Frank Lloyd Wright Dies: Organic Architecture Loses Its Visionary

Frank Lloyd Wright died on April 9, 1959, at age 91 in Phoenix, Arizona, leaving behind 532 completed structures, an architectural philosophy that reshaped how Americans thought about domestic space, and a personal life of scandal, tragedy, and ego that matched the scale of his buildings. He had been working until the end, supervising construction of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which opened six months after his death and immediately divided critics between those who called it a masterpiece and those who called it a washing machine. Wright had been designing buildings for 70 years, starting as a draftsman in Louis Sullivan's Chicago office in 1888. His Prairie houses of the early 1900s, with their horizontal lines, open floor plans, and integration with the landscape, represented the first truly American domestic architecture. Before Wright, American homes were built in styles imported from Europe: Colonial, Victorian, Tudor, Italianate. Wright argued that American buildings should reflect the American landscape, particularly the vast horizontal expanse of the Midwest. The Robie House in Chicago, completed in 1910, remains the masterwork of this period. His personal life destroyed his career for years. In 1909, Wright abandoned his wife and six children to travel to Europe with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of a client. The scandal was enormous. In 1914, a servant at Wright's Taliesin estate in Wisconsin set fire to the living quarters and murdered seven people with a hatchet, including Borthwick and her two children. Wright rebuilt Taliesin, which burned again in 1925 from an electrical fire. He rebuilt it a second time. The Fallingwater commission in 1935 revived Wright's career spectacularly. Edgar Kaufmann Sr. expected a house with a view of the waterfall on his Pennsylvania property. Wright designed a house cantilevered directly over the waterfall, with reinforced concrete terraces extending into space in a gesture so audacious that engineers questioned whether the structure would stand. Kaufmann's construction manager secretly added extra steel reinforcement. The house became the most photographed private residence in the world. Wright designed over 1,000 structures during his career; 532 were completed, and approximately 400 survive today, including eight designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites.