A house cantilevered in reinforced concrete over a Pennsylvania waterfall, built for a Pittsburgh department-store family (1937)
Mill Run, Pennsylvania
Fallingwater, for Edgar J. Kaufmann, over Bear Run
Architecture · Modernist
Frank Lloyd Wright
1867–1959 · American
Prairie School; organic architecture; the Usonian house
The most celebrated American architect, whose career ran for seven decades and produced over a thousand designs, more than half of them built. He invented the low, horizontal Prairie house, preached an 'organic architecture' growing out of its site, devised the affordable Usonian house for middle America, and ended with the great spiral of the Guggenheim. His private life — the Taliesin murders of 1914 above all — was as widely reported as his buildings.
How to spot them
- ▸Long low horizontals, deep cantilevered eaves, hidden entrances, banded art-glass windows
- ▸Natural materials left as found; a massive central hearth; compressed lobbies opening into tall spaces
- ▸Quiz clue: 'organic architecture', 'Prairie School', 'Usonian', 'Taliesin', 'lieber Meister' (Louis Sullivan)
- ▸He worked in Chicago for Adler and Sullivan before going out on his own
Key buildings
A white spiralling ramp of reinforced concrete on Fifth Avenue, opened six months after its architect's death (1959)
Fifth Avenue, New York City
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum — visitors are meant to take the lift up and walk down
A long brick Chicago house of 1910 with a dramatic cantilevered roof, usually taken as the summation of the Prairie style (1910)
Hyde Park, Chicago
The Frederick C. Robie House, now owned by the University of Chicago
A Unitarian church in Oak Park of 1908, one of the first public buildings in America made of exposed reinforced concrete (1908)
Oak Park, Illinois
Unity Temple — built cheaply in concrete after the previous church burned down
A Wisconsin corporate headquarters where slender tapering 'lily pad' columns rise to discs, lit by miles of Pyrex glass tubing (1939)
Racine, Wisconsin
The S. C. Johnson Administration Building; the dendriform columns had to be load-tested to satisfy the building inspectors
A desert camp of canvas, redwood and desert-masonry walls, built as a winter home and school in Arizona (1937)
Scottsdale, Arizona
Taliesin West — the winter base of the Taliesin Fellowship
A Tokyo hotel of 1923 that famously survived the Great Kantō earthquake in the year it opened, and was demolished in the 1960s (1923)
Chiyoda, Tokyo
The Imperial Hotel; its entrance lobby was re-erected at the Meiji Mura museum
A Los Angeles house of 1921 built for an oil heiress, its abstract ornament derived from the plant in its name (1921)
East Hollywood, Los Angeles
Hollyhock House, for Aline Barnsdall
Key ideas
- Organic architecture: a building should grow from its site, its materials and its purpose, as a plant grows
- The destruction of the box: corners opened up, walls turned into screens, space allowed to flow between rooms
- Compression and release: a low, dark entry opening suddenly into a tall bright room
- Usonian houses: single-storey, slab-on-grade, carport instead of garage, radiant floor heating — affordable housing for the American middle class
- Broadacre City: his anti-urban vision of a decentralised America with an acre of land per family
Quick-fire facts
- •Born 8 June 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin; died 9 April 1959 in Phoenix
- •He designed 1,114 works, of which 532 were built
- •He trained under Louis Sullivan at Adler and Sullivan, always calling him 'lieber Meister'
- •In 1914 a servant, Julian Carlton, murdered seven people at Taliesin, including Mamah Borthwick, and set the house on fire
- •The Price Tower at Bartlesville, Oklahoma, is his only realised skyscraper; his Mile-High Illinois tower was never built
- •His Usonian prototype was the Herbert and Katherine Jacobs House at Madison, Wisconsin, of 1937
- •Eight of his buildings were inscribed by UNESCO in 2019 as 'The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright'
- •The American Institute of Architects named him the greatest American architect of all time
- •Ayn Rand's Howard Roark in The Fountainhead is loosely modelled on him
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation — Frank Lloyd Wright
- Meryle Secrest — Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography