Happy 150th Birthday, Frank Lloyd Wright! (revised 2025)

Whenever anyone thinks of American architects, the first person who comes to mind for many is Frank Lloyd Wright (FLW). As the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation proudly proclaims "Frank Lloyd Wright changed the way we build and the way we live."

Frank Lloyd Wright, 1954

FLW was born on June 8, 1867 to William Carey Wright, a preacher and musician and Anna Lloyd Jones, a teacher in Richland Center, Wisconsin. His parents divorced when he was 18 years old. He attended the University of Wisconsin but not graduate. He moved to Chicago in 1887 in search of work. After short stints at the Joseph Lyman Silsbee and Beers, Clay, and Dutton firms, he apprenticed at the highly respected Adler and Sullivan firm in 1888. Following a dispute with Louis Sullivan, FLW opened his own practice in 1893. He died on April 9, 1959 in Phoenix, AZ at age 91.

He designed over 1100 structures in a career lasting 70 years. 532 of the designs were built. The Prairie Style with which he is closely associated is mostly horizontal in shape with one story low-pitched roofs, deep overhangs, and generally long rows of casement windows. The goal of his architecture was to be "organic," a physical manifestation of buildings in harmony with the natural environment in which they are placed. The Frank Lloyd Wright Trust provides information about and access to some of the structures FLW built in Chicago. Buffalo, NY has seven of his houses dating from its days as an industrial hub as the 1800s gave way to the early 20th century. FLW designed and built two houses in South Carolina: "Auldbrass Plantation" here in Beaufort County near Yemassee and "Broad Margin" in Greenville.

FLW's domestic life was often chaotic. Wright was known for his disinterest in traditional family life and had more than a few extramarital alliances, some which ended in matrimony, and some which did not. He married Catherine Lee "Kitty" Tobin on June 1, 1889. Together they had 6 children before they divorced in 1922. Perhaps the most notorious of the acknowledged relationships was Mamah Borthwick Cheney who would be killed along with two of her children and  four Taliesin workers by axe-wielding arsonist Taliesin servant, Julian Carlton, in 1914. Wife #2 was a morphine addict, Maude "Miriam" Noel. His third wife was Olga Lazovich Hinzenburg, a dancer whom he met in 1924 and married in 1928. Together they had a daughter and he adopted her daughter from Olga's marriage to Vlademar Hinzenberg, a Russian architect. Olga died in 1985. 

Aspects of his personal life has spawned fictional treatment and a real crime story of murder: 

• Death in a Prairie House : Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders by William R. Drennan, 2008.
• The Women : A Novel by T. C. Boyle, 2009. Olga is the main character in The Women.
• Loving Frank by Nancy Horan, 2007.
• Murder in Perspective : An Architectural Mystery, 1997.

Note: The image of Frank Lloyd Wright above was by New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer: Al Ravenna [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Latest revision: 8 May 2025-gmc