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 architecture was stated primarily through the house form. He had few major commissions for public buildings, office buildings or skyscrapers in the early years. The Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, New York was his only large-scale structure prior to the Midway Gardens in Chicago and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. None of these buildings are still standing today.
             In the 1920's, Wright explored the use of poured concrete and abstract sculptural ornamentation in residential construction. He developed a type of construction using precast "textile" concrete blocks which were bound together by steel rods and poured concrete. 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).
             Despite the Depression, Wright began to secure important commissions and to make a contribution in the field of low-cost housing. During the early 1930's, when commissions were few, he turned to writing and lecturing for income a
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