BIOGRAPHY
Frank Lloyd Wright was born as Frank Lincoln Wright in southwestern Wisconsin, USA, on June 8, 1867.
His father, William Carey Wright, was a musician and a preacher. His mother, Anna Lloyd-Jones was a teacher.
It is said that Anna Lloyd-Jones placed pictures of great buildings in young Frank's nursery as part of training him up from the earliest possible moment as an architect.
Wright briefly studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, after which he moved to Chicago to work for a year in the architectural firm of J. Lyman Silsbee.
In 1887, he was hired as a draftsman in the firm of Adler and Sullivan. At the
time the firm was designing Chicago's Auditorium Building.
Wright eventually became the chief draftsman, and also the man in charge of the firm's residential designs.
Under Sullivan, Wright began to develop his own architectural ideas.
Wright started his own firm in 1893 after being fired from Adler and Sullivan, first working out of a studio which was built onto his home in Oak Park.
“Early in my career I was a very arrogant young man.. I was so sure of my ground and I had to choose between an honest arrogance and a hypercritical humility... and I deliberately choose an honest arrogance, and I've never been sorry.” - Frank Lloyd Wright
Between 1893 and 1901,49 buildings designed by Wright were built. During this period he began to develop his ideas which would come to together in his "Prairie House" concept.
Into 1909, he developed and refined the prairie style. Frank Lloyd Wright founded the "prairie school" of architecture, and his art of this early productive period in his life is also considered as part of the "Arts and Crafts movement".
PHILOSOPHY OF ARCHITECTURE
No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill- Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.
Wright created the philosophy of "organic architecture," the central principle of which maintains that the building should develop out of its natural surroundings.
From the outset he exhibited bold originality in his designs for both private and public structures and rebelled against the ornate neoclassic and Victorian styles favored by conventional architects.
He was opposed to the mechanical imposition of preconceived styles.
He believed that the architectural form must ultimately be determined by the particular function of the building, its environment, and the type of materials employed in the structure.
Among his fundamental contributions was the use of various building materials for their natural colors and textures, as well as for their structural characteristics.
His exteriors incorporated low horizontal proportions and strongly projecting eaves. This concept was particularly evident in his early Prairie style, single-family houses.
THE PRAIRIE STYLE
Through the turn of the century, Wright's distinctively personal style was evolving, and his work in these years foreshadowed his so-called "prairie style," a term deriving from the publication in 1901 of "A Home in a Prairie Town" which he designed for the Ladies' Home Journal
Prairie houses were characterized by low, horizontal lines that were meant to blend with the flat landscape around them. Typically, these structures were built around a central chimney, consisted of broad open spaces instead of strictly defined rooms.
FALLING WATER
Falling water is often described as "the best-known private home for someone not of royal blood in the history of the world."
It is also the fullest realization of Wright's lifelong ideal of a living place completely at one with nature.
Fallingwater is constructed on three levels primarily of reinforced concrete, native sandstone and glass.
Cantilevered balconies are anchored in solid rock. Reinforced-concrete cantilever slabs project from these rocks to carry the house over the stream.
From the living room, a suspended stairway leads directly down to the stream.
On the third level immediately above, terraces open from sleeping quarters, emphasizing the horizontal nature of the structural forms.
THE GUGGENHIEM MUSEUM
In 1943,Wright was commissioned to design a museum to house the Solomon R. Guggehiem Collection of Non-Objective Paintings.
The many delays in implementing the plan, led to completion of the project in 1956.
The spiral form that characterized the design from the earliest stage went through several versions; with tiers of the same size, or growing progressively smaller toward the top, or expanding in size as the building rose.
UNITY TEMPLE
Unity Church was the first public building of any type in America to be built entirely of exposed concrete. Its use was dictated in part by the need to keep construction costs low, but Wright's principle of integrity therefore built in character out of the same material, i.e., reinforced concrete.
The ceiling is opened above the central cube into a grid of beams, into which are set 25 stained-glass skylights.
Clerestories run full width across the tops of each balcony just under the roof. Light enters the sanctuary only from above and is filtered by the colors and patterns of the leaded windows and skylights.
As Wright said, the space is flooded "with light from above to get a sense of a happy cloudless day into the room... the light would, rain or shine, have the warmth of sunlight."
EPILOGUE
Wright never retired; he died on April 9, 1959 at the age of ninety-two in Arizona. He was interred at the graveyard at Unity Chapel.
The epitaph at his Wisconsin grave site reads:
"Love of an idea, is the love of God"
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