Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was an influential American architect and designer who sought to create visual harmony between society and nature through design. The architect created the idea of organic architecture, which prioritized the melding of man-made buildings with nature. This process posited commonly repeated materials and motifs throughout the structure. “The good building is not one that hurts the landscape, but one which makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building was built,” he once said. Wright not only drew inspiration from nature, but from his mentor the famed architect Louis Sullivan and the Japanese woodblock master Hiroshige. Born on June 8, 1867 in Richland Center, WI, he went on to study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1886. However, before completing his studies he left to pursue an architecture career in Chicago. In his personal life, he was known for his numerous extra-marital affairs and his dramatic divorce from Kitty Wright. He died at the age of 92 on April 9, 1959 in Phoenix, AZ. His legacy lives on in iconic homes such as Fallingwater (1936-1939) in Mill Run, PA, Robie House (1909) in Chicago, IL, and perhaps most famously the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1959) in New York.