Frank Lloyd Wright

Although Frank Lloyd Wright designed houses, churches, and commercial buildings in differing styles, he is probably most associated with the Prairie Style, which dates from approximately 1893 to the First World War. It seemed to embody his most significant philosophical ideas about architecture and brought him both national and international acclaim by the time he was forty.

Neil Levine, in The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996), attributes the impetus of the Prairie School to Chicago architect Louis H. Sullivan, with whom Wright worked before establishing his own studio. The group included, among others, Dwight Perkins, Myron Hunt, and Robert Spencer—all housed on an upper floor of Steinway Hall. They worked mainly for middle- to upper-middle-class clients in suburban Chicago, notably Oak Park, rural Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Their work "was a regional revolt and reform then occurring in the visual arts," notes H. Allen Brooks (The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and His Midwest Contemporaries [NY: Norton, 1972]: 4).

"Nature was Wright's constant preoccupation," says Levine (xvii). Wright gained an appreciation for nature, particularly Midwestern nature, from working on his uncles' Wisconsin farm during his teenage summers. There he could observe the horizontal line of the land, the line that he considered domestic and democratic and freeing. "On the flat prairie of the Midwest, breadth would be a sign of shelter, as height was a sign of power and success in the city" (17). It would signify comfort, a quality that Wright wanted to characterize his buildings, particularly his houses.