Frank Lloyd Wright

"Be different"

Ask the average citizen to name a famous American architect and you can bet that their answer will be Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright gained such cultural primacy for good reason: he changed the way we build and live. Designing 1,114 architectural works of all types — 532 of which were realized — he created some of the most innovative spaces in the United States. With a career that spanned seven decades before his death in 1959, Wright’s visionary work cemented his place as the American Institute of Architects’ “greatest American architect of all time.”

Leaving a Legacy

Usonian Architecture

Responding to the financial crisis of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression that gripped the United States and the rest of the world, Wright began working on affordable housing , which developed into the Usonian house. Wright’s Usonians were a simplified approach to residential construction that reflected both economic realities and changing social trends. In the Usonian houses, Wright was offering a simplified, but beautiful environment for living that Americans could both afford and enjoy.

Prairie Style

Wright’s work from 1899 to 1910 belongs to what became known as the “Prairie Style.” With the “Prairie house”— a long, low, open plan structure that eschewed the typical high, straight-sided box in order to emphasize the horizontal line of the prairie and domesticity— Wright established the first truly American architecture. In a Prairie house, “the essential nature of the box could be eliminated,” Wright explained. Interior walls were minimized to emphasize openness and community.

Want more info about the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation?

After Wright’s death, most of his archives were stored at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Taliesin (in Wisconsin), and Taliesin West (in Arizona.) These collections included more than 23,000 architectural drawings, about 40 large-scale architectural models, some 44,000 photographs, 600 manuscripts and more than 300,000 pieces of office and personal correspondence. Most of these models were constructed for MoMA's retrospective of Wright in 1940. In 2012, in order to guarantee a high level of conservation and access as well as to transfer the considerable financial burden of maintaining the archive, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation partnered with the Museum of Modern Art and the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library to move the archive's content to New York. Wright's furniture and art collection remains with The Foundation, which will also have a role in monitoring the archive. These three parties established an advisory group to oversee exhibitions, symposiums, events and publications.