Frank Lloyd Wright

His mother's people were Welsh Unitarians who had settled the Wisconsin valley he would spend his life building in. His father was a musician, orator and lawyer who moved the family from town to town and then left it. The parents divorced in 1885 and Wright said he never saw his father again. He entered the University of Wisconsin at 19 as a special student in civil engineering and left without a degree. In Chicago he was hired within days as a draftsman by Joseph Lyman Silsbee, then moved to Adler and Sullivan, where he called Louis Sullivan his lieber Meister. Among the influences he named for the rest of his life were Sullivan, Japanese prints and the Froebel kindergarten blocks he had played with as a boy.

He designed more than 1,000 structures over 70 years, built more than 400 of them, and roughly 300 still stand. The Prairie houses came first, long and horizontal with the hearth at the center, alongside the Larkin Administration Building of 1903 in Buffalo, which sealed its clerks inside a top-lit court, and Unity Temple in Oak Park in 1905. He spent years in Japan on the Imperial Hotel, finished in 1923 and demolished in 1968. Fallingwater, cantilevered over a waterfall at Mill Run for Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr., was completed in 1937 at a cost of 155,000 dollars. The Johnson Wax headquarters in Racine followed in 1939 with dendriform columns and walls of Pyrex tubing. The Usonian houses answered the middle-class budget. Broadacre City answered the city by proposing to dissolve it.

On August 15, 1914 a servant named Julian Carlton set fire to the living quarters at Taliesin and killed seven people with an axe: Mamah Borthwick, for whom Wright had left his wife and children in 1909, her children John and Martha, the draftsman Emil Brodelle, the gardener David Lindblom, the workman Thomas Brunker, and Ernest Weston, another workman's son. Carlton swallowed hydrochloric acid and starved to death seven weeks later. A second fire took the house on April 20, 1925, with Japanese prints Wright valued at up to 500,000 dollars. He had been dealing prints to stay solvent and had been accused of retouching them. In 1926 he and Olgivanna were arrested on a Mann Act charge later dropped. In 1928 the Bank of Wisconsin took Taliesin and sold thousands of his prints at a dollar each.

He went into a Phoenix hospital with abdominal pains on April 4, 1959, was operated on, seemed to be recovering and died five days later at 91. He had claimed all his life to have been born in 1869. The Guggenheim opened that October. He was buried where he had asked to be, in the family plot beside Unity Chapel within sight of Taliesin, until 1985, when members of the Taliesin Fellowship removed the remains against the wishes of relatives and the Wisconsin legislature, cremated them and sent the ashes to Scottsdale on Olgivanna's instructions. The Wisconsin grave is still marked and still empty. In July 2019 UNESCO inscribed eight of his buildings on the World Heritage list.

Frank Lloyd Wright's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Larkin Administration Building building
  Buffalo, New York. Demolished in 1950 1903
• Unity Temple building
  Oak Park, Illinois, and now a World Heritage site 1905
• Imperial Hotel building
  Tokyo. Demolished in 1968 1923
• Fallingwater building
  Mill Run, Pennsylvania, for Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr. It cost 155,000 dollars 1937
• Johnson Wax Headquarters building
  Racine, Wisconsin. Pyrex tubing instead of window glass 1939
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum building
  It occupied him from 1943 and opened about six months after he died 1959

• 1886 aged ~19 Enters the University of Wisconsin as a special student in civil engineering He left without a degree and took an honorary doctorate from the school in 1955.
• 1887 aged ~20 Hired as a draftsman in Chicago, and within months by Adler and Sullivan
• June 1889 aged 21 Marries Catherine Tobin They had six children. The divorce came through in November 1922.
• 1893 aged ~26 Leaves Adler and Sullivan after Sullivan spots a house he designed on the side His contract had forbidden outside work. He took at least nine such commissions.
• 1909 aged ~42 Leaves his wife and children and goes to Italy with Mamah Borthwick
• August 15, 1914 aged 47 Julian Carlton burns Taliesin and murders seven people with an axe Mamah Borthwick, her two children, and four men who worked on the estate.
• April 20, 1925 aged 57 A second fire destroys the house and his Japanese print collection Crossed wires in a new telephone system. He rebuilt and called it Taliesin III.
• 1932 aged ~65 Opens the Taliesin Fellowship with Olgivanna Twenty-three apprentices came the first year. Some 625 passed through in his lifetime.
• April 9, 1959 aged 91 Dies in Phoenix at 91, five days after abdominal surgery

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