Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) was an American architect, born in Richland Center, Wisconsin. He studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin without taking a degree and worked for Adler & Sullivan in Chicago from 1888 to 1893 before opening his own practice. Over about seventy years he designed more than 1,000 structures, of which more than 500 were built.

He called his approach organic architecture: a building designed for its site, with structure, furniture and decoration planned as one whole. His Prairie houses had low-pitched roofs, deep overhanging eaves, long bands of windows and open floor plans around a central fireplace; the Robie House in Chicago (1909) is the best-known example. Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois (1905-1909), was built of poured concrete left exposed.

Fallingwater (1936-1939), a weekend house for the Kaufmann family near Mill Run, Pennsylvania, has concrete terraces cantilevered (projecting with no support beneath) over a waterfall on Bear Run. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, completed in 1959, displays art along a continuous spiral ramp. He trained apprentices at Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. In 2019 UNESCO listed eight of his buildings as a World Heritage Site.