About Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 — April 9, 1959), Mas­ter of the Organic Archi­tec­ture, was one of the most promi­nent and influ­en­tial archi­tects of the first half of the 20^th cen­tury. He not only devel­oped a series of highly indi­vid­ual styles over his extra­or­di­nar­ily long archi­tec­tural career (span­ning the years 1887 – 1959), he influ­enced the whole course of Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture and build­ing. To this day he remains prob­a­bly America’s most famous architect.

Image gallery after the break— Image gallery »

Biog­ra­phy

Early years

Frank Lloyd Wright was born in the agri­cul­tural town of Rich­land Cen­ter, Wis­con­sin, United States, on June 8, 1867, just two years after the end of the Amer­i­can Civil War. He was brought up with strong Uni­tar­ian and tran­scen­den­tal prin­ci­ples (even­tu­ally, in 1905, he would design the Unity Tem­ple in Oak Park, Illi­nois). As a child he spent a great deal of time play­ing with the kinder­garten edu­ca­tional blocks by Friedrich Wil­helm August Froebel (known as Froebel Gifts) given to him by his mother. These con­sisted of var­i­ous geo­met­ri­cally shaped blocks that could be assem­bled in var­i­ous com­bi­na­tions to form three– dimen­sional com­po­si­tions. Wright in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy talks about the influ­ence of these exer­cises on his approach to design. Many of his build­ings are notable for the geo­met­ri­cal clar­ity they exhibit.

Wright began his for­mal edu­ca­tion in 1885 at the Uni­ver­sity of Wisconsin-Madison School for Engi­neer­ing, where he was a mem­ber of a fra­ter­nity, Phi Delta Theta. He took classes part-time for two years while appren­tic­ing under Allan Darst Conover, a local builder and pro­fes­sor of civil engi­neer­ing. In 1887, Wright left the uni­ver­sity with­out tak­ing a degree (although he was granted an hon­orary doc­tor­ate of fine arts from the uni­ver­sity in 1955) and moved to Chicago, Illi­nois, where he joined the archi­tec­tural firm of Joseph Lyman Sils­bee. Within the year, he had left Sils­bee to work for the firm of Adler & Sul­li­van. Begin­ning in 1890, he was assigned all res­i­den­tial design work for the firm. In 1893, Wright was fired from Adler & Sul­li­van by Louis Sul­li­van him­self, after Sul­li­van dis­cov­ered that Wright had been accept­ing clients inde­pen­dently from the firm. Wright estab­lished his own prac­tice and home in the Chicago sub­urb of Oak Park, IL. He had com­pleted around fifty projects by 1901, includ­ing many houses in his hometown.

Between 1900 and 1910, his res­i­den­tial designs were “Prairie Houses” (extended low build­ings with shal­low, slop­ing roofs, clean sky lines, sup­pressed chim­neys, over­hangs and ter­races, using unfin­ished mate­ri­als), so-called because the design is con­sid­ered to com­ple­ment the land around Chicago. These houses are cred­ited with being the first exam­ples of the “open plan.”

In fact, the manip­u­la­tion of inte­rior space in res­i­den­tial and pub­lic build­ings, such as the Uni­tar­ian Unity Tem­ple, in Oak Park, are hall­marks of his style.

He believed that human­ity should be cen­tral to all design. Many exam­ples of this work can be found in Buf­falo, New York, result­ing from a friend­ship between Wright and an exec­u­tive from the Larkin Soap Com­pany, Dar­win D. Mar­tin. In 1902 the Larkin Com­pany decided to build a new admin­is­tra­tion building.

Wright came to Buf­falo and designed not only the first sketches for the Larkin Admin­is­tra­tion Build­ing (com­pleted in 1904, demol­ished in 1950), but also three homes for the company’s executives:

• George Bar­ton House, Buf­falo NY, 1903
• Dar­win D. Mar­tin House, Buf­falo NY, 1904
• William Heath House, Buf­falo NY, 1905
• and later, the Gray­cliff estate, Derby, NY 1926

The houses con­sid­ered the mas­ter­pieces of the late Prairie period (1907−9) are the Fred­er­ick Robie House and the Avery and Queene Coon­ley House, both in Chicago. The Robie House, with its soar­ing, can­tilevered roof lines, sup­ported by a 110-foot-long chan­nel of steel, is the most dra­matic. Its liv­ing and din­ing areas form vir­tu­ally one unin­ter­rupted space. This build­ing had a pro­found influ­ence on young Euro­pean archi­tects after World War I and is some­times called the “cor­ner­stone of mod­ernism.” Wright’s work, how­ever, was not known to Euro­pean archi­tects until the pub­li­ca­tion of the Was­muth Port­fo­lio in 1910.

Europe and per­sonal troubles

In 1904, Wright designed a house for a neigh­bor in Oak Park, Edwin Cheney, and imme­di­ately took a lik­ing to Cheney’s wife, Mamah Borth­wick Cheney. The two fell in love, even though Wright had been mar­ried for over a decade. Often the two could be seen tak­ing rides in Wright’s auto­mo­bile through Oak Park, and they became the talk of the town. Wright’s wife, Kitty, would not grant him a divorce how­ever, and at first, nei­ther would Edwin Cheney grant one to Mamah. In 1909, even before the Robie House was actu­ally com­pleted, Wright and Mamah Cheney eloped to Europe. The scan­dal that erupted vir­tu­ally destroyed Wright’s abil­ity to prac­tice archi­tec­ture in the United States.

Archi­tec­tural his­to­ri­ans have spec­u­lated on why Wright decided to turn his life upside-down. It has been said that he enjoyed liv­ing on the edge. Offered as proof of this are the facts that he was always dig­ging him­self into prob­lems. He spent money almost as soon as he received it, and almost always seemed to be in debt. This argu­ment has been com­pleted with spec­u­la­tion that Wright was him­self hav­ing a pro­fes­sional midlife cri­sis (in 1907 he was already forty years old). Schol­ars argue that he felt by 1907 – 8 that he had done every­thing he could do with the Prairie Style, par­tic­u­larly from the stand­point of the one-family house. To illus­trate, one can ask the ques­tion, “How many dif­fer­ent per­mu­ta­tions of the Prairie Style res­i­dence can you do with­out even­tu­ally feel­ing like you are going nowhere?” Wright was not get­ting larger com­mis­sions for com­mer­cial or pub­lic build­ings, which frus­trated him not only because of the desire for big­ger and bet­ter work, but also because of his immense ego and desire to be rec­og­nized as the archi­tec­tural genius he saw him­self as.

Wright and Mamah Cheney trav­eled exten­sively through­out Europe, where Wright absorbed a great amount of archi­tec­tural his­tory. In 1910, dur­ing a stop in Berlin, Wright, with vir­tu­ally all of his draw­ings, vis­ited the pub­lish­ing house of Ernst Was­muth, who had agreed to pub­lish his work there. In two vol­umes, the Was­muth Port­fo­lio was thus pub­lished, and cre­ated the first major expo­sure of Wright’s work in Europe.

Wright remained in Europe for two years, though Mamah Cheney left for the United States a few times, and set up home in Fiesole, Italy. Dur­ing this time, Edwin Cheney granted her a divorce, though Kitty Wright again refused to grant one to her hus­band. After Wright’s return to the United States in 1911, he moved to Spring Green, Wis­con­sin, to land that was held by his mother’s fam­ily, and began to build him­self a new home, which he called talesian.

More per­sonal turmoil

On August 15, 1914, while Wright was in Chicago com­plet­ing a large project, Mid­way Gar­dens, Julian Carl­ton, a male ser­vant whom he had hired sev­eral months ear­lier, set fire to the liv­ing quar­ters of Tal­iesin and mur­dered seven peo­ple with an axe as the fire burned. The dead were: Mamah, her two chil­dren John and Martha, a gar­dener, a drafts­man, a work­man, and the workman’s son. Two peo­ple sur­vived the mêlée, one of whom helped to put out the fire that almost com­pletely con­sumed the res­i­den­tial wing of the house.

In 1923, Wright’s mother, Anna, died. Wright wed Miriam Noël in Novem­ber 1923, but her addic­tion to mor­phine led to the fail­ure of the mar­riage in less than one year. In 1924, after the sep­a­ra­tion, Wright met Olga (Olgi­vanna) Lazovich Hinzen­burg, at the Pet­ro­grad Bal­let. They moved in together at Tal­iesin in 1925, but in 1926, Olga’s ex-husband sought cus­tody of his daugh­ter. In Min­netonka, Min­nesota, Wright and Olgi­vanna were accused of vio­lat­ing the Mann Act and arrested in Octo­ber 1925. The charges were dropped in 1926. Dur­ing this time period, Wright designed his last res­i­den­tial com­plex for Dar­win D. and Isabelle Mar­tin in the Buf­falo, NY area, the Gray­cliff estate. The cou­ple mar­ried in 1928.

Endur­ing legacy

Wright is respon­si­ble for a con­cept or a series of extremely orig­i­nal con­cepts of sub­ur­ban devel­op­ment united under the term Broad­acre City. He pro­posed the idea in his book The Dis­ap­pear­ing City in 1932, and unveiled a very large (12 by 12 feet) model of this com­mu­nity of the future, show­ing it in sev­eral venues in the fol­low­ing years. He went on devel­op­ing the idea until his death.

It was also in the 1930s that Wright first designed “Uson­ian” houses. Intended to be highly prac­ti­cal houses for middle-class clients, the designs were based on a sim­ple, yet ele­gant geom­e­try. He would later use sim­i­lar, ele­men­tary forms in his First Uni­tar­ian Meet­ing House built in Madi­son, Wis­con­sin, between 1947 and 1950.

Wright was awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1941.

His most famous pri­vate res­i­dence was con­structed from 1935 to 1939 ”” Falling­wa­ter ”” for Mr. and Mrs. E.J. Kauf­mann Sr., at Bear Run, Penn­syl­va­nia. It was designed accord­ing to Wright’s desire to place the occu­pants close to the nat­ural sur­round­ings, with a stream and water­fall run­ning under part of the build­ing. The con­struc­tion is a series of can­tilevered bal­conies and ter­races, using lime­stone for all ver­ti­cals and con­crete for the hor­i­zon­tals. The house cost $155,000, includ­ing the architect’s fee of $8,000. Kaufmann’s own engi­neers argued that the design was not sound. They were over­ruled by Wright, but work­men secretly added extra steel to the hor­i­zon­tal con­crete ele­ments. There is a dif­fer­ence of opin­ion as to whether Wright’s orig­i­nal design would have with­stood the test of time. In 1994, Robert Sil­man and Asso­ciates exam­ined the build­ing and devel­oped a plan to restore the struc­ture. In the late 1990s, steel sup­ports were added under the low­est can­tilever until a detailed struc­tural analy­sis could be done. In March 2002, post-tensioning of the low­est ter­race was completed.

Wright prac­ticed what is known as organic archi­tec­ture, an archi­tec­ture that evolves nat­u­rally out of the con­text, most impor­tantly for him the rela­tion­ship between the site and the build­ing and the needs of the client. Houses in wooded regions, for instance, made heavy use of wood, desert houses had ram­bling floor plans and heavy use of stone, and houses in rocky areas such as Los Ange­les were built mainly of cin­der block. Wright’s cre­ations took his con­cern with organic archi­tec­ture down to the small­est details. From his largest com­mer­cial com­mis­sions to the rel­a­tively mod­est Uson­ian houses, Wright con­ceived vir­tu­ally every detail of both the exter­nal design and the inter­nal fix­tures, includ­ing fur­ni­ture, car­pets, win­dows, doors, tables and chairs, light fit­tings and dec­o­ra­tive ele­ments. He was one of the first archi­tects to design and sup­ply custom-made, purpose-built fur­ni­ture and fit­tings that func­tioned as inte­grated parts of the whole design, and he often returned to ear­lier com­mis­sions to redesign inter­nal fit­tings. His Prairie houses use themed, coör­di­nated design ele­ments (often based on plant forms) that are repeated in win­dows, car­pets and other fit­tings. He made inno­v­a­tive use of new build­ing mate­ri­als such as pre­cast con­crete blocks, glass bricks and zinc cames (instead of the tra­di­tional lead) for his lead­light win­dows, and he famously used Pyrex glass tub­ing as a major ele­ment in the Johnson’s Wax build­ing. Wright was also one of the first archi­tects to design and install custom-made elec­tric light fit­tings, includ­ing some of the very first elec­tric floor lamps, and his very early use of the then-novel spher­i­cal glass lamp­shade (a design pre­vi­ously not pos­si­ble due to the phys­i­cal restric­tions of gas lighting).

As Wright’s career pro­gressed, so as well did the mech­a­niza­tion of the glass indus­try. Wright fully embraced glass in his designs and found that it fit well into his phi­los­o­phy of organic archi­tec­ture. Glass allowed for inter­ac­tion and view­ing of the out­doors while still pro­tect­ing from the ele­ments. In 1928, Wright wrote an essay on glass in which he com­pared it to the mirror’s of nature; lakes, rivers and ponds. One of Wright’s ear­li­est uses of glass in his works was to uti­lize strung panes of glass along whole walls in an attempt to cre­ate light screens to join together solid walls. By uti­liz­ing this large amount of glass, Wright sought to achieve a bal­ance between the light­ness and airi­ness of the glass and the solid, hard walls. Arguably, Wright’s most well– known art glass is that of the Prairie style. The sim­ple geo­met­ric shapes that yield to very ornate and intri­cate win­dows rep­re­sent some of the most inte­gral orna­men­ta­tion of his career.

One of his projects, Monona Ter­race, orig­i­nally designed in 1937 as City and County Offices for Madi­son, Wis­con­sin, was com­pleted in 1997 on the orig­i­nal site, using a vari­a­tion of Wright’s final design for the exte­rior with the inte­rior design altered by its new pur­pose as a con­ven­tion cen­ter. The “as-built” design was car­ried out by Wright’s appren­tice Tony Put­tnam. Monona Ter­race was accom­pa­nied by con­tro­versy through­out the sixty years between the orig­i­nal design and the com­ple­tion of the structure.

A lesser known project that never came to fruition was Wrights plan for Emer­ald Bay, Lake Tahoe [2]. Few Tahoe Locals are even aware of the iconic amer­i­can archi­tects plan for their nat­ural treasure.

Wright’s per­sonal life was a col­or­ful one that fre­quently made head­lines. He mar­ried three times: Cather­ine Lee Tobin in 1889, Miriam Noël in 1922, and Olga Milanov Hinzen­berg (Olgi­vanna) in 1928. Olgi­vanna had been liv­ing as a dis­ci­ple of the Armenian-Greek mys­tic G.I. Gur­d­ji­eff, and her expe­ri­ences with Gur­d­ji­eff influ­enced the for­ma­tion and struc­ture of Wright’s Tal­iesin Fel­low­ship in 1932. The meet­ing of Gur­d­ji­eff and Wright is explored in Robert Lepage’s The Geom­e­try Of Mir­a­cles. Olgi­vanna con­tin­ued to run the Fel­low­ship after Wright’s death, until her own death in Scotts­dale, Ari­zona in 1985. Despite being a high-profile archi­tect and almost always in demand, Wright would find him­self con­stantly in debt thanks in part to his lav­ish lifestyle. In one instance Wright was over $1,000 in debt, and report­edly would bor­row $1,500 from a friend only to spend more than half of it on clothes, gifts, and trips.

Wright died on April 9, 1959, hav­ing designed an enor­mous num­ber of sig­nif­i­cant projects includ­ing the Solomon R. Guggen­heim Museum in New York City, a build­ing which occu­pied him for 16 years (1943”“59) and is prob­a­bly his most rec­og­nized mas­ter­piece. The build­ing rises as a warm beige spi­ral from its site on Fifth Avenue; its inte­rior is sim­i­lar to the inside of a seashell. Its unique cen­tral geom­e­try was meant to allow vis­i­tors to expe­ri­ence Guggenheim’s col­lec­tion of nonob­jec­tive geo­met­ric paint­ings with ease by tak­ing an ele­va­tor to the top level and then view­ing art­works by walk­ing down the slowly descend­ing, cen­tral spi­ral ramp, which fea­tures a floor embed­ded with cir­cu­lar shapes and tri­an­gu­lar light fix­tures, in order to com­ple­ment the geo­met­ric nature of the struc­ture. Unfor­tu­nately, when the museum was com­pleted, a num­ber of impor­tant details of Wright’s design were ignored, includ­ing his desire for the inte­rior to be painted off-white. Fur­ther­more, the Museum cur­rently designs exhibits to be viewed by walk­ing up the curved walk­way rather than walk­ing down from the top level.

Wright built 362 houses. About 300 sur­vive as of 2005. Three have been lost to forces of nature: the water­front house for W. L. Fuller in Pass Chris­t­ian, Mis­sis­sippi, which was destroyed by Hur­ri­cane Camille in August 1969, the Louis Sul­li­van Bun­ga­low of Ocean Springs, Mis­sis­sippi, which was destroyed by Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina in 2005, and the James Charn­ley Bun­ga­low of Ocean Springs, Mis­sis­sippi, which was also gut­ted by Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina in 2005. The Ennis House in Cal­i­for­nia has also been dam­aged by earth­quake and rain-induced ground move­ment. While a num­ber of the houses are pre­served as museum pieces and mil­lions of dol­lars are spent on their upkeep, other houses have trou­ble sell­ing on the open mar­ket due to their unique designs, gen­er­ally small size and out­dated fea­tures. As build­ings age their struc­tural defi­cien­cies are increas­ingly revealed, and Wright’s designs have not been immune from the pas­sage of time. Some of his most dar­ing and inno­v­a­tive designs have required major struc­tural repair, and the soar­ing can­tilevered ter­races of Falling­wa­ter are but one exam­ple. (A com­mon joke was once how “Falling­wa­ter” is falling into the water.) Some of these defi­cien­cies can be attrib­uted to Wright’s push­ing of mate­ri­als beyond the state of the art, oth­ers to some­times less than rig­or­ous engi­neer­ing, and still oth­ers to the nat­ural wear and tear of the ele­ments over time.

Tur­moil fol­lowed Wright even many years after his death in 1959. In 1985, fol­low­ing the death of Olgi­vanna, Wright’s third wife and often a source of con­tro­versy, it was learned that her dying wish had been that Wright, her daugh­ter by a first mar­riage and her­self all be cre­mated and relo­cated to Scotts­dale, Ari­zona. Dur­ing the nearly 30-year period prior to Olgivanna’s death, Wright’s body had lain interred near his birth­place and later-life home in Wis­con­sin. This place, called The Val­ley, was also home to one of his many unfin­ished projects, The Unity Tem­ple. Olgivanna’s plan to exhume her late-husband and cre­mate him, her daugh­ter and her­self called for a memo­r­ial gar­den, already in the works, to be fin­ished and pre­pared for their remains. Despite the fact that the gar­den had yet to be fin­ished, the remains were pre­pared and sent to Scotts­dale where they waited in stor­age for an uniden­ti­fied amount of time before being interred in the memo­r­ial area. Today, any­one who vis­its a small ceme­tery attached to a corn field near Rich­land Cen­ter, Wis­con­sin to look upon a grave­stone marked with Wright’s name, will be vis­it­ing an empty grave.

In 1992 The Madi­son Opera in Madi­son, Wis­con­sin com­mis­sioned and pre­miered the opera Shin­ing Brow, by com­poser Daron Hagen and libret­tist Paul Mul­doon based on events early in Wright’s life. The work has since received numer­ous revivals. In 2000, Work Song: Three Views of Frank Lloyd Wright, a play based on the rela­tion­ship between the per­sonal and work­ing aspects of Wright’s life, debuted at the Mil­wau­kee Reper­tory Theater.

One of Wright’s sons, Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., known as Lloyd Wright, was also a notable archi­tect in Los Ange­les. Lloyd Wright’s son, (and Wright’s grand­son) Eric Lloyd Wright, is cur­rently an archi­tect in Mal­ibu, California.

Another son and archi­tect, John Lloyd Wright, invented Lin­coln Logs in 1918.

The Oscar-winning actress Anne Bax­ter was his granddaughter.

Wright also designed his own cloth­ing. His fash­ion sense was unique and he usu­ally wore very expen­sive suits, flow­ing neck­ties, and capes as well as dri­ving a yel­low con­vert­ible, which earned him many speed­ing tickets.

Often, Wright designed not only the build­ings, but the fur­ni­ture as well. Some of the built-in fur­ni­ture remains, while other restora­tions have included replace­ment pieces cre­ated using his plans.

Influ­ences on architecture

Wright responded to the trans­for­ma­tion of domes­tic life that occurred at the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, when ser­vants became a less promi­nent or com­pletely absent fea­ture of most Amer­i­can house­holds, by devel­op­ing homes with pro­gres­sively more open plans. This allowed the woman of the house to work in her ‘work­place’, as he often called the kitchen, yet keep track of and be avail­able for the chil­dren and/or guests in the din­ing room. Much of mod­ern archi­tec­ture, includ­ing the early work of Mies van der Rohe, can be traced back to Wright’s inno­v­a­tive work.

His ‘Uson­ian’ homes set a new style for sub­ur­ban design that was fol­lowed by count­less devel­op­ers. Many fea­tures of mod­ern Amer­i­can homes date back to Wright; open plans, slab-on-grade foun­da­tions, and sim­pli­fied con­struc­tion tech­niques that allowed more mech­a­niza­tion or at least effi­ciency in build­ing are amongst his innovations.

Some of his Works

• See the ‘Wikipedia’ arti­cle: List of Frank Lloyd Wright works

• Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Stu­dio, Oak Park, Illi­nois, 1889
• William Her­man Winslow Res­i­dence, River For­est, Illi­nois, 1894
• Ward Win­field Willits Res­i­dence, and Gardener’s Cot­tage and Sta­bles, High­land Park, Illi­nois, 1901
• Dana-Thomas House State His­toric Site, Spring­field, Illi­nois, 1902
• Larkin Admin­is­tra­tion Build­ing, Buf­falo, New York, 1903
• Dar­win D. Mar­tin House, Buf­falo, New York, 1903 – 1905
• Unity Tem­ple, Oak Park, Illi­nois, 1904
• Fred­er­ick C. Robie Res­i­dence, Chicago, Illi­nois, 1906
• Tal­iesin I, Spring Green, Wis­con­sin, 1911
• Mid­way Gar­dens, Chicago, Illi­nois, 1913
• Impe­r­ial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan, 1915 demol­ished, 1968, lobby and pool recon­structed in 1976 in at Meiji Mura, near Nagoya, Japan
• Hol­ly­hock House (Aline Barns­dall Res­i­dence), Los Ange­les, Cal­i­for­nia, 1917
• Ennis Res­i­dence, Los Ange­les, Cal­i­for­nia, 1923 Tal­iesin West Panorama from the “bow” look­ing at the “ship” Enlarge Tal­iesin West Panorama from the “bow” look­ing at the “ship”
• Kauf­mann Res­i­dence, Falling­wa­ter, Bear Run, Penn­syl­va­nia, 1935
• John­son Wax Head­quar­ters, Racine, Wis­con­sin, 1936
• Her­bert F. John­son Res­i­dence (“Wing­spread”), Wind Point, WI, 1937
• Tal­iesin West, Scotts­dale, Ari­zona, 1937
• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Florida South­ern Col­lege Works, 1940s
• First Uni­tar­ian Soci­ety, Shore­wood Hills, Wis­con­sin, 1947
• Her­man T. Moss­berg Res­i­dence, South Bend, Indi­ana, 1948
• Thomas Keys Res­i­dence, Rochester, Min­nesota, 1950
• Louis Pen­field House, Willoughby Hills, Ohio, 1955 Price Tower, Bartlesville, Okla­homa Enlarge Price Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma
• Price Tower, Bartlesville, Okla­homa, 1956
• Annun­ci­a­tion Greek Ortho­dox Church, Wauwatosa, Wis­con­sin, designed in 1956, com­pleted in 1961
• Marin County Civic Cen­ter, San Rafael, CA, 1957”“66 (fea­tured in the movies Gat­taca & THX 1138)
• The Illi­nois, mile-high tower in Chicago, 1956 (unbuilt)

Ref­er­ences

Works Cited in Article

1. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Glass Designs, Carla Lind, Pome­gran­ate Artbooks/Archetype Press, 1995.
2. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biog­ra­phy, Meryle Secrest, Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1992.

Selected books and arti­cles on Wright’s philosophy

• Frank Lloyd Wright, by Robert McCarter
• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Uson­ian Homes: Designs for Mod­er­ate Cost One-Family Homes, by John Sergeant
• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Uson­ian Homes (Wright at a Glance Series), by Carla Lind
• “In the Cause of Archi­tec­ture,” Archi­tec­tural Record, March, 1908, by Frank Lloyd Wright. Pub­lished in Frank Lloyd Wright: Col­lected Writ­ings, vol. 1.
• Nat­ural House, The, by Frank Lloyd Wright
• Truth Against the World: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks for an Organic Archi­tec­ture, ed. by Patrick Meehan
• Under­stand­ing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Archi­tec­ture, by Don­ald Hoffman
• Uso­nia : Frank Lloyd Wright’s Design for Amer­ica, Alvin Rosenbaum

Biogra­phies on Wright

• Many Masks, by Bren­dan Gill
• Frank Lloyd Wright, by Ada Louise Huxtable
• Frank Lloyd Wright: a Biog­ra­phy, by Meryle Secrest
• Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and Archi­tec­ture, by Robert Twombly
• The Fel­low­ship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taleisin Fel­low­ship, by Roger Fried­land and Harold Zellman

Selected sur­vey books on Wright’s work

• Archi­tec­ture of Frank Lloyd Wright, The, by Neil Levine
• Archi­tec­ture of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Com­plete Cat­a­log, The, by William Allin Stor­rer ISBN 0−226−77623−9
• Frank Lloyd Wright: America’s Mas­ter Archi­tect, by Kathryn Smith
• Frank Lloyd Wright: Archi­tect, by the Museum of Mod­ern Art
• Frank Lloyd Wright Com­pan­ion, The, by William Allin Stor­rer ISBN 0−226−77624−7
• Frank Lloyd Wright: Mas­ter­works, by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer
• Wrightscapes: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Land­scape Designs, by Charles and Berdeana Aguar
• Wright Space: Pat­tern and Mean­ing in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Houses by Grant Hildebrand
• Frank Lloyd Wright Field Guide, by Thomas A. Heinz ISBN 0−8101−2244−8
• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Glass Designs, by Carla Lind

Arti­cle from Wikipedia. See also ‘The Frank Lloyd Wright Foun­da­tion’ web­site.

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