Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright was born on June 8, 1867, in Richland Center, Wisconsin. He spent a few semesters in the Engineering School at the University of Wisconsin before leaving for Chicago in 1887. At the age of twenty, he was hired as an apprentice in the office of J. Lyman Silsbee who designed All Souls' Unitarian Church where Wright's uncle was a minister. The young architect's first work was nominally a Silsbee commission-the Hillside Home School built for his aunts in 1888 near Spring Green, Wisconsin. While construction was underway on the Hillside Home School, Wright went to work for the Chicago firm of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, working as a draftsman on the Auditorium Building, which, at the time of completion in 1890, was the largest building in Chicago. He remained with that firm until 1893(Lind). Wright's basic philosophy of architec
During the early 1930's, when commissions were few, he turned to writing and lecturing for income and developed his plan for Broadacre City, an integrated and self-sufficient community of detached housing with built-in industries. As the decade of the forties began, Frank Lloyd Wright's practice began to grow. At the same time, he became a media superstar who divided his time between the spotlight and the drawing board, and he could not give his work the attention it required. Both were designed in 1935-36 and each makes bold use of concrete, but the two buildings are worlds apart in style and character. Many projects of his last decade have been criticized as vulgar and repetitive, inappropriate for the site, superficially developed, and far removed from the organic architecture that characterized his earlier work. It is said that the last project on his drawing board was a simple an affordable prefabricated concrete-block house (Blake p86-. He had few major commissions for public buildings, office buildings or skyscrapers in the early years. In the 1920's, Wright explored the use of poured concrete and abstract sculptural ornamentation in residential construction. Johnson and Son Company in Racine, Wisconsin (Clark p177). He undertook project all over the world, seldom declining a commission. He developed a type of construction using precast "textile" concrete blocks which were bound together by steel rods and poured concrete. Wright's most important buildings of the 1930's were Falling Water at Bear Run, Pennsylvania and the Administration Building of the S. None of these buildings are still standing today. Despite the Depression, Wright began to secure important commissions and to make a contribution in the field of low-cost housing. This "textile block" construction method found its best expression in a series of four houses built in the hills around Los Angeles, California (Pfeiffer p112).
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