Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, designer, writer and educator who, across a seventy-year career, produced more than a thousand designs and roughly 532 completed works. Trained under Louis Sullivan at Adler and Sullivan, he developed his own philosophy of organic architecture, buildings conceived in harmony with their site, their materials and the people who use them, expressed first in the low, horizontal Prairie houses of Chicago's suburbs and later in increasingly experimental forms: the poured-concrete Unity Temple, the earthquake-engineered Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, the cantilevered Fallingwater built directly over a Pennsylvania waterfall, and the spiraling Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, completed six months after his death. He founded the Taliesin Fellowship at his own Wisconsin estate in 1932, training apprentices in architecture and craft through his final decades, and named both that estate and its winter counterpart in Arizona, Taliesin West, after a Welsh bardic name meaning shining brow, in keeping with his family's Welsh heritage. Away from architecture he was an avid dealer and collector of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, a pursuit he said he was enslaved to, curating the first ever retrospective exhibition of the printmaker Hiroshige at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1906 and, for a time, earning more from print dealing than from architectural commissions. His personal life was repeatedly public and difficult: he left his first wife and family in 1909 to travel to Europe with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of a client, and in 1914 Borthwick, her two children and four others were murdered at Taliesin by a staff member who then set fire to the house, a tragedy Wright rebuilt from twice more across his life. Eight of his buildings, spanning fifty years of his career, were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2019 as The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the first modern architecture designation in the United States.