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Frank Lloyd Wright was an influential American architect who focused on organic design with natural materials and light. He experimented with materials such as wood, glass, and concrete in his designs, including Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum. Wright believed in using experimental design only if it provided a better way to fulfill a need. He was heavily influenced by Japanese culture and died in 1959 at age 92.
Frank Lloyd Wright, born June 8, 1867, was a prolific and influential American architect. He has designed truly magnificent homes, workplaces, cathedrals and furniture. His forward-thinking designs still look modern and desirable today, further highlighting his genius. Wright focused on organic design with the use of natural light and natural materials such as wood, stone and clay.
Many of Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs emphasized one material such as wood or cinder block over the rest of the materials used. For example, Wright’s 1908 GC Stockman House Prairie Style dining room design is mostly wood, all in the same medium-warm tone with clean rectangular lines. Extra-long wooden spindles on the backs of the dining chairs and wood trim around the windows add an understated, natural elegance to the room.
The exploratory effects of sunlight are a particularly intriguing quality found in some of Wright’s architecture. For example, in HF Johnson’s 1937 Wingspread house, Wright used hundreds of small square windows in the roof. The windows reflect sunlight in tiny square bands all around the brick walls of the high-ceilinged living room for an interesting confetti effect.
Frank Lloyd Wright also experimented with light-reflecting glass windows in the patio roof design of IN Hagan’s house, called Kentuck Knob, in 1954. Hexagonal-shaped glass pieces set into the roof in straight lines are framed by slanted timber. As the sun shines through the patterned glass, glowing white hexagons appear on the gray stone patio floor, creating a uniquely lit pathway.
Wright believed that creativity shouldn’t simply be used for the purpose of experimenting with new ways of doing something. He believed that experimental work should be used if it is the best way to fill a need by providing a better way to do something. Wright’s experimental use of windows made from stacks of glass tubes in the SC Johnson & Son Administration building added the needed kind of diffused light while giving the structure an innovative look.
Wright’s design philosophy is so widely regarded as organic because he believed that architecture should combine innovative ways of interpreting structure with the use of elements from nature. The Japanese have long married natural materials such as plants into creative structures made of metal or wood, and Wright was heavily influenced by Japanese culture. Much of his early work, including the redesign of Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, emphasized the strong, long lines of Japanese architecture.
Wright used the linear, organic approach for Fallingwater, a home he designed for a family who loved waterfalls in their backyard. Fallingwater remains one of Wright’s most famous designs and features the unique concrete balconies tapped to resemble rock ledges in the falls. Wright said of his work Fallingwater: “I think you can feel the water falling when you look at the design.”
Frank Lloyd Wright opted for curved rather than straight lines in his striking spiral-shaped design for the Guggenheim museum in New York, another of Wright’s most famous works. From the outside, the Guggenheim looks like a tower of overlapping concrete rings and inside the floors are inclined. Museum visitors navigate the curved, sloping halls that lead to different sections of displays.
Wright was born and raised in Wisconsin. Wright studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin before moving to Chicago and working in architectural design firms as a draftsman. He opened his own successful architectural practice in 1893. Frank Lloyd Wright married three times and died at age 92 in April 1959 in Arizona.
