Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was active for seventy years and designed the Prairie houses, Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. He wanted an organic architecture that grows out of its site, and his open plans transformed the home.

Frank Lloyd Wright was born in 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin. He briefly studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin but left and moved to Chicago in 1887. There he worked for Louis Sullivan, whom he later called his teacher. In 1893 he opened his own office in Oak Park outside Chicago. Over the next fifteen years he developed the Prairie house: low, long houses with broad roofs, open plans around a central fireplace and bands of windows.

Among the Prairie houses are the Robie House in Chicago and Unity Temple in Oak Park, a church in cast concrete. After a personal crisis and a journey to Europe he built Taliesin in Wisconsin, where a fire in 1914 killed seven people. He designed the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and in the 1930s Fallingwater, a house cantilevered over a waterfall, and the Johnson Wax headquarters with mushroom-shaped columns. He developed the simple Usonian houses for the middle class and in 1932 founded a school of architecture at Taliesin. His last major work was the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Wright died in 1959, aged 91, having designed over a thousand buildings, about half of which were built. His work was published in Berlin in 1910–1911 and influenced European modernists, among them Mies van der Rohe and De Stijl. His idea of an architecture in harmony with the landscape has inspired architects all over the world, including in the Nordic countries. Eight of his buildings became World Heritage Sites in 2019. He is regarded as one of the most influential architects of the 20th century.