Should Frank Lloyd Wright Essays - Frank Lloyd Wright, Free Essays

Should Frank Lloyd Wright Essays - Frank Lloyd Wright, Free Essays Should Frank Lloyd Wright Natalie DeFrancesco Class 02 Frank Lloyd Wright 12/4/1999 Bibliography Frank Lloyd Wright was born on June 8th, 1867 in Wisconsin. His heritage was Welsh. His fathers name was William Carey Wright; his occupation was a musician and a preacher of his faith, Unitarian. His mothers name was Anna Lloyd Jones; her occupation was a schoolteacher. It was said that his mother placed pictures of great buildings on the walls of his nursery in order to train him to become an architect. He spent most of is life on his Uncles farm near Spring Green, Wisconsin. Frank briefly studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. When Frank was twenty years old, he moved to Chicago. After he moved there, he got his first job in an Architectural Firm of J. Lyman Silsbee, he worked there for about a year. In 1887, he got a job as a draftsman for Adler and Sullivan; here he eventually became chief draftsman and residential design. Under Sullivan he began to develop his architectural ideas. In 1889 he married his first wife Catherine Tobin. After awhile of developing his own ideas he started to design bootlegged homes which meant that he was going against the firms policy of moonlighting. When the firm found out what Frank was doing, he was fired. These were the start of Wrights low, sheltering rooflines, the prominence of the central fireplace and destruction of the box open floor plans. In 1893, Wright started his own firm; he first worked out of the Schiller Building (designed by Adler and Sullivan). Then he moved into a studio which was built onto his home in Oak Park. Oak Park was an affluent suburb of Chicago, which was located to the west of centercity. From 1893 to 1901, about 49 building designed by Wright were built. This period was brought together by concepts of prairie house ideas. In 1909 he developed and refined his prairie style. He founded the Prairie School of architecture. His art of this early productive period in his life is also considered as part of the Arts and Crafts movement. The productive first phase ended in 1909. He left his wife and his five children to go to Germany. There, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, wife of a former client and his new lover, joined him. For two years, Wright and Cheney lived together at Taliesin, a home that Frank built at the site of his uncles farm near Spring Green, Wisconsin. This ended when a crazed servant murdered Cheney and six others and set fire to Taliesin, which most was destroyed. From 1914 to 1937 was a time of personal turmoil and change for Wright. During this time he rebuilt Taliesin (but it was almost lost due to a bank foreclosure), he divorced Catherine Tobin, married and separated from Miriam Noel (which spent in jail because of this), and met his 3rd wife, Olgivanna Milanoff (a Bosnian Serb who was a student of GI Gurdjieff). Designs of this period included the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (a large complex that required much time in Japan to oversee it), and concrete California residences. Few commissions were completed toward the end of this period, but he did lecture and publish frequently, with books including An Autobiography in 1932. In 1932, the Taliesin fellowship was founded. Thirty apprentices who came to live and learn under Wright. His books served as an advertisement. It inspired many whom read it to seek him out. His out put became more organized and prolific with the help of the numerous apprentices who assisted in design detail and the site supervision. His most famous work Fallingwater was designed in 1863. Fellowship was expanded as Taliesin west was built in Arizona as a winter location for the school. Taliesin Association Architects, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation are living legacies of what Wright founded in 1932. Few building were built during the war years. The GI Bill brought many new apprentices when the war ended. The post war period. To the end of Franks life was the most productive. He received two hundred and seventy house commissions. He designed and built the Price Tower skyscraper, the Guggenheim Museum in New