Frank Lloyd Wright has been called the “greatest American architect” and even the greatest architecture in all history. Art is subjective and we can’t really draw comparisons and pick a winner but he did change the way people think about architecture.
His mother decided he would be an architect from birth and hung etchings of cathedrals in his nursery to encourage his early development.
Wright’s ideas of “organic” architecture influenced a whole generation of architects that came to be known the “Prairie school.” He believed the “flat plane and the horizontal line” were the definitive face of democracy and his ideas of the harmony of the structure with its environment were well ahead of its time.
Influenced by Japanese and Taoist art and philosophy he used the cantilever and many innovative uses of glass and other materials that were taken from the site of the project. His masterpiece Fallingwater is a series of cantilevered slabs of concrete cascaded over a 30-foot waterfall. He kept the inner stone waterfall descending through the living room of the country home.
Other notable projects include the Guggenheim museum in New York City. Most of his clients were independent self-made men who recognized the kindred soul In Wright who preached American ideals and personified freedom and democracy in the walls and beams of his art.
Wright is quotes as saying, “The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.” He believed America needed its own architecture. His utopian Broadacres envisioned a mixed-use city without skyscrapers as he viewed true freedom in architecture as a horizontal experience.
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