Frank Lloyd Wright Essays (1501 words) - Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright Frank Lloyd Wright .......having a good start not only do I fully intend to be the greatest architect who has yet lived, but fully intend to be the greatest architect who will ever live. Yes, I intend to be the greatest architect of all time. - Frank Lloyd Wright 1867-1959 CHILDHOOD Born in Richland Center, in southwestern Wisconsin, on June 8, 1867 (sometimes reported as 1869), Frank Lincoln Wright, who changed his own middle name to Lloyd, was raised under the influence of a Welsh heritage. The Lloyd-Jones family, his mothers side of the family, had a great influence on Wright throughout his life. The family was Unitarian in faith and lived close to each other. Major emphasis within the Lloyd-Jones family included education, religion, and nature. Wrights family spent many evenings listening to William Lincoln Wright read the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Blake. His aunts Nell and Jane opened a school of their own, pressing the philosophies of the German educator, Froebel. Wright was brought up in a comfortable, but certainly not warm household. His father, William Carey Wright, who worked as a preacher and a musician, moved from job to another, dragging his family across the United States. Possibly as a result of this upheaval, Wrights parents divorced when while he was still young. His mother, Anna, relied heavily upon her many brothers, sisters and uncles, and Wright was intellectually guided by his aunts and his mother. Before Wright was even born, his mother had decided that her son was gong to be a great architect. Using Froebels geometric blocks to entertain and educate her son, Mrs. Wright must have struck the genius that her son possessed. Use of imagination was encouraged and Wright was given free run of the playroom filled with paste, paper, and cardboard. On the door were the words, SANCTUM SANCTORUM (Latin for place of inviolable privacy). Wright was seen as a dreamy and sensitive child, and cases of him running away while working on the farmlands with his uncles were noted. This pattern of running away from one thing or another continued throughout his lifetime. WRIGHTS FIRST BREAK In 1887, at the age of twenty, Frank Lloyd Wright moved to Chicago. During the late nineteenth century, Chicago was a booming, crazy place. With an education in engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Wright found a job as a draftsman in a Chicago architectural firm. During this short time with the firm of J. Lyman Silsbee, Wright started on his first project, the Hillside Home for his aunts, Nell and Jane. Impatiently moving forward, Wright got a job at one of the best known firms in Chicago at the time, Adler and Sullivan. Sullivan was to become Wrights greatest mentor. LOUIS SULLIVAN: LIEBER MEISTER Wright referred to Sullivan as Lieber Meister (beloved master). He admired his talent for ornamentation, and his skill of drawing intricate plans and designs. Wright picked up on the ways of Sullivan and soon became ahead of Alder in importance within the firm. Wrights relationship between him and his employer caused great amounts of tension between Wright and his fellow draftsmen, as well as with Sullivan and Adler. Wright was assigned the residential contracts of the firm. His work soon expanded as he accepted jobs outside of the firm. When Sullivan found out about this in 1893, he called Wright on a breach of contract. Rather than to drop the night jobs, Wright walked out on the firm. When Wright left the company, Sullivans quantity of contracts declined quickly. Sullivan soon ran into economic troubles and his international reputation dwindled by 1920. Sullivan was soon regarded as worthless to the architectural world. He resorted to alcoholism and died in 1924 without regaining the glory of what was held in his early years in Chicago. LIFE AFTER THE FIRM Wright quickly built up a practice in residential architecture. At one point in his career, Wright would produce 135 buildings in ten years. Wright took a different approach to architecture by designing the furniture, light fixtures, and other things that were in the structures that he made. He developed a unique type of architecture that was known as the Prairie style. Dominated by the horizontal line, the style would make-up the type of buildings designed in the 1900-1913 era of his career. Wright had two other distinctive styles and a period for each one of them, one being the Textile block (1917-1924) and the other the Usonian (1936-1959), which is the most familiar to modern world. In 1909