Frank Lloyd Wright was a Midwesterner by birth. He was born in 1867 in the small, agricultural market town of Richland Center, Wisconsin, about twenty-five miles northwest of Spring Green and Helena Valley, where his mother's family lived and where he himself would eventually make his home.

His father, William Cary Wright, a sometime lawyer, music teacher, and preacher, left New England in 1859 for southwestern Wisconsin, where he met Anna Lloyd Jones, whom he married in 1866. Wright's mother was born in Wales to a family of strong Unitarian faith. Brought to the United States as a small child, she grew up on the farms her parents established in Wisconsin. The family moved around a lot, but finally settled in Madison, where Wright began high school. He never received a diploma, however, for he dropped out in the spring of 1885, around the time his parents divorced and his father left home. Wright was forced to work to help support his mother and two sister. He got a job in the architectural office of Allan Conover, who was also a professor of engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

In early 1887, after nearly two years with Conover and 2 semesters as a "special student" at the university, Wright left Madison and moved to Chicago where he got a job in the office of Joseph Lyman Silsbee. Silsbee was a progressive architect and an important influence on Wright. Sometime in early 1888, Wright left Silsbee and went to work as a draftsman for the firm owned by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan. For six years, Wright worked closely with Sullivan.

While working for Sullivan, Wright designed several residential commissions that came to the firm. Since Adler and Sullivan both preferred to work on larger offices and commercial structures, they turned over smaller commissions such as houses to their young associates.

During this time, Wright married Catherine Tobin and moved to Oak Park, Illinois, where the young couple built a house and eventually had six children. Wright also began accepting independent commissions from neighbors and friends while still working for Sullivan. According to Wright, he left Sullivan's employ in 1893 because he was found out and was asked to leave.

Wright opened an office in Chicago, and in 1895 built a studio attached to his Oak Park home. Though he did most of his design work in Oak Park, Wright kept an office in downtown Chicago as a place to meet with clients.

Wright was also a member of "The Eighteen," a group of architects who met regularly to discuss ideas and projects. This contact with his peers, several of whom would become leaders of the Prairie movement, was critical in the formation of many of Wright's ideas about architecture.

Due to personal hardships, there was a span of time that Wright took off from designing and spent some time in Europe. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Wright was viewed by most architects and historians as an important figure, but a retired one. He was famous for some of his works, but he was over 60 and was forced to make a living lecturing and writing. He produced dozens of articles and books during this period, including his autobiography.

In 1936, however, commissions for three of Wright's most famous and important buildings came all at once. Edgar Kaugman, millionaire owner of a Pittsburgh department store, requested a design for a weekend retreat in the mountains of western Pennsylvania. Herbert Jacobs, a newspaper reporter from Madison, Wisconsin, challenged Wright to design an inexpensive but functional and efficient home. And Herbert Johnson asked Wright if he would submit a design for a new administration building for S.C. Johnson and Son in Racine, Wisconsin.

The amazing Wright, at age 69, took on his second career. Between 1936 and his death in 1959, he designed hundreds of buildings, of which over 200 were actually constructed.

Frank Lloyd Wright died in Scottsdale, Arizona, on April 19, 1959 at the age of 91, a few days after surgery for an intestinal blockage. The next day, William Wesley Peters, who had been the Taliesin Fellowship's first apprentice in 1932, and who was by 1959 Wright's second in command, put Wright's embalmed and coffined body in a truck and drove day and night to Spring Green, Wisconsin. There, a few of Wright's closest friends and other Fellowship members had a simple funeral ceremony presided over by the pastor of the Madison Unitarian Meeting House.

Though Wright had clearly wanted to be buried in Wisconsin, his body was moved to Taliesin West by a request in the will from his latest wife, Olgivanna Milanov Hinzenburg, where Wright's remains still lie. His original gravestone at Unity Chapel remains as a monument.

Decades after his death, Wright is, if anything, more famous today than when he was alive. Perhaps it is because Wright's buildings are timeless. They are interesting, as comfortable, and as inviting today as they were when they were built. Wright was most certainly a genius. He lived in a time of great changes in technology, society, and in values.

Taliesin West

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