Frank Lloyd Wright

By Charles River Editors

A commemorative Frank Lloyd Wright stamp

Charles River Editors
provides superior editing and original writing services across the digital publishing industry, with the expertise to create digital content for publishers across a vast range of subject matter. In addition to providing original digital content for third party publishers, we also republish civilization’s greatest literary works, bringing them to new generations of readers via ebooks.

Sign up here to receive updates about free books as we publish them
, and visit
Our Kindle Author Page
to browse today’s free promotions and our most recently published Kindle titles.

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)

“The architect must be a prophet... a prophet in the true sense of the term... if he can't see at least ten years ahead don't call him an architect.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

Perhaps America’s most innovative and prolific architect, the works of Frank Lloyd Wright are almost too vast and diverse to list. Recognized for designing unique churches and distinctive commercial buildings, and admired for his geometric style house designs, Wright has been widely imitated, and his work continues to influence architecture not only in the United States but around the world. Laymen often think they know the definition of “a Frank Lloyd Wright,” but they probably don’t fully understand the brilliant mind of the man, nor the intricacies of his Prairie Style. Yet it endures because he has made it so.

In many ways, Wright’s architectural career has overshadowed other aspects of his life. In the course of creating innovative kinds of offices, churches, schools, skyscrapers, hotels, and museums, not to mention furniture and stained glass decorations, Wright wrote over a dozen books and toured America and Europe at large, often giving widely acclaimed speeches. Despite a somewhat hardscrabble start to life in the Midwest, Wright became known for his flamboyant and entertaining lifestyle, which included multiple marriages and scandals like the murders at his Taliesin studio in 1914. But through it all, Wright continued working nearly up until his death, and in 1991 the American Institute of Architects recognized him as "the greatest American architect of all time"

Frank Lloyd Wright: The Life and Buildings of America’s Most Famous Architect
looks at the life and works of one of history’s greatest builders. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Frank Lloyd Wright like never before.

Frank Lloyd Wright: The Life and Buildings of America’s Most Famous Architect

About Charles River Editors

Introduction

Chapter 1:
The Evolution of an Engineer

Chapter 2: Wright’s Early Career

Chapter 3: Religious Buildings

Chapter 4: Midway Gardens and the Evolution of a Thinker

Chapter 5: Creating Communities

Chapter 6: Wright’s Personal Life

Chapter 7: Other Projects

Online Resources

Bibliography

“Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

The world-famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, was born on June 8, 1867, in Richland Center, Wisconsin Frank Lloyd Wright’s grandparents were early arrivals in Ixonia, Wisconsin, when Richard Lloyd-Jones, his wife, and seven children immigrated from Wales to their new home on the Wisconsin prairie. Unlike many immigrants at the time, the Lloyd-Jones family traveled by water from one land to the other, rather than pioneer wagon, first aboard an ocean liner, then via canal boats, followed by a lake-steamer.

But pioneers they were. Richard Lloyd-Jones established a farm in Wisconsin at a time when Native Americans still lived in the Midwest.

In addition to being a farmer, Richard Lloyd-Jones was a Unitarian preacher. He established a Unitarian church in Ixonia where he declared “speech was free because men were.” Truth was the hallmark of grandpa Lloyd-Jones, as evidenced by the Druid symbol he took for his family crest which stood for “Truth against the world.”
[1]
His commitment to truth in all things deeply impacted Frank Lloyd Wright’s life, and he spoke of it often.

Richard Lloyd-Jones’s fourth child, Anna, was only five years old when the family arrived in the United States. She later became Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother, making him a first generation Wright.

The family’s respect for truth manifested itself in the belief that education was man’s salvation. To that end, Anna became a country schoolteacher, riding on horseback to various schoolhouses.

Frank Lloyd Wright failed to inherit his mother’s confidence in the educational system. In his autobiography, Wright said, “
Were I a Rockefeller – Ford – or Dupont, I mean as rich, I would buy up our leading universities—close them and hang out the sign—closed by the beneficence of one, Frank Lloyd Wright.”
[2]
That is not to say he did not respect intellect, education, and enlightenment. He simply had less trust in organized education than did his mother.

During her tenure as a country schoolteacher, Anna met a circuit rider from Hartford, Conn., who was traveling through Wisconsin, making his rounds. William Russell Cary Wright was educated at Amherst College where he originally studied medicine before deciding it wasn’t for him. Then he studied the law, becoming a circuit-rider and meting out justice in the Midwest.

When Anna and the young William Russell Cary Wright married, they each left their horse-riding days behind.

Anna stopped teaching, and Mr. Wright became a music teacher, but he eventually gave that up as well. Changing occupations yet another time, he became a preacher.

Anna and William’s first child was Frank Lloyd Wright, the grandson of immigrant Richard Lloyd-Jones. According to Frank, his father was jealous of his mother’s attention to her newborn son. She predicted that Frank Lloyd Wright was to “build beautiful buildings,” and she would stop at nothing to make that happen.

Even before he was born Anna had decided that Frank would be an architect. To that end, she decorated his baby’s room with ten wood-engravings of English cathedrals. The first images the future architect would see were great, celebrated buildings. Frank did become the architect of his mother’s dreams, but he detested the gaudy European stone buildings she'd chosen for him. As an adult, he made a career out of helping architecture to evolve in a new and innovative way, changing how buildings of any kind were designed. As far as Wright was concerned, the ornate trim and gargantuan domes were things to be done away with.

Three years later, the Wright family welcomed a baby girl, little Jane Wright. At about the same time, the now Reverend William Russell Cary Wright was called to a church at Weymoth, near Boston. As a result, Frank and Jane spent their first few years in a Boston suburb, far from the family’s Wisconsin home. But it was a Baptist church, and very much in contrast to the Unitarian teachings Frank had previously learned from his mother and her family.

It was while the family lived in Boston that Anna Lloyd-Jones Wright discovered Friedrich Froebel's concept of kindergarten, which was a new and foreign concept to her. Anna decided her very young children would benefit from Froebel’s approach. She discovered that, in the United States, Milton Bradley had embraced Froebel’s concept, well before kindergarten had become a part of the American school system, and had begun to manufacture learning products. Milton Bradley created blocks of different shapes with which to teach basic skills, and called them Kindergarten Gifts. Anna Wright eagerly bought these Kindergarten Gifts in order to teach preschoolers Frank and Jane, but as far as Anna was concerned, there never seemed to be enough education, so Frank also attended Miss Williams’ private school, a fashionable school in the Boston suburbs, for some years.

At home, Anna taught Frank the writings of William Longfellow, the radical William Ellery Channing,
[3]
Waldo Emerson, the sermons of Theodore Parker, and the works of Henry David Thoreau, favoring the transcendentalism of the East. In his autobiography, Wright describes his childhood as a lonesome one, where he would rather read, listen to music, draw, and “make things,” than to sleep—and to dream.

When Frank’s father became a minister, his mother longed to return west to Wisconsin and her family, the only home she had ever known. Soon Frank’s youngest sister, Maginel, was born, and then the family of five did return west, to a new home on the shores of Lake Mendota, near Madison, Wisconsin.

In Wright’s opinion, this was when his education began, but it had nothing to do with school or formal education. When he was only 11 years old, Frank was sent to his Uncle James in the Ixonia valley of Wisconsin, to learn farm work, or, as Wright said, to learn to “add ‘tired’ to ‘tired’.” His greatest regrets were that he had to leave behind books, music, idle dreams, and city streets. He also left behind his mother, father, little Maginel, and Jane, and went to work on his Uncle James’s farm, forty miles away.

As he worked the farm, Frank pondered about the fact that much of his time there was devoted to the dairy herd, yet the family never included cream with their meals. Frank’s mother distrusted doctors, and believed that food could cure anything, especially in its plainest forms. Apparently, her brother James held the same belief, because after a long day of work splitting rails and doing other things that seemed a bit too hard for such a young boy, he listed the array of foods for breakfast, but, no cream. Again, a list of food served at noon, but without cream. Finally, dinner, with no cream.

By April, Frank was yearning for September 17, and the beginning of the school year. Regardless of the fact that he adored Uncle James, the older man was not kind to Frank. As a result, the young boy ran away from home, only to be found by his uncle, who compassionately explained to Frank how to adjust to hard work. Years later, he recalled his uncle explaining that, “Adventures make strong men and finish weak ones.” Little, pre-pubescent Frank had only begun to learning to see the beauty in the world around him.

Back in Wisconsin, Frank’s father returned to teaching music to help make ends meet. It was shortly after his time on the farm that Frank befriended Robie Lamp, a physically handicapped boy his age, who studied music under the tutelage of Frank’s father. Frank and his new best friend remained close until Robie died at the early age of only 44 years. One of Wright’s lesser-known structures was a little cream-white brick house he'd designed for Robie where he lived until he died, which featured a billiards room, a children’s playroom, and an entire servants' wing.

As children, Frank and Robie not only learned violin, but they also learned how to run a small printing press in the Wright’s basement. The two, along with a friend, Charlie Doyon, formed Wright, Doyon and Lamp, Publishers and Printers. After a young lifetime of learning to respect the writers of literature, Frank now discovered that “Letters are works of art, or should be.”
[4]

Music and singing were what Wright called a “riot” at the Wright’s house, as it was always mixed with laughter. Frank decided when he was 16 that music was unmanly, and so he left it behind. He and Robie both replaced their childhood interests with construction and the design of inventions.

Frank Lloyd Wright was only 16 years old when he entered the University of Wisconsin. Frank’s parents had divorced by then, his mother’s family considered her failed marriage a disgrace, and he never saw his father again.

Wright enrolled in the university as a prospective civil engineer, but it proved to be a burden for his now single mother, left with three children to raise on her own, to afford tuition. During the 1886-87 school year, Frank Lloyd Wright attended the University of Wisconsin (Madison) where he had been a student during the latter part of 1885-86. By 1886-87, he was one of only four students who were referred to as a “Special Student in Engineering,”
[5]
and was working part-time to help his mother make ends meet.

The Catalogue of the
Phi Delta Theta Fraternity
from 1888-94 listed Frank Lloyd Wright at his Oak Park, Ill. address as a graduate of the class of 1889 and a member of Wisconsin Alpha.
[6]
But in truth, Frank Lloyd Wright never earned his college degree.

He left the University of Wisconsin for Chicago, with one semester left before graduation. He told his mother and sisters he was slipping out to get food, and simply never returned. In his own words, Frank was spared what he'd called the curse of the “architectural” education of the day, with its false direction in culture, and wrong emphasis on sentiment, partly because his mother could not afford for him to study architecture full-time.

With no architectural experience, and only a partial education in civil engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Frank was met with no kindness in Chicago. He was nearly broke before he was able to find work. Eventually, he was hired by Cecil Corwin of Silsbee’s architectural firm. It was pure coincidence that Silsbee’s was in the process of building All Souls Church for Frank Lloyd Wright’s uncle.

Wright described his time at Silsbee’s as a very positive experience, save for Silsbee’s hesitance to approve a raise for him when he was earning less than lesser-talent staff, and he eventually quit.

Wright was quickly hired by Silsbee’s competitors, Beers, Clay and Dutton, for the same rate of pay he had asked from Silsbee's. However, soon Wright realized he lacked the experience to produce the designs expected of him, and he returned to Silsbee's who met his wage demands, at a time when the architecture firm of Adler & Sullivan were building the Chicago Auditorium.

Frank bounced around among the leading Chicago architectural firms, armed only with a partial education in civil engineering, for some years, before settling in to work for Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, styled as Adler & Sullivan, for seven years. During his tenure there, he met fellow architect Paul Mueller, with whom he would work in the future. Wright remained close with Adler, Sullivan and Mueller throughout his life, even after becoming an independent architect.

Adler

Sullivan

In spite of having left college degreeless and disenchanted about institutions of learning, Wright devoted his life to learning, eventually opening his own university.

Now that he no longer attended classes, he continued to learn everything he could on his own. It was about this time that Frank discovered a copy of Owen Jones’
Grammar of Ornament
in the All Souls library. He claimed that Jones’ book was “enough to keep, in spite of architects, one’s faith alive in architecture.”
[7]