Frank Lloyd Wright Biography

Frank Lloyd Wright

(Richlan Center, United States, 1869-Phoenix, id., 1959) American architect.Born into a family of British shepherds, he spent his childhood and adolescence on a farm in Wisconsin, where he lived in close contact with nature, something that conditioned his later conception of architecture.He entered the University of Wisconsin to study engineering, but after two courses, he moved to Chicago, where he entered Ll's studio.Silsbee; As he was too conventional an architect, he did not feel comfortable and left to work with Louis Sullivan, with whom he collaborated closely for six years and whom he always remembered with respect and affection.

Frank Lloyd Wright

His first solo work was the Charnley House in Chicago (1892), which was followed, somewhat later, by a whole series of single-family houses that have in common its compact character and decorative austerity, as opposed to the eclecticism of the time.In these first realizations of domestic architecture, known as prairies houses or "prairies houses", some of the constants of his work are present, such as the predominantly horizontal conception, the interior space organized based on two intersecting axes and the extension of the roof in wings that form porticoes.

Previously, his innovative genius had been revealed in the Larkin Company Administration Building in Buffalo (1904), where he left the central space empty from the ground floor to the ceiling, in order that all the floors were opened by balconies to this wide area.After a trip to Japan in 1905 and another to Europe in 1909-1910, he settled in Spring Green (Wisconsin), where he made the Taliesin I for himself and his family, tragically destroyed by fire.

The loss of his family in this accident affected him in such a way that he decided to leave the United States and move to Japan, where he built, in the style of traditional castles, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.In 1921 he returned to the United States and rebuilt the Taliesin (versions II and III) twice, and made a series of works such as the Millard House in Pasadena.

The House Kaufmann and the Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum (New York)

A period of reflection and theoretical rather than practical approaches followed, before returning to activity with works in which reinforced concrete plays a fundamental role.Among them, his most famous creation occupies a prominent place, the Casa Kaufmann or Casa de la Cascada, which adapts perfectly to the staggering of the terrain and extends the interior space to the outside in a search for integration between architecture and nature.As a result of this construction, Bruno Zevi defined the concept of organic architecture or organicism (a current of which Frank Lloyd Wright is considered the maximum exponent, although he did not formulate it theoretically) against the rationalist architecture of Le Corbusier, another of the great geniuses of contemporary architecture.

This organic architecture had its maximum expression in the Taliesin West complex, in Phoenix, where he managed to masterfully synthesize all the formal elements that had characterized his work to date.His career as a pioneer of modern architecture, which spanned over sixty years, ended brilliantly with the Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum in New York, where the architect experimented with a new conception of space, based on the organic development of curved or circular plants on a continuum.

In the last years of his life he mainly carried out projects, some of which became concrete realities after his death.The architectural legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright can be summarized in two concepts that constitute the center of his reflection: the exterior continuity of the interior space within the harmony between nature and architecture and the creation of an expressive space within an abstract volume.