Tim Vreeland
Frank Lloyd Wright was related on his father’s side to such pillars of respectability as the Lowells of Boston. And on his mother’s side to a well-rooted clan of Wisconsin farmers and preachers. His father, William Cary Wright, was a lawyer, preacher and music teacher who had passed on his love and knowledge of music to his son. Along with this the boy inherited his father’s charm, playful wit and evangelical eloquence. Like his father, he was short in stature (five foot, six inches), physically graceful and fine-boned (Fig. 17).
It was, however, his mother, Anna Lloyd Jones, who educated him. She, in fact, doted on him. It was she who determined that he should become a great architect and who bought him the Froebel blocks, a European kindergarten progressive learning tool that he credited with first having introduced him to the art of which he became a supreme master.
William Cary, the father, walked out of their lives in 1885, never to be seen again, and the marriage contract was dissolved. As one consequence of this, young Frank would become the most deeply concerned and emotionally committed domestic architect of modern times (Fig. 18).
As a youngster, Wright preferred reading, drawing or listening to music to playing with other boys. To prevent him from becoming a sissy, his mother sent him to work on her brother’s farm in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Young Frank hated it. “It’s all pulling tits and shoveling shit,” he complained at the time. However, much later, when Wright inherited all the Spring Green farms from his mother’s family and he found himself master of a grand country estate which he would name Taliesin after the Welsh bard of Arthurian legend, he significantly altered his point of view. He began to idealize pastoral life in Whitmanesque prose; so long as others were doing the actual farm work (namely, his apprentices), he was free to behave like a grandee riding his Tennessee walking horse and driving his 1928 straight-eight Packard touring car (Fig. 7 see EM #199).
When Wright married his first wife, Catherine, she was seventeen and he still a virgin at twenty-one. They were very much in love. He built them a house in Oak Park, a leafy suburb of Chicago, and they lived in it together for twenty years, producing six children. He was a good father and husband all that time. His son John remembers that in those days “No word, however true, could do justice to the mischief in his eyes, nor to the humor he could pack away in a single gesture or facial expression. It was fun to have him about.”
He spared no expense in indulging his family. The children were always dressed in the best that could be had. He said, in describing those days, “As long as we had the luxuries, the necessities could pretty well take care of themselves.”
It was during this idyllic period of his marriage to Catherine, from 1890 to 1910, that Wright produced his first crop of masterpieces. In his own words, “I began with a square” (Fig. 19) and invented the Prairie Style (Fig. 20).
It was, however, his mother, Anna Lloyd Jones, who educated him. She, in fact, doted on him. It was she who determined that he should become a great architect and who bought him the Froebel blocks, a European kindergarten progressive learning tool that he credited with first having introduced him to the art of which he became a supreme master.
William Cary, the father, walked out of their lives in 1885, never to be seen again, and the marriage contract was dissolved. As one consequence of this, young Frank would become the most deeply concerned and emotionally committed domestic architect of modern times (Fig. 18).
As a youngster, Wright preferred reading, drawing or listening to music to playing with other boys. To prevent him from becoming a sissy, his mother sent him to work on her brother’s farm in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Young Frank hated it. “It’s all pulling tits and shoveling shit,” he complained at the time. However, much later, when Wright inherited all the Spring Green farms from his mother’s family and he found himself master of a grand country estate which he would name Taliesin after the Welsh bard of Arthurian legend, he significantly altered his point of view. He began to idealize pastoral life in Whitmanesque prose; so long as others were doing the actual farm work (namely, his apprentices), he was free to behave like a grandee riding his Tennessee walking horse and driving his 1928 straight-eight Packard touring car (Fig. 7 see EM #199).
When Wright married his first wife, Catherine, she was seventeen and he still a virgin at twenty-one. They were very much in love. He built them a house in Oak Park, a leafy suburb of Chicago, and they lived in it together for twenty years, producing six children. He was a good father and husband all that time. His son John remembers that in those days “No word, however true, could do justice to the mischief in his eyes, nor to the humor he could pack away in a single gesture or facial expression. It was fun to have him about.”
He spared no expense in indulging his family. The children were always dressed in the best that could be had. He said, in describing those days, “As long as we had the luxuries, the necessities could pretty well take care of themselves.”
It was during this idyllic period of his marriage to Catherine, from 1890 to 1910, that Wright produced his first crop of masterpieces. In his own words, “I began with a square” (Fig. 19) and invented the Prairie Style (Fig. 20).
Fig. 19 Perspective and plan of the Edwin H. Cheney house of 1903-04. Square in plan, it represents the Prairie House in its simplest, clearest form. In the course of its execution, the architect fell in love with the client’s wife.
Fig. 20 The Fred C. Robie house of 1908 – 10, the quintessential Prairie House with exaggeratedly extended roof eaves expressing Wright’s beloved horizontality.
Had he done nothing else, he would still be considered today an architect of the first rank. He was, however, too restless to stop at a single style and, as we shall see, during the course of a very long life he explored many additional ones, all of which he subsumed under the generic title of “organic architecture.” He explained the term this way:
Down all the avenues of time architecture was an enclosure by nature and the simplest form of enclosure was the box... [However] I was the free son of a free people and I wanted to be free. I think I first consciously began to try to beat the box in the Larkin Building in 1906 . . . . I pushed the staircase towers out from the corners of the main building and made them free-standing individual features to let the light and air in at the corners . . . and a little later [did the same thing] in the Unity Temple . . . . That sense of freedom began which has come into the architecture of today which we call “organic architecture.”
Down all the avenues of time architecture was an enclosure by nature and the simplest form of enclosure was the box... [However] I was the free son of a free people and I wanted to be free. I think I first consciously began to try to beat the box in the Larkin Building in 1906 . . . . I pushed the staircase towers out from the corners of the main building and made them free-standing individual features to let the light and air in at the corners . . . and a little later [did the same thing] in the Unity Temple . . . . That sense of freedom began which has come into the architecture of today which we call “organic architecture.”