Frank Loyd Wright … a short history
Saturday, April 18th, 2009
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) was the leader of the Prairie School Movement of Architecture. His life was anything but normal, and he is responsible for the most peaceful architecture ever designed.
Frank was born and raised in Wisconsin. His father was a music teacher and a Baptist minister who led churches in Iowa, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Frank traveled around the country during the first 10 years of his life. Later his father abandoned them. To help his mother make ends meat, Frank got a job working for Allen Conover, a local builder. To improve his skills, he took drafting classes at the University of Wisconsin.
In 1887 Frank pawned his father’s books and bought a one-way ticket to Chicago. He found a job as a tracer for eight dollars a week working for architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee. After a year, Frank took a better paying drafting job with Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, who were working on the design of the Auditorium Theater. Wright referred to Sullivan as his Lieber Meister (beloved master). Sullivan was the only architect that Wright would acknowledge had an influence on him.
The basis for Wright’s future work was founded on Sullivan’s philosophy that “form follows function”. Wright left Adler and Sullivan in 1893 when he was fired over a dispute regarding his acceptance of a growing number of independent commissions.
In 1894 Wright opened an office on the 11th floor of the Steinway Piano Company building. He joined Robert Spencer and Dwight Perkins and the others and started the Prairie School of Architecture. Four years later Wright moved to his home studio in Oak Park. The studio became the workplace of some of the most notable of Prairie School architects, including Walter Burley Griffin, Marion Mahony, John Van Bergen, William Drummond, and Francis Barry Byrne. This arrangement lasted until the studio was officially closed in 1911.
In 1909, Wright left his first wife - Catherine Lee Clark Tobin - for Margaret (Mamah) Cheney, the wife of a neighbor and client. He built a home for Margaret that he named Taliesin, which means “shining brow” in Welsh, on a hillside near Spring Green, WI. Tragedy struck in 1914, while Wright was away in Chicago. 30 year old servant Julian Carlton bolted the doors and windows of the dining room where Mamah Borthwick, her two children, and six other people were eating, poured buckets of petrol under the doors and torched the building. Carlton then used an axe to attack those who jumped out of the windows to escape the flames.
Wright was devastated. He coped by burying himself in his work. It was during this time that he completed the design for the Midway Gardens in Chicago. Wright accepted a commission to design and build the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Japan in 1914. This commission consumed most of his time from 1916 to 1922.
Upon his return to America, his first wife, Catherine, whom he left in 1909 agreed to give him a divorce. In November 1923 he married sculptor, Miriam Noel. The marriage lasted less than a year and in April 1924, Miriam left him. The divorce was finalized in August 1927.
While still married to Miriam, Wright met Olgivanna, 33 years his junior, at the ballet in Chicago. Together they had one daughter, Svetlana, born in 1917. They were married in 1928.
During the Great Depression when Wright’s architecture commissions dried up, he began lecturing and writing. He authored several books and became a frequent contributor to architectural magazines. In 1932 he established the Taliesin Fellowship, his self-styled architectural school in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The school opened to 30 students, each paying an $1,100 tuition. There was a waiting list of 27. As part of their education, Wright had his students finish remodeling projects at Taliesin. This facet of their training was borne out of the influence of Olgivanna’s training at the Gurdjieff Institute, where there was no formal training and the belief that physical labor for the master would bring knowledge and inner peace.
In 1934 one of Wright’s apprentices, Edgar Kaufmann Jr. convinced his father to let Wright design a summer home for him near Bear Run, Pennsylvania. Out of that association came Wright’s masterpiece, Fallingwater, the house built on the waterfall.
Wright developed his vision for modestly priced homes. His first Usonian house was the Jacobs house near Madison, Wisconsin. Wright believed that everyone should have an architect design a house specifically for them no matter how inexpensive the house was. He despised “cookie cutter” houses.
In 1938 Wright returned to the Arizona desert near Ocatillo to have the apprentices build his winter home, Taliesin West, on 800 acres purchased from the government. Wright and the fellowship could now spend winters in the desert and summers in Spring Green.
With his reputation on the rise Wright accepted a commission from Solomon R. Guggenheim to design a museum in New York City. After delays caused by World War II, Guggenheim’s death, and discussions with the building commission, construction finally began in 1957. Construction lasted almost two years, and the museum finally opened in October of 1959. Wright never got to see the completion of the Guggenheim Museum. On April 4, 1959, Wright had surgery for an intestinal blockage. Seeming to be recovering as expected, he suddenly died five days later.
Wright is buried in the family cemetery at Taliesin near his mother and Mamah.
