- Frank Lloyd Wright is one
of America's most notable architects.
His approach to residential and commercial
design changed how we live.
His influence continues today with
many of the ideas he took from
the Arts and Crafts movement in England
and then in the United States.
Wright was born in Wisconsin in 1867.
He began his career at the firm
of Adler and Sullivan with Louis Sullivan.
Sullivan was a pioneering architect who said,
"Form follows function."
Sullivan believed that American architecture
should be based on American function
and materials, not European traditions.
Wright followed this concept
throughout the rest of his career.
Throughout his life, famous for his
egocentric personality, Wright acknowledged
very few influences but credits Sullivan
as the primary influence on his career.
In 1893 Wright opened his own firm in Chicago
and then transferred the practice
to his house in Oak Park.
Wright's early houses had a style
unlike any other architect.
He worked with the landscape,
mimicking a strong horizontal plane.
The houses had no basements or attics.
They were constructed of natural materials
following the Arts and Crafts idea
of natural beauty, never painted.
Wright's houses typically had low-pitched
roof lines with deep overhangs and large
walls of windows to merge the inside and the outside.
Wright's houses had a large stone or brick
fireplace in the home's heart.
Like the open-plan houses of today,
he designed rooms that are open to one another.
This style is called the Prairie School and became
indigenous to midwestern architecture.
In 1911 Wright and his second wife moved to Wisconsin,
where he built his new house, Taliesin.
They lived there until 1914, when a
mentally-unstable servant tragically
murdered Wright's wife and six others,
then set fire to the house.
Wright rebounded and rebuilt Taliesin.
Wright's architectural and sociological
philosophies aligned with others
in the Arts and Crafts movement.
He rejected urban living and utilized
natural materials, skylights and walls of windows
to embrace the natural environment.
His work used shapes found in the environment
and he believed that these should be
not only integrated but should become
the basis of American architecture.
Wright worked at Taliesin West in Phoenix
until his death at 92.
By then he had become internationally recognized
as the world's greatest architect.
His approach and ideas can be seen
in every ranch-style house in America.
The integration of inside and outside living,
open floor plans and the lack of elaborate
ornamentation in our houses today is his legacy.