Frank Lloyd Wright influenced 20th century architecture more than any other man. He outshone other architects not so much by the prizes and honors he won as by his refusal to compromise. He early decided that man's buildings should be designed to suit man's nature and the nature of the land, and he never compromised in the process of creating an indigenous and original American architecture. Others still flatter him in the sincerest way: they imitate his buildings, take up "new" materials he used long ago and try to build anew in his old ways.
Wright did not create a style, or believe in one. Rather, every new building of his embodied one idea: that the building should be true to its purpose and to Nature surrounding it. For more than half a century, he pursued this idea with infinite variety.
Schooled as a civil engineer in the 1880's Wright never lost the engineer's awareness of his materials and of the building site. As a draftsman and budding architect in the office of Alder and Sullivan, he caught Louis Sullivan's idea "Form follows function" and his love of integral ornament. At the turn of the century, Wright designed Prairie Houses, built low, hugging the ground, looking as if they grew out of the land they were on. Their large, non-box-like rooms flowed together. Also early in his career he designed churches and commercial buildings such as had never been seen before. He was the first to conceive of and build a mechanically ventilated office building with all-steel furnishings, the Larkin Building in Buffalo, New York, in 1904. In the 1930's and 1940's he built a truly modern administration building and laboratory tower for the Johnson and Son Company in Racine, Wisconsin. The lightweight wall of glass and metal, so common after World War II, was originally Wright's idea in the 1920's.
Nearly every building Wright designed stirred up controversy. But after these buildings were in use, time and events proved him right. His Imperial Hotel (1916-1922) was the only large structure that remained safe after the Tokyo earthquake of 1923.
He used many new materials-poured concrete, concrete block, native stone-as they had never been used before. He had strongly held ideas-about architecture, about democracy, about every facet of life-and he made no bones without expressing them. He lived in controversy without and struggle within to achieve simplicity effectively.
Wright died after having projected the idea of a mile-high skyscraper. Certainly the sky was the only limit for Frank Loyd Wright.
—from the book
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