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Frank Lloyd Wright was born as Frank Lincoln Wright on June 8, 1867. He was
born in Richland Center, which is in southern Wisconsin. His father, William
Carey Wright, was a musician and a preacher. His mother, Anna Lloyd-Jones was a
teacher. It is said that his mother placed pictures of great buildings in young
Frank’s nursery as part of training him up from the earliest possible moment to
be an architect.
Wright spent some time growing up on a farm owned by his uncle,
which was located near spring Green, Wisconsin. He was of Welch heritage, and
was brought up in the Unitarian Religion. Wright briefly studied civil
engineering at the university of Wisconsin in Madison, and then moved to Chicago
to work at an architectural firm.
In 1887, he was hired as a draftsman by the
firm of Alder and Sullivan. At the time, the firm was designing Chicago’s
Auditorium Building. Wright eventually became the head draftsman, as well as the
leader of the firm’s residential designs. After obtaining these
responsibilities, Wright began to design and apply his own architectural ideas.
In 1889, he married his first wife, Catherine Tobin.
He also began designing
houses, which was against his firms policy because they were required to follow
the designs sent to them, not make their own.
When his boss discovered this,
Frank was fired. His house designs, however, were incredible. They showed the
start of Wright’s low, sheltering rooflines, the prominence of the central
fireplace, and intricate geometric designs on both doors and windows. Wright
started his own firm in 1893, working out of a studio that was built in onto his
home in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago.
Between 1893 and 1901, 49 buildings by
Wright were built. During this period he began to develop his ideas, which would
come together in his “Prairie House” concept. Into 1909, he developed and
refined the prairie style, and founded this concept in architecture, and his art
of this early productive period in his life is also considered as part of the
arts and crafts movement, because many of his designs not only had plans for the
structure of the house, but ideas of decorating the interior as well.
This very
productive phase in Wrights career ended in 1909, when he left his wife and five
children to go to Germany. He was joined there by Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the
wife of a former client and now his girlfriend.
From 1912 to 1914, Wright and
Cheney lived together at Taliesin, a home he designed near his uncle’s farm in
Spring Green, Wisconsin. This ended when a crazed servant murdered Chaney and
six others, also setting a fire that destroyed most of Taliesin. During the
years 1914 to 1932, Wright rebuilt Taliesin, divorced his first wife, married
and separated form another woman (partially due to the fact that he spent some
time in jail), and met his third wife, Olgivanna Milanoff.
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