On June 8, 1867, Frank Lloyd Wright was born. Wright was one of the United States’ most important architects; he built more than 400 buildings and changed the look of American homes in the early 20th century.
According to Wright’s autobiography, his mother announced while she was pregnant that her child would grow up to build beautiful buildings, and she covered the walls of his nursery with pictures of English cathedrals, hoping to encourage him in that direction.
Wright began his architectural career in Chicago in 1887. The city was still recovering from the great fire of 1871, and with the population growing rapidly, there was plenty of work to be found. Wright took a job as a draftsman with the architect Joseph Silsbee. Silsbee had been hired the year before to build a church by some members of Wright’s family, and Wright had worked unofficially as a draftsman on that project.
Silsbee’s style proved too conservative for Wright, and Wright left after about a year to work for Louis Sullivan, one of the major architects of the era. Sullivan’s firm did primarily business and commercial work, but occasionally designed homes as side projects for their most important business clients, and within a few years, Wright was supervising that small corner of Sullivan’s business.
To supplement his income, Wright accepted a few independent commissions for homes. Sullivan found out fairly quickly—Wright’s style was already becoming distinctive—and since such outside work violated his contract with Sulivan, Wright was fired.
He set up his own practice in 1893. He and his team of young architects (which notably included some of the first women to be licensed architects) began developing a new style. Though Wright never used the term himself, the architecture his firm developed became known as the “Prairie School.”
Prairie-style homes were generally flat, with no more than two stories and low-pitched roofs. They were built around open floor plans, made with natural materials—lots of stone and wood—and usually included a lot of glass as a way of connecting the indoors and the outdoors.
For a time in the early 20th century, Wright was as well known for his scandalous personal life as for his architecture. He began an affair with Mamah Cheney, the wife of a neighbor, in 1903. In 1909, Wright and Mamah spent a year together in Europe. During that time, her husband agreed to a divorce, but Wright’s wife, Kitty, would not. Nancy Horan’s novel Loving Frank tells the story of their affair from Mamah’s point of view.
In 1911, Wright began building a new home for himself and Mamah in Spring Green, Wisconsin, which was near much of his mother’s family. In 1914, a servant at Taliesin set fire to the living quarters and murdered seven people with an ax, including Mamah. The killer was arrested but died seven weeks later after refusing to eat. William R. Drennan tells the story of the Taliesin murders in Death in a Prairie House.
Kitty Wright finally agreed to a divorce in 1922. Under its terms, Wright was required to wait a year to remarry. His second marriage, to Miriam Noel, collapsed quickly when Wright discovered that she was addicted to morphine.
In 1925, he moved into Taliesin with his new mistress, Olga Hinzenburg, and the residential quarters were destroyed by another fire, this one caused by faulty wiring in the new telephone system. Fortunately, no one was injured in this fire.
Wright married Olga in 1928, a year after his divorce from Miriam was finalized. In 1932, they began sponsoring the Taliesin Fellowship, providing the opportunity for students to live at Taliesin to learn architecture from Wright and spiritual development from Olga, who was a follower of the mystic/philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff. Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman explore the history of the Taliesin community in The Fellowship.
In the late 1930s, Wright began to develop the “Usonian” house, “Usonia” was his preferred name for the United States. It was similar to the Prairie-style house but less expensive to build, often made from prefabricated concrete blocks, and the floor plans were even more open. The openness was, in part, Wright’s response to the disappearance of servants from the American household; open space made it easier for the housewife to see and manage the entire house (and the children) from the kitchen, which Wright assumed would be her primary workspace.
Some of Wright’s major buildings were created in the final decades of his life. The Pennsylvania home “Fallingwater” was built over a waterfall, and is frequently mentioned among the finest designs in all of American architecture. Wright spent sixteen years working on the spiraling design of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. And while it is not one of his best-known buildings, the 19-story Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, is notable for being Wright’s only skyscraper.
Wright died on April 9, 1959, and another round of personal drama began. His widow, Olga, wanted him to be cremated and buried with her at their winter home, Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Arizona. But in accordance with Wright’s own stated wishes, he was buried near his mother’s family in Wisconsin. In 1985, members of the Taliesin Fellowship removed his remains, cremated them, and sent them to Arizona, where they were eventually buried at Taliesin West. It’s not clear who did this, or on what authority. Olga had taken no legal action to move Wright’s remains; the rest of Wright’s family wanted him left where he was, and even the Wisconsin legislature had expressed its wishes that Wright should remain buried in Wisconsin.
In 2019, UNESCO added eight of Wright’s buildings to its list of World Heritage Sites. Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum are among that group, as is one of Wright’s few Los Angeles buildings, Hollyhock House, located in Barnsdall Art Park. Donald Hoffman tells the story of that building in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House, and Mark Anthony Wilson looks more broadly at Wright’s Pacific career in Frank Lloyd Wright on the West Coast.
Of less historic and cultural significance than the UNESCO list, perhaps, but surely better known, is the Simon and Garfunkel song “ So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright.” Paul Simon says Art Garfunkel asked him to write a song about Wright; Simon didn’t really know anything about Wright, but he built a song around the name anyway.
Paul Frederickson’s biography of Wright is called Plagued by Fire. Wright’s son, John, is the author of the memoir My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick are the filmmakers of the PBS documentary Frank Lloyd Wright.
Also This Week
June 8, 1950
Sonia Braga was born. The Brazilian actress began her career as a child, and while still a teenager appeared in the Brazilian company of the musical Hair. In the 1970s, she appeared in Brazil’s version of Sesame Street. In the 1980s, she decided to focus on movies and made her international breakthrough in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Braga stars in the 2016 Brazilian film Aquarius as a retired widow who is the last holdout when developers want to buy her apartment building; it’s available for streaming at Kanopy.
June 12, 1967
In the case of Loving v. Virginia, the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional. The state of Virginia argued that there was no violation of equal justice since both parties in the marriage—white and black—were subject to the penalty. The Court rejected that argument, holding that marriage is a fundamental right. Patricia Hruby Powell tells the story of the Lovings in Loving vs. Virginia, a novel in verse.
June 9, 1973
Secretariat wins the Belmont Stakes, becoming the first horse in 25 years to win horse racing’s Triple Crown. Secretariat was so dominant a horse that year that only four other horses entered the race, and he ran the fastest mile-and-a-half race in history, beating the field by more than the length of a football field. William Nack is the author of the biography Secretariat; Lawrence Scanlan’s The Horse God Built focuses on Secretariat’s trainer, Eddie Sweat.
June 10 is National Iced Tea Day
Americans began drinking iced tea in the mid-19th century. Like so many things, it really caught up after it was sold at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, and today, about 85% of the tea consumed in the United States is iced. In Iced Tea, Fred Thompson explains which types of tea make the best iced tea, and offers recipes for 50 different varieties of homemade iced tea.