Frank Lloyd Wright Architect

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Architect 1867 to 1959 In the vertical art storage rack, you will find the following: Large Reproduction: The Poster of Guggenheim Posters: The Art Elements & Principles posters to use in the

1 Architect 1867 to 1959 In the vertical art storage rack, you will find the following: Large Reproduction: The Poster of Guggenheim Posters: The Art Elements & Principles posters to use in the discussion On the NSS PTA website, you will find digital images available for download as a.zip files (artist works as well as the Elements of Art) These can be sent to the teacher to project on their Smartboards. In the black cabinet, you will find a white binder with a copy of this presentation. Updated December 2017

2 Personal Data Name: Born: Died: Lived: Family: Frank Lloyd Wright (born Frank Lincoln Wright) June 8, 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin April 9, 1959, at the age of 91 in Arizona He was born in Wisconsin and spent most of his life there. He also spent some time living in New York City. Germany, Japan, Illinois, and Arizona. Wright was married three times and fathered 7 children. Professional Data Type of Artist: Artistic Credo: Famous Works: Life Lesson: Architect, draftsman, and designer of furniture, glass art, and other aspects of interior Design. Designed for the American Lifestyle, Organic Architecture and Bringing the outdoors in. Bold geometric shapes in architecture, curves, and rectangles. Conservation of natural environment. The Prairie Style Homes designed with horizontal lines and open interior spaces. Falling Water, 1936, Arizona New low architecture that engages the water Play with Blocks. Build. Explore. Living rooms, car ports, open floor plans. These styles are directly influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright s innovations in residential architecture. Drawing inspiration from his native Midwestern prairie, he coaxed America out of boxlike houses and into wide-open living spaces that suited the American lifestyle (Carla Lind, The Wright Style). Mr. Wright s organic architecture was a radical departure from the traditional architecture of his day, which was dominated by European styles that dated back hundreds of years. He contributed the Prairie and Usonian houses to the vernacular of American residential design, and elements of his designs can be found (at least to some small degree) in a large portion of homes today. While most of his designs were single-family homes (ranging from small homes for families of modest incomes, to mansions like his unbuilt design for Henry Ford), his varied output also includes houses of worship skyscrapers, resorts, museums, government offices, gas stations, bridges, and other masterpieces showing the diversity of Frank Lloyd Wright s talent. He was one of the greatest 20 th Century architects. Frank Lloyd Wright s view on architectural space, ornamentation, and relationship to site, and concerning the place of architecture in art, life, and philosophy have inspired generations of architects and artists all over the world.

3 Frank Lloyd Wright s career was notable in several areas: Practicing Architecture: He designed several hundred buildings, of which around 500 were built. Architectural Theoretician/ Academic: He wrote several books on architecture, and founded and ran a school in the field, training many architects. Artist (Draftsman): His drawings of his buildings and other plans were beautiful and notable in themselves. The L.A. Times said he was a productive artist whose imagination continued to outpace even his long lifetime of work. Interior Design and Furniture: Mr. Wright s design went beyond the building to the finest details of the interior space, including furniture, art glass, and other aspects of interior design Artist Background Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you. Frank Lloyd Wright was born as Frank Lincoln Wright in Richland Center in Southwestern Wisconsin, on June 8, 1867 (a date sometimes reported as 1869). His father, William Carey Wright, was a musician and a preacher. His mother, Anna Lloyd-Jones was a teacher. It is said that Anna placed pictures of great buildings in young Frank s nursery as part of training him from the earliest possible moment as an architect. She hoped he would become an architect. Frank spent some of his time growing up at the farm owned by his uncles near Spring Green, Wisconsin (also in the Southwestern part of the state). Frank was of Welsh heritage and was brought up in the Unitarian faith. When Frank was nine years old, she bought him a set of wooden Froebel blocks at a fair. Frank loved his new toy. There were many things in the package his mother gave him. Frank found polished maple blocks in the shape of cubes, rectangles, cylinders, pyramids, cones and spheres. He also found colored shiny paper for covering the blocks, as well as, little green spheres and straight sticks for joining the shapes into simple structures. While playing with his blocks,, Frank learned that everything is made from basic geometric shapes. The shapes can be hidden within the outer shape of an object, but they are there just the same. Later in his life he was to say, The maple wood blocks are in my fingers to this day. At the age of 11, Frank started working on a family farm in Wisconsin. The summer work was so hard. Frank actually counted the days until school began in the fall. On the farm, Frank had to get up at 4:00 in the morning, feed the pigs, milk the cows, weed the garden, and help in the fields. Life on the farm was not all bad, because Frank liked to be close to nature. He loved the low, rolling hills of the Wisconsin prairie. He learned the magic of growing things. He saw the colors in nature from one season to the next. One day Frank saw a red-orange tiger lily in a green field. When he became an architect, he signed every drawing with a small red square that always reminded him of the beautiful tiger lily in the green field in Wisconsin.

4 Frank found delight when he found the simple shapes of his Froebel blocks hidden in nature. Tiny green spheres appeared when he opened a long, smooth pea pod. Pulling back the husk of an ear of corn exposed the straight rows of square kernels. Feathery green carrot tops showed him where to find plump, orange triangular carrots growing underground. His respect for the simple beauty of nature grew. Frank learned to see pattern in the freshly tilled soil, in the layering of rocks, in the ripples of water, and in the moving clouds. He noticed structures of trees, plants, and spider webs. He studied shapes in insects and animals. He learned to see that nature hides the basic shapes of the circle, square, and triangle within the outer shape of everything. Later in life, these lessons would give him the ideas he would use to create his own style of American architecture. Frank met his first wife, Catherine at a costume party. Soon after meeting, they were married. They were married in Frank decided it was time to build his own home on the land that he already owned in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. Frank wanted his house to remind him of the shapes and colors of nature that he loved on the farm in Wisconsin. He could make this happen if he used building materials that blended together with organic harmony as he had seen in the landscape, where all shapes and colors are part of nature s endless and incredible patterns. At first the house was small. After Frank and Catherine had their six children, Frank needed to make extra rooms for them. He decided to use the room he worked in at home. He divided the room in half to make a girls bedroom and a boys bedroom. The rooms were quite small. To make them feel larger, Frank left a big, open space at the top of the wall separating the two rooms. This allowed light and air to travel freely from one room to the next. The children were delighted and soon discovered that pillows, toys, and secret messages could also travel easily over the wall with no top. Around the table in the dining room were chairs with very high backs. When the children sat on the chairs, the backs seemed to reach up to the ceiling. They felt like Alice in Wonderland in a small private room within a big room. When guest came to dinner, the children giggled upstairs. They wondered how long it would take the guests to guess the secret of the dining room s light. They imagined the surprised look on their faces when they noticed the shadows of the tree branches on the dining room table. It was a wooden grille and paper that covered an empty space in the ceiling where light bulbs were hidden. Before dinner, the children would help Frank put freshly cut tree branches above the glass. A wonderful new addition was found on top of the house. A stairway and a dark hall with a low ceiling led to a mysterious doorway. Behind the door of curtains was a gigantic, sunny playroom. The ceiling high above has another decorative grille. The balcony was their tree house. The children could sit on the window seats and imagine they were looking down on the world from their own fairy tale castle. At Christmas, the best presents were in the big boxes wrapped in fancy paper and tied with ribbons. The children would struggle to unwrap the boxes only to find smaller boxes wrapped the same way inside. Frank watched in delight as they unwrapped box, finding box after box inside. Finally, inside the smallest box was a tiny china doll or a funny mechanical animal.

5 Professional Life Wright briefly studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, after which he moved to Chicago to work for a year in the architectural firm of J. Lyman Silsbee. In 1887, he was hired on as a draftsman in the firm of Adler and Sullivan, run by Louis Sullivan(design) and Dankmar Adler (engineering) at the time the firm was designing Chicago s Auditorium Building. Wright eventually became the chief draftsman, and also the man in charge of the firms residential designs. Under Sullivan, whom Wright called Leiber Meister (beloved master), Wright began to develop his own architectural ideas. He designed houses on his own toward the end, homes Wright called bootlegged which were done against Adler and Sullivan s policies concerning such moonlighting. When Louis Sullivan found out about these homes, Wright was fired from the firm. The bootlegged houses showed the start of Wright s low, sheltering rooflines, the prominence of the central fireplace and the destruction of the box open floor plans. The Adler and Sullivan firm was just the right place to be a young man aspiring to be a great architect, as it was at the leading edge of American architecture at the time. Wright started his own firm in 1893 after being fired from Adler and Sullivan, first working out of the Schiller building (designed by Adler and Sullivan) and then out of the studio which was built onto his home in Oak Park, which is located just west of the city of Chicago. Between 1893 and 1901, 49 buildings designed 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. Frank Lloyd Wright founded the prairie school of architecture, and his art of this early productive period in his life is considered as part of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The Taliesin Fellowship was founded in 1932, with thirty apprentices who came to live and learn under Mr. Wright. An Autobiography served as an advertisement, inspiring many who read it to seek him out. The architect s output became more organized and prolific, with the help of numerous apprentices whom assisted in design detail and site supervision. His most famous work, Falling Water, was designed in The fellowship was expanded as Taliesin West was built in Arizona as a winter location for the school. The Taliesin Associated Architects, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation are living legacies on what Mr. Wright founded in Few buildings were produced during war years, but the G.I bill brought many new apprentices when the war ended. This post-war period until the end of Wright s life was the most productive. He received 270 house commissions, and designed and built the Price Tower skyscraper, the Guggenheim Museum (which required Wright to live in New York City for a time) and the Marin County Civic Center. Wright never retired. He died April 9, 1959 at the age of 91 in Arizona. He was buried at the graveyard at Unity Chapel (which is considered to be his first building) at Taliesin in Wisconsin. In 1985, Olgivanna Wright passed away and one of her wishes was to have Frank Lloyd

Wright s remains cremated and the ashes placed next to hers at Taliesin West. Amid much controversy, this was done. The epitaph at his Wisconsin grave site reads: Love of an idea, is love of God.

6 Wright s remains cremated and the ashes placed next to hers at Taliesin West. Amid much controversy, this was done. The epitaph at his Wisconsin grave site reads: Love of an idea, is love of God. Featured Design Architecture The Guggenheim Museum, New York City, NY The Guggenheim Museum is one of Frank Lloyd Wright s most famous and unique buildings. It was designed by the American Institute of Architects as an example of Wright s architectural contributions to American culture. In 1943, Wright was commissioned to build the museum by Solomon R. Guggenheim, a wealthy art collector. Guggenheim wanted Wright to create a museum to house his vast collection of Non-Object paintings. Most importantly, he wanted the museum to be like no other. After rendering hundreds of sketches and architectural drawings, right based his design on the spiral of a sea shell. There are several tiers of uniform size beginning at the ground level which then expand in size as the building rises. Inside the building, there is a spiraling ramp following the curvilinear form of the façade. Wright s intention was to have visitors enter the museum and take an elevator to the top tier where they would view the art works in a downward path. There is a skylight which filters natural light down to the central court below. The structure is made of concrete. Wright battled with many people in order to get the museum approved. Artists whose work would be exhibited were afraid that the unusual design would make it difficult for people to view their artwork. The museum s first directors, the curator and the Board of Trustees also echoed these sentiments. Robert Moses, New York City s park commissioner at the time, was opposed to the structure and did not approve of the art work which would be exhibited. In order to lessen

the fears of these individuals, Wright prepared a series of detailed drawings

defending his building. In 1956, a building permit was finally issued.

In the 1980 s an addition to the structure was created.

7 the fears of these individuals, Wright prepared a series of detailed drawings illustrating the specific paintings that would be viewed and he published articles defending his building. In 1956, a building permit was finally issued. The museum opened its doors in In the 1980 s an addition to the structure was created. Another gallery was added and the original driveway was filled in and converted to a bookstore and café. Model of the Guggenheim Museum Interior: Floors Interior: Ceiling window

8 Elements of Art: Talking about his architecture Begin with using the Elements of Art posters for discussion. COLOR: Gray- Blends in with the surrounding buildings SHAPE: Round stands out from surrounding buildings, follows nature LINE: What type of lines Curves, spiral, clean lines, contemporary style LIGHT: Use of skylight to let natural light enhance the paintings inside Discussion Questions What does the Guggenheim museum remind you of? (A snail) Have you ever been to an exhibit at the Guggenheim? What seems to be missing from this building? (Windows) How does light get into the building? What type of artwork would you expect to see inside this museum? How can a room or house be made to bring in more of outside and nature? (fewer walls, more windows) Are there any open or organic buildings in Fairfield? (Burr school, Ludlow middle school) What type of homes or buildings are commonly found in Fairfield? Why? (Colonial and cape styles, because many houses were built prior to the modern era.) Do you prefer more traditional or more contemporary houses/buildings? How have buildings changed the world? Can you name some famous buildings you have seen? Why are they important? Sources: Frank Lloyd Wright by Heinz Frank Lloyd Wright for Kids by Thorne-Thomsen Frank Lloyd Wright: A Gatefold Portfolio by Robin Langley Sommer People to Know: Frank Lloyd Wright by David K. Wright World History Series: Architecture by Paula Bryant Pratt Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and Work at Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Home Page at Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust at

Masterpiece: Tree of Life (Art Glass Window), 1904 by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Darwin D. Martin House

Masterpiece: Tree of Life (Art Glass Window), 1904 by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Darwin D. Martin House Keywords: Shape, Line, Repetition, Structure Grade: 4 th Grade Month: September/October Activity: