Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright Sr., who lived from June 8, 1867, to April 9, 1959, was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator. Across a seventy-year career, he produced over a thousand designs. His work shaped twentieth-century architecture globally, and he taught hundreds of apprentices through the Taliesin Fellowship. Wright’s guiding principle, which he called organic architecture, held that buildings should harmonize with both people and their surroundings. That idea found its clearest expression in Fallingwater (1935), later described as the finest American building ever created. He helped launch the Prairie School movement and imagined the Usonian home as part of Broadacre City, his plan for American urban development. Beyond houses, Wright designed innovative offices, churches, schools, skyscrapers, hotels, museums, and other commercial structures, often integrating custom interiors—leaded glass, flooring, furniture, even tableware—into each project. He authored books and articles and lectured widely in the United States and Europe. In 1991, the American Institute of Architects named him the greatest American architect of all time; in 2019, a selection of his works was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site under the title The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright grew up in rural Wisconsin. He studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin and then apprenticed in Chicago, first briefly with Joseph Lyman Silsbee and later with Louis Sullivan at Adler & Sullivan. He opened his own successful practice in Chicago in 1893 and set up a studio in his Oak Park, Illinois, home in 1898. As his fame grew, his personal life often made news: in 1909 he left his first wife, Catherine “Kitty” Tobin, for Mamah Cheney; in 1914 a staff member murdered Mamah, her children, and others at Wright’s Taliesin estate; his second marriage to Miriam Noel (1923–1927) was tempestuous; and he later courted and married Olgivanna Lazović (1928–1959).

**Early life and education**

**Childhood (1867–1885)** Frank Lloyd Wright was born on June 8, 1867, in Richland Center, Wisconsin, though he claimed throughout his life that his birth year was 1869. A 1987 biography by Brendan Gill asserted that his full name was originally “Frank Lincoln Wright,” chosen by his father, but that his mother soon changed the middle name to Lloyd. No record of “Frank Lincoln Wright” exists before Gill’s book; the earliest official document listing his full name is an 1880 U.S. census, which records a “Frank Loyd Wright” working as a hired hand for his uncle, James Lloyd Jones.

His father, William Cary Wright (1825–1904), was a gifted musician, orator, and occasional preacher who had been admitted to the bar in 1857 and also published music. Originally from Massachusetts, William served as a Baptist minister before adopting the Unitarian faith through his wife’s family. Wright’s mother, Anna Lloyd Jones (1838/39–1923), was a teacher and a member of the Lloyd Jones clan, whose Welsh parents had emigrated from the United Kingdom to Wisconsin. One of her brothers, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, was a prominent Unitarian figure in the Midwest.

According to Wright’s autobiography, his mother believed her first child would grow up to build beautiful buildings. She decorated his nursery with engravings of English cathedrals cut from magazines to encourage that ambition. Wright had two younger sisters: Maginel Wright Enright (1880–1966), a successful children’s book illustrator and mother of writer and illustrator Elizabeth Enright, and Jane Wright (1869–1953).

Architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable described Wright’s childhood as unstable, marked by constant lack of resources, poverty, and anxiety, resulting in what she called a deeply disturbed and obviously unhappy upbringing. His father held pastorates in McGregor, Iowa (1869); Pawtucket, Rhode Island (1871); and Weymouth, Massachusetts (1874). When financial hardship followed them to Weymouth, the family returned to Spring Green, Wisconsin, where the supportive Lloyd Jones family could help William find work. By 1877 they had moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where William gave music lessons and served as secretary to the newly formed Unitarian society. Though a distant parent, he shared his love of music with his children.

In 1876, Anna discovered an exhibit of educational blocks called the Froebel Gifts, the foundation of an innovative kindergarten curriculum. As a trained teacher, she was excited by the program and bought a set, which the nine-year-old Wright spent much time playing with. The geometrically shaped blocks could be assembled in various combinations to form two- and three-dimensional compositions. In his autobiography, Wright wrote that these exercises influenced his approach to design: “For several years, I sat at the little kindergarten table-top… and played… with the cube, the sphere and the triangle—these smooth wooden maple blocks… All are in my fingers to this day…”

In 1881, shortly after Wright turned fourteen, his parents separated. In 1884, his father filed for divorce from Anna on grounds of emotional cruelty, physical violence, and spousal abandonment. Wright attended Madison High School. After the divorce was granted in 1885, his father left Wisconsin. Wright said he never saw his father again.

**Education (1885–1887)** At age nineteen, in 1886, Wright was admitted to the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a special student. He studied civil engineering under professor Allan D. Conover but left without earning a degree; the university later presented him with an honorary degree in 1955.