About this talk

Running time: 50 minutes

With a brief personalised introduction by John Peter, Frank Lloyd Wright informally discusses his childhood, his experience working with Louis Sullivan, a number of his famous buildings, Taliesin, his life and architectural convictions with both criticism and humour.

Born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, Frank Lloyd Wright briefly studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Moving to Chicago, he worked in the office of the leading residential architect J. Lyman Silsbee.

In 1889 Wright became assistant to Louis Sullivan with the celebrated firm of Adler and Sullivan. He designed a series of houses for the firm and executed some on his own. From his studio and home in Oak Park, Illinois, Wright created the open-plan Prairie Houses such as the 1894 Winslow House in River Forest, Illinois and the 1909 Robie House in Chicago, Illinois. During that same period he designed the Larkin Office Building in Buffalo, New York and the Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, pioneering the use of monolithic reinforced concrete.

Wright journeyed to Europe in 1910 where the publication of his early work by Wasmuth in Berlin, Germany had a seminal influence on the future of modern architecture. Wright went to Japan during the construction of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. He returned to Wisconsin with little work until the textile block houses in the Los Angeles area of the 1920s which includes the Barnsdall and Millard houses.

In 1930 Wright formed the Taliesin Fellowship based in Spring Green, Wisconsin and Scottsdale, Arizona. During this period he designed the famous Kaufmann Falling Water houses in Bear Run, Pennsylvania as well as the Johnson Wax Company Administration Building and Johnson's House Wingspread in Racine, Wisconsin.

One of his last works was one of his most celebrated, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Wright's professional life spanned seventy years. As a speaker, writer, teacher and designer of nearly a thousand buildings, some four hundred built, Wright is the best known architectural genius of the twentieth century.

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