Frank Lloyd Wright

United States

Person

Designer

Born 8 June 1867 Richland Center, Wisconsin, USA Died 9 April 1959 Phoenix, Arizona, USA Frank Lloyd Wright enrolled as a special student of civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1886/87 before moving to Chicago in 1887. After working in the office of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, he established his own architectural practice in 1893. Between c. 1895 and 1915 he developed the Prairie Houses, designing not only the buildings but often their interiors and furnishings as well. Among his early major works were the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo (1902–1906) and Taliesin, his self-designed home and studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin, which he rebuilt several times after fires. In 1909/10 he travelled to Europe and prepared the influential publication 'Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright'. During the 1910s and early 1920s he spent extended periods in Japan working on the new Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Later projects included the Textile Block Houses in California (1923/24), the founding of the Taliesin Fellowship architectural school (1932), Fallingwater for Edgar J. Kaufmann (1935), the headquarters of S. C. Johnson & Son (1936), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1943–1959). In 1938 he established Taliesin West near Phoenix as a second campus of his private architecture school, Taliesin Fellowship.