| | '''Frank Lloyd Wright''' (1887 - 1959) was the greatest American [[architect]], uniquely original in his work. His early career was studded with commercial projects, but he did not always please builders. While he fell upon hard times he turned to designing houses for wealthy people in the greater Chicago area. In the third phase of his career, he was once again welcomed as the genius he was, and added greatly to the vocabulary of modern American architecture. | | '''Frank Lloyd Wright''' (1887 - 1959) was the greatest American [[architect]], uniquely original in his work. His early career was studded with commercial projects, but he did not always please builders. While he fell upon hard times he turned to designing houses for wealthy people in the greater Chicago area. In the third phase of his career, he was once again welcomed as the genius he was, and added greatly to the vocabulary of modern American architecture. |
| | Wright, generally acknowledged as one of the greatest architects of the 20th cent., developed a highly original approach to residential design before World War I, which became known as the "Prairie Style." His early work, executed in and around Chicago, combined open planning principles with horizontal emphasis, asymmetrical facade elevations, and broad, sheltering roofs, as seen, for example, in his Robie House (1909). Wright, who stood apart from the European-derived modernist mainstream, continued to design buildings into his old age, producing some of his finest and most idiosyncratic works, such as the Guggenheim Museum.<ref>http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry/Amer-arch</ref> | | Wright, generally acknowledged as one of the greatest architects of the 20th cent., developed a highly original approach to residential design before World War I, which became known as the "Prairie Style." His early work, executed in and around Chicago, combined open planning principles with horizontal emphasis, asymmetrical facade elevations, and broad, sheltering roofs, as seen, for example, in his Robie House (1909). Wright, who stood apart from the European-derived modernist mainstream, continued to design buildings into his old age, producing some of his finest and most idiosyncratic works, such as the Guggenheim Museum.<ref>http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry/Amer-arch</ref> |
| | Although his structures and ideas were a brilliant revolution, his work also had a tendency toward serious flaws - he is famously quoted as saying to a client who complained that the roof leaked over his desk, "move your desk." | | Although his structures and ideas were a brilliant revolution, his work also had a tendency toward serious flaws - he is famously quoted as saying to a client who complained that the roof leaked over his desk, "move your desk." |
| | + | {{cquote|The ceilings inside Fallingwater drop from a maximum of 9ft to a rather stooping 6ft 4in. Wright based proportions intuitively around his own height - 5ft 8 1/2 in [another source says 5' 7"] - and if his clients were tall, well, they just had to bend to the maestro's proportional will. William Wesley Peters, one of Wright's associates, was well over 6ft tall. Wright once told him: "Sit down, Wes, you're ruining the scale of my architecture."<ref>https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2001/sep/10/artsfeatures</ref>}} |