Wright, Frank Lloyd (1869-1959)

Unity Temple, a church in Oak Park, Illinois, USA, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1905-6. Frank Lloyd Wright is regarded as one of the most influential of US architects. He used new methods and materials to create buildings incorporating free flowing space and open plan rooms.

US architect. He is known for ‘organic architecture’, in which buildings reflect their natural surroundings. From the 1890s, he developed his celebrated prairie house style, a series of low, spreading houses with projecting roofs. He later diversified, employing reinforced concrete to explore a variety of geometric forms. Among his buildings are his Wisconsin home, Taliesin East (1925), in prairie-house style; Falling Water, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1936), a house of cantilevered terraces straddling a waterfall; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1959), a spiral ramp rising from a circular plan.

Wright also designed buildings in Japan 1915-22, most notably the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1916). In 1938 he built his winter home in the Arizona Desert, Taliesin West, and established an architectural community there. He always designed the interiors and furnishings for his projects, to create a total environment for his patrons.

Wright was a student of Louis Sullivan 1888-93. Other Wright buildings include the Robie house (1909) in Chicago; the Johnson Wax Company Administration building, Racine, Wisconsin (1938), and the company's Laboratory Tower (1949); and the high-rise Price Company Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma (1953).

He was born at Richland, Wisconsin, studied as a civil engineer, and began practice in Chicago in 1893. It was partly the original character of his work that made him the leader among American architects by the middle of the 20th century, but much of his wide influence internationally was due to his numerous books in which his ideas on architecture were expounded. He published an autobiography in 1932.