Frank Lloyd Wright – one of the most famous architects
•His fame probably comes from his architectural design of residential homes and his
ideas about redesigning cities for people
•If you see an architect designing a home today with glass and stones, it’s the
inspiration of Frank Lloyd Wright
•He was hugely influential, not only famous designer/architecture of modern housing,
but also had all kinds of ideas of what cities should look like
•We will see in a way his urban utopia is to do away with cities
•As we’ve seen, Ebenezer Howard’s idea was to build new urban settlements at a
distance from cities
•Le Corbusier wanted to build high rises, but Wright wanted to build cities in another
way
•Like these other urban utopian thinkers, there are aspects of his ideas and designs
that become central to North America
•More than any of the three other utopian thinkers we’ve looked at so far, it’s hard to
separate Wright’s life and his biography and his work
•His life at times is when he reads things like soap opera?
•He was born in 1867, the year in which Canada became a country; he was born on a
farm, and his community was in Wisconsin
•The images of growing up in rural Wisconsin, images that stayed with him in his
whole life and played a significant role in his designs
•He was always preoccupied with idealization of his rural childhood
•In the case of Frank Lloyd Wright, there were many cases that were unhappy
•At one point when he was a rebellious teenager, his father tried to beat him, so was
close to mother instead
•Again, he was not an architect, he didn’t go to university, he was a high school drop
out
•When he left high school in 1885, his mother arranged a part time job for him to
assist the member of engineering in University of Wisconsin
•At the same time, he enrolled in Engineering in University of Wisconsin and that
lasted a year and never got his degree
•As many people did, since he got a chance, what he set out for at that time was a city
in middle of Chicago (emerging as great industrial centre for architecture and
building)
•Like Daniel Burnham, he was really good at drawing planets and blueprints
•He ended working in architectural company and met Louis Sullivan – regarded as
genius in Chicago architecture at the time, and was well-known figure in social
service in Chicago
•In essence of Frank Lloyd Wright, he worked with Sullivan
•He started as a draftsman and designed more himself
•Combined the engineer’s understanding of technology with the artists
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