smith House
The Richard C. Smith House is a Frank Lloyd Wright
designed Usonian home that was constructed in
Jefferson, Wisconsin in 1950. It is one of Wright's
diamond module homes, a form he used in the
Patrick Kinney House, the E. Clarke and Julia Arnold
House and a number of other homes he designed in
the late 1940s and early 1950s. The back of the
house wraps around a huge oak tree

21. THE DEPRESSION
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.

22. SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is a well-
known art museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is
the permanent home of a renowned and continuously expanding collection of
Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern and contemporary art and also features
special exhibitions throughout the year. The museum was established by the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Foundation in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, under the
guidance of its first director, the artist Hilla von Rebay. It adopted its current name after
the death of its founder, Solomon R. Guggenheim, in 1952.
the cylindrical museum building, wider at the top than the bottom, was conceived as
a "temple of the spirit" and is one of the 20th century's most important architectural
landmarks. The building opened on October 21, 1959, replacing rented spaces used
by the museum since its founding. Its unique ramp gallery extends from just under the
skylight in the ceiling in a long, continuous spiral along the outer edges of the building
until it reaches the ground level. The building underwent extensive expansion and
renovations in 1992 (when an adjoining tower was built) and from 2005 to 2008.

23. REMARKABLE RETURN
With this larger community to take care of, and Wisconsin winters brutal, the winter
of 1934 found the Wrights and the Fellowship in rented quarters in the warmer air
of Arizona where they worked on the Broadacre City model, which would debut in
Rockefeller Center in 1935. Wright was by this time still considered a great
architect, but one whose time had come and gone. In 1936, Wright proved this
sentiment wrong as he staged a remarkable comeback with several important
commissions, including the S.C. Johnson and Son Company Administration
Building in Racine, Wisconsin; Fallingwater, the country house for Edgar Kaufmann
in rural Pennsylvania; and the Herbert Jacobs House (the first executed "Usonian"
house) in Madison, Wisconsin.
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.

24. BETH SHOLOM CONGREGATION
Beth Sholom Congregation is a Conservative synagogue located in the
Philadelphia suburb of Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. It is the only synagogue
designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Beth Sholom is Hebrew
for House of Peace.
The building has been called a startling, translucent, modernist
evocation of an ancient temple, transposed to a Philadelphia suburb by
Frank Lloyd Wright
"Beth Sholom Synagogue ... is a new National Historic Landmark because
of its significance in the history of American architecture. The glazed glass
pyramidal tower, built in the 1950s, reflects two dominant metaphors—the
tent and the mountain—to convey the sense of a collective sacredness. It
is nationally significant as one of Wright's most important commissions
during his long and productive career.

25. THE LAST DECADES
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. Other, ultimately unbuilt, projects included a
hotel for Dallas, Texas, two large civic commissions for Pittsburgh, a sports
club for Hollywood, a mile-high tower for Chicago, a department store for
Ahmedabad, India, and a plan for Greater Baghdad.

26. KALITA HUMPHREYS THEATER
The Kalita Humphreys Theater is a historic
theater in Dallas, Texas (USA). It is one of
only three surviving theaters by architect
Frank Lloyd Wright and one of the last
completed buildings he designed. It was
the official home of the Dallas Theater
Center from 1959 to 2009.
Suntop Homes
The Suntop Homes, also known under the early name of
The Ardmore Experiment, were quadruple residences
located in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and based largely
upon the 1935 conceptual Broadacre City model of the
minimum houses. The design was commissioned by Otto
Tod Mallery of the Tod Company in 1938 in an attempt
to set a new standard for the entry-level housing market
in the United States and to increase single-family
dwelling density in the suburbs.

27. THE END
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. He died April 9, two
months shy of his ninety-second birthday.

28. LEGACY
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 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.
Twelve Frank Lloyd Wright buildings appeared
in this list, including Fallingwater, the Robie
House, the Johnson Administration
Building, the Guggenheim, Taliesin, and
Taliesin West. In 2000, the A.I.A. selected their
top ten favorite buildings of the twentieth
century: Fallingwater topped this list, with the
Robie House, the Guggenheim Museum, and
the Johnson Administration Building also
among the select few.

29. NOTE
To My Friends, family & Clients,
I hope you enjoyed this look into another facet of
American Architecture as much I I did putting it together.
As always I welcome your comments and
suggestions…. Jeff
Jeffrey Shapiro
Realtor, Sales Agent
New Jersey – New York
Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage
Alpine-Closter Office
15 Vervalen Street, Closter, NJ 07624
(201) 519-1600
njfineliving@gmail.com
www.jeffshapirorealtor.com