Frank Lloyd Wright :: essays research papers

Frank Lloyd Wright Frank Lloyd Wright was born as Frank Lincoln Wright in Richland Center in southwestern Wisconsin, on June 8, 1867. His father, William Carey Wright, was a musician and a preacher. His mother, Anna Lloyd-Jones was a teacher(1 Compton). It is said that Anna Lloyd-Jones placed pictures of great buildings in young Frank's nursery as part of training him up from the earliest possible moment as an architect. Wright spent some of his time growing up at the farm owned by his uncles near Spring Green, Wisconsin. Frank Lloyd Wright was of Welsh ethnic heritage, and was brought up in the Unitarian faith. Wright briefly studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, after which he moved to Chicago to work for a year in the architectural firm of J. Lyman Silsbee. In 1887, he hired on as a draftsman in the firm of Adler and Sullivan, run by Louis Sullivan (design) and Dankmar Adler (engineering) at the time the firm was designing Chicago's Auditorium Building(1 Compton). Wright eventually became the chief draftsman, and also the man in charge of the firm's residential designs. Under Sullivan, whom Wright called "Lieber Meister" (beloved master), Wright began to develop his own architectural ideas. In 1889 he married his first wife, Catherine Tobin. He also designed houses on his own toward the end, homes Wright called â€Å"bootlegged† (2 Encarta) which were done against Alder and Sullivan's policies concerning such moonlighting. When Louis Sullivan found out about these homes, Wright was fired from the firm. The bootlegged houses showed the start of Wright's low, sheltering rooflines, the prominence of the central fireplace, and "the destruction of the box" open floorplans. The Adler and Sullivan firm was just the right place to be for a young man aspiring to be a great architect, as it was at the leading edge of American architecture at the time. Wright started his own firm in 1893 after being fired from Adler and Sullivan, first working out of the Schiller building (designed by Adler and Sullivan) and then out of a studio which was built onto his home in Oak Park, an affluent suburb of Chicago which is located just to the west of the center of the city. Between 1893 and 1901, 49 buildings designed by Wright were built. During this period he began to develop his ideas which would come together in his "Prairie House" concept(1 Compton). Into 1909, he developed and refined the prairie style. Frank Lloyd Wright founded the â€Å"prairie school† of architecture, and his art of this early productive period in