Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was born as Frank Lincoln Wright in Richland Center in

southwestern Wisconsin, on June 8, 1867. His father, William Carey Wright, was a musician

and a preacher. His mother, Anna Lloyd-Jones was a teacher(1 Compton). 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 spent some of his time growing up

at the farm owned by his uncles near Spring Green, Wisconsin. Frank Lloyd Wright was of

Welsh ethnic heritage, and was brought up in the Unitarian faith.

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 hired on as a draftsman in the firm of Adler and Sullivan, run by Louis Sullivan (design)

and Dankmar Adler (engineering) at the time the firm was designing Chicago's Auditorium

Building(1 Compton). Wright eventually became the chief draftsman, and also the man in charge

of the firm's residential designs. Under Sullivan, whom Wright called "Lieber Meister" (beloved

master), Wright began to develop his own architectural ideas. In 1889 he married his first wife,

Catherine Tobin. He also designed houses on his own toward the end, homes Wright called

"bootlegged" (2 Encarta) which were done against Alder and Sullivan's policies concerning such

moonlighting. When Louis Sullivan found out about these homes, Wright was fired from the firm.

The bootlegged houses showed the start of Wright's low, sheltering rooflines, the prominence of

the central fireplace, and "the destruction of the box" open floorplans. The Adler and Sullivan

firm was just the right place to be for a young man aspiring to be a great architect, as it was at

the leading edge of American architecture at the time.

Wright started his own firm in 1893 after being fired from Adler and Sullivan, first

working out of the Schiller building (designed by Adler and Sullivan) and then out of a studio

which was built onto his home in Oak Park, an affluent suburb of Chicago which is located just

to the west of the center of the city.

Between 1893 and 1901, 49 buildings designed by Wright were built. During this

period he began to develop his ideas which would come together in his "Prairie House"

concept(1 Compton). 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

This very productive first phase in Wright's career ended in 1909, when he left his wife

and 5 children to go to Germany. He was joined there by Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife

of a former client and now his lover. From 1912-1914, Wright and Ms. Chaney lived together

at Taliesin, a home Wright had built at the site of his uncles' farm near Spring Green. This period

ended when a crazed servant murdered Ms. Chaney and 6 others, also setting a fire that

destroyed much of Taliesin.

During the period from 1914-1932, a time of personal turmoil and change, Wright

rebuilt Taliesin, divorced Catherine, married and separated from