[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Frank_Lloyd_Wright_wor...
https://youtu.be/JLSQBAXIKtk?si=Q8FP4c8v72PiZU93
Available here: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=trailer+sugarla...
https://bpsfuelforthought.wordpress.com/2019/02/23/move-your...
As someone else mentioned, he was designing houses that look newer than they actually are.
> With money borrowed from his boss
Genius in field works for wealthy man in field, gets special treatment at a young age. News at 11.
He's not a random, there are a lot of factors working for him
Except frontier AI labs basically consider the entirety of human creation, multiplied by 100, to be their total addressable market.
The most important architect in Chicago could only ever be able to capture a small fraction of a single city's architecture business.
The original construction was much more modest in size.
Obviously most 22 year olds in 1890 didn't earn a few times the national average salary. At the beginning of the twentieth century 81% of households were rented, and most of those were not nearly as nice as Frank Lloyd Wright's first home, which was not nearly as nice as it is today after decades of extensions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lloyd_Wright_Home_and_St...
Like the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oak Park there’s something a little underwhelming about them at first to a modern sensibility - they feel like spaces you are familiar with from modern houses (albeit often realized with greater skill than is typical - both houses make incredible use of their window perspectives for example). But then you need to recognize how far ahead of their time they were; Gropius’s aesthetic was his invention; that you can replicate it in your own home out of an ikea catalog today is because of him.
This is a really generous interpretation of what happened... He ran off to Europe with one of their neighbors, and his ex-wife (not divorced yet, though!) was left high and dry with no money and was forced to turn the studio into apartments for income.
That being said, the most accurate/honest depiction I've seen is a 2-part series on PBS. I think it does a great job of capturing the genius alongside the troubled hubris.
Wright ended his marriage and took Mamah Borthwick Cheney to Europe. This scandal ended his Chicago career.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamah_Borthwick
After bringing her to his Talesin estate in Wisonsin, she and her children perished in the events explained in the wiki.
This particular home is not itself stunning. The Dana Thomas house in Springfield, IL is far more impressive.
In Chicago, the Robie house is the must see, followed by Unity Temple, leaving the Home & Studio a distant third.
I have personally stayed at the Cheney house (twice), which was a bed & breakfast for a time.
He also made some buildings.
So focused on making things look good, but spent no time thinking about people actually living in the houses.
https://codygatlindesign.com/2024/09/28/why-6-of-the-worlds-...
The tourguide didn't mince words, and came at FLW pretty hard for scams and philandering. My understanding is that FLW was kind of a grifter. Outside of being famous for just not paying his employees and designers, he was working on the side to put up houses that were explicitly against his contract after being paid huge cash advances by his friend / employer. He also famously hoarded his designers' and sculptors' ideas and claimed them for himself.
There's some fascinating ideas at play in his houses, and the fact that he designed the furniture for the rooms they would go in is fascinating, even though I didn't care much for his style. The concept of 'compression and expansion' came through well, when you'd walk through a somewhat narrow offset corridor before entering a grand room. It definitely had an impact.
That house was basically a prototype for a bunch of random ideas he had, including a stage for his children and his wife's students to perform plays (she was a youth teacher) complete with a giant mural of a djinn iirc was inspired by one thousand and one nights.
It felt like a psychedelic church.
Specifically there was an octagonal drafting room without central supports, using chains linked across the room and held together by a giant hub to hold it together from the sides. Truly a wild piece of engineering I've never observed in any home elsewhere.
I tried photographing it, which was essentially impossible but here's the best version I could find. https://www.instagram.com/p/DOZxFBoEdMb/
Since the home was also a studio, he would take people on a bit of a wild tour through his home before leading them to my favorite room on the tour -- and also octagonal 'deal room', which is the room most representative of all of his ideas within that house, with hidden drawers, and drafting boards hidden everywhere. https://martinhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/flw_studi...
I'm not sure how you could possibly make that assertion?
The fact that no such claims exist is how I made my assertion. Look at his body of work and study it. He reinvented his primary style multiple times but yet kept his core style. A claim that he was a grifter needs a lot of evidence for one of the most colossal intellects of our time. It's like saying Einstein was a grifter.
Like the Johnson Wax complex in Racine, there were regulatory objections to the design. For the Guggenheim, two fire exits were required per level, so how is this done with a spiral ascending gallery? For Johnson Wax, the "lily pad" column supports were tested to 10x the maximum rated weight. I have not been to Johnson Wax.
Wright did prove his designs durable in unexpected ways, several times.
They do look fabulous, but man I wouldn't want to live in one.
(But yeah, as someone else mentioned, many of them probably demanded a special fortitude of those who chose to live in them.)
Art Garfunkel had studied architecture, and asked Paul Simon to write a song about Wright. Paul Simon didn’t know anything about Wright, so instead he made the song about Garfunkel. What Garfunkel didn’t realize was that Simon was singing about ditching Garfunkel and going solo, which is what happened.
Garfunkel has talked about how painful that realization was. He still performs the song, because it’s just a great tune.
It's two-story structure with cyclindral dome in Art-Deco facade.
