Frank Lloyd Wright

Artist Biography

Considered the most influential architect of his time, Frank Lloyd Wright designed about 1,000 structures, some 400 of which were built. He described his "organic architecture' as one that "proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man and his circumstances as they both change.' As a pioneer whose ideas were well ahead of his time, Wright had to fight for acceptance of every new design. The famous American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, was the son of William C. Wright and Anna Lloyd Jones in the United States in the small rural community of Richland Center, Wisconsin on June 8, 1867.

As an independent architect, Wright became the leader of a style known as the Prairie school. Houses with low-pitched roofs and extended lines that blend into the landscape typify his style of "organic architecture”. In 1904 he designed the strong, functional Larkin Building in Buffalo, N.Y., and in 1906 the Unity Temple in Oak Park. After 1900 and his local success, Wright became immensely more ambitious and decided to take on the European avant-garde, whose work he must have known well through magazines. He fashioned a new form of horizontal streamlining, a word he claims to have invented, and then helped form a group of architects, the "Chicago Eighteen,” which soon evolved into the "New School of the Middle West.” The Prairie House, such as the William E. Martin Residence, was the result of both efforts. Wright applied the same general principles of space and streamlining, used in his Prairie Houses, to public buildings. Even the "New Prairie Style” was conceived for domestic scale.

On January 17th 1938 Wright appeared on the cover of Time magazine; later it would be a two cent stamp. After his success as the respectable architect, in the thirties, he started to realize the emergent rules of a commercial society. From this date to his death in 1959 he spent as much time given interviews, and being a celebrity, as in designing buildings. In the age of media stars in radio, film, soon TV, Wright mastered them all, and instinctively helped create the system with which we are still settled. By 1950 Wright's sure instinct for promotion had paid off professionally. But the media attention, the time, energy and personal involvement it demanded, executed their revenge. Most of the buildings produced in these years betray an excessive vulgarity, or overruling ambition, which the young Wright would have called ‘grandomania', and most people today call kitsch. Frank Lloyd Wright died on April 9, 1959, in Phoenix, Arizona.

Frank Lloyd Wright Art, Prints and Posters Collection