Frank Lloyd Wright

**Frank Lloyd Wright** (born **Frank Lincoln Wright**; June 8, 1867 &ndash; April 9, 1959) was a famous American architect from the early 20th century. He designed all kinds of buildings including banks, holiday resorts, office buildings, churches, a synagogue, a gas station, a beer garden and an art museum.

Wright designed more than 1,000 structures and completed 532 works. Wright believed in designing structures which were in peace with humanity and its environment. He called his belief organic architecture.

Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin on June 8, 1867 to a farming family. He was born **Frank Lincoln Wright**. His father, William Carey Wright (1825–1904), was a locally admired speaker, music teacher, sometimes a lawyer, and minister. William Wright had met and married Anna Lloyd Jones (1838/39 – 1923),

Wright attended a Madison High School, but there is no evidence he ever graduated. He was admitted to the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a special student in 1886. took classes part-time for two semesters, and worked with a professor of civil engineering, Allan D. Conover. He moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1887. In spite of this, "Sullivan took [Wright] under his wing and gave him great design responsibility." As an act of respect, Wright would later refer to Sullivan as *Lieber Meister* (German for "Dear Master"). Wright also formed a bond with office foreman Paul Mueller. Wright would later engage Mueller to build several of his public and commercial buildings between 1903 and 1923.

As Wright began to work on residential projects for Adler & Sullivan. Wright designed his houses on his own time. Sullivan knew nothing of Wright's works until 1893, when he recognized that one of the houses was a Frank Lloyd Wright design. In 1902, the Larkin Company decided to build a new building. Wright came to Buffalo and designed not only the Larkin Administration Building (completed in 1904, demolished in 1950), but also homes for three of the company's executives including the Darwin D. Martin House in 1904.

## Famous works 
### Fallingwater 
Frank Lloyd Wright designed a summer-house in 1935 for the Kaufmann family over a waterfall in Pennsylvania. He called the house "Fallingwater". Some people say it is the most famous private home in the world.

The house actually sits low in the valley over the stream, but looks dramatic from further downstream. It has large terraces, and some of them stick straight out and hang over the waterfall or the stream. There are windows and glass doors, with only narrow steel supports between them, wrapping all the way around the living room.

There are also windows going all the way from the floor to the ceiling in all three stories of the tower.

In 1991, members of the American Institute of Architects named the Fallingwater house the "best all-time work of American architecture".

### Robie House 
One famous house was called the Robie House. It had a maze like layout and geometric stained glass windows. The Robie House was a unique house with odd shapes, colors and form. He finished making it in 1910, as a house for children. In fact, many children lived and played in that house with their families up until 1926 when it was closed for living in, and closed to the public. Many times, it was planned to be destroyed. However, twice, Wright saved his house from destruction because of the reasons he built it and all the memories of it that he loved so much. It is now being restored at a cost of $10 million.

### Johnson Wax Headquarters 
Another famous building by Wright was called the Johnson Wax Headquarters. The building has Wright's idea of the streamlined Art Moderne style popular in the 1930s. In a break with Wright's earlier Prairie School structures, the building features many circular forms and needed over 200 different curved "Cherokee red" bricks to create the sweeping curves of the inside and outside. It was intended to be constructed in Chicago, Illinois. It could have included 528 stories, with a gross area of 18,460,000 square feet (1,715,000 m2). The building is on Fifth Avenue. Its interior is similar to the inside of a seashell. In 1940, Wright started the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. It was set up for educational purposes. It looks after two Wright buildings, Taliesin East in Wisconsin, and Taliesin West in Arizona. It has a library with more than 22,000 of Wright's drawings, and 300,000 documents. It is home to the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.

## Personal life 
Frank Lloyd Wright was married three times and fathered seven children, four sons and three daughters. He also adopted Svetlana Milanoff, the daughter of his third wife, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright. Wright once had an apprentice who was married to Joseph Stalin's daughter.

His wives were:
* Catherine "Kitty" (Tobin) Wright (1871–1959); social worker, socialite (married in June 1889; divorced November 1922)
* Maude "Miriam" (Noel) Wright (1869–1930), artist (married in November 1923; divorced August 1927)
* Olga Ivanovna "Olgivanna" (Lazovich Milanoff) Lloyd Wright (1897–1985), dancer and writer (married in August 1928)

The Oscar-winning actress Anne Baxter was Wright's granddaughter.

Wright was a fan of Japanese Art and collected them throughout his career.

## Death 
Wright died on April 9, 1959, while undergoing surgery in Phoenix, Arizona, to remove an intestinal obstruction. His third wife, Olgivanna, ran the Fellowship after Wright's death, until her own death in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1985.

Later that year, it was learned that her dying wish had been that Wright, she, and her daughter by a first marriage all be cremated and relocated to Scottsdale. Several of Wright's buildings have been proposed by the United States to be UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Shortly after his death, Simon & Garfunkel recorded *So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright* as a tribute to Wright.

In 2000, Fallingwater was named "The Building of the 20th century" in "Top-Ten" poll taken by members attending the AIA annual convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On that list, Wright was listed along with many of the USA's other greatest architects including Eero Saarinen, I. M. Pei, Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. He was the only architect who had more than one building on the list. The other three buildings were the Guggenheim Museum, the Frederick C. Robie House and the Johnson Wax Headquarters.

## Related pages 
* American modern architecture

## References 
## Other websites 
* Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Official Website
* Frank Lloyd Wright, Wisconsin Historical Society 
* Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy
* Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust – FLW Home and Studio, Robie House
* Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture 
* Frank Lloyd Wright Wisconsin Heritage Tourism Program
* Frank Lloyd Wright Original Letters Shapell Manuscript Foundation
* Frank Lloyd Wright  – PBS documentary by Ken Burns and resources