The famous American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, was born as the son of William C. Wright and Anna Lloyd Jones in the United States in the small rural community of Richland Center, Wisconsin in 1867.

At nineteen the young Frank supervised the building of the Joneses' Unity Chapel, a structure which still stands today in the heart of the clan's territory, and next to which Frank, Mrs Cheney and other members of the family are buried. The next year, in 1887, Wright carried out his own first commission, also in a wooden version of the eclectic, Queen Anne Style: the Hillside Home school. In order to study architecture and learn the traditional, classical language, Wright, the country boy, had to go first to the nearby city, Madison, and then the metropolis, Chigago. Wright worked for several architectural offices until he finally found a job with the most cultured architect of the Mid-West, Louis Sullivan. While working on key buildings for Sullivan and Adler, he also started an illicit practice of architecture at night, bootlegging' houses away from the office and sharpening his own eclectic mixture of Sillsbee, Queen Anne and Sullivan classicism. His Charnley House of 1891 is a perfect amalgamation of these sources into his own version of Free Style Classicism.

Just before his twenty-second birthday, in 1889, he married Catherine Lee Tobin, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, and together with Sullivan and his other contacts she gave him the cultural background he lacked; she gave him social polish as well. They settled in the exclusive, Protestant neighbourhood of Oak Park, west of the seedy part of Chigago. Frank Lloyd Wright's own house and studio, the Frank Lloyd Wright Residence, built 1889 - 1895 and later, became the laboratory for many of his experiments in domestic architecture. Here, in an idyllic American suburb, with giant oaks, sprawling lawns and no fences, Wright built some sixty rambling homes by the year 1900 (when he forged the "Prairie Style"). In their sensitive eclecticism they fitted perfectly the comfortable assumptions of middle class life. The Nathan Moore house, 1895, (rebuilt 1923 after a fire) is one of the best of this period - although Wright was later to think it one of his worst. For twenty years he brought up a thriving family of six children upstairs, and ran a thriving architectural practice of twelve or so draughtsmen downstairs. He was very much the father of both families, giving each one their central hearth.

After 1900 and his local succes, Wright became immensely more ambitious and decided to take on the European avant-garde, whose work he must have known well through magazines. He fashioned a new form of horizontal streamlining - a word he claimes to have invented, and then helped form a group of architects, the "Chigago Eighteen", which soon evolved into the "New School of the Middle West". The Prairie House, such as the William E. Martin Residence , was the result of both efforts. Wright applied the same general principles of space and streamlining, used in his Prairie Houses, to public buildings. Even the New Prairie Style was conceived for domestic scale.

By the age of forty-one, in 1908, Wright had achieved both a social and professional success extraordinary for a country farm boy. Yet a confusing doubt was beginning to grow, a malaise which had opposite causes not unconnected with the relation of modernism to Western traditonal architecture. During this time he was struggling with the idea that was becoming uppermost in his mind, the Cause of American Architecture. The idea is formulated almost as Baptist sermon by his father: "Personally, again, I have met little more than the superficial snap-judgment-insult of the artistically informed. I am quite used to it, glad to owe it nothing in any final outcome. But, meanwhile, the Cause suffers delay!". By 1907 with the Cause failing as he was formulating it, his despair with America began to grow. He started to shock the Mid-Western moral majority by flaunting married women in his grand, open car. Like a Secessionist 'artiste', he let his grow over the collar. He wore expensive clothes, flowing neckties, riding breeches and Norfolk jacket - not the attire for the Oak Park commuter. He had reached the height of his Prairie School Style.

Probably the reason he left Catherine and went off to Europe, was not my simply to gain 'freedom' from domestic banality, but also freedom from American provinciality. Of equal importance was the new woman in his life, who symbolised positive freedom - Mamah Borthwick Cheney - the wife of a client.

Running of to Europe with Mrs. Cheney, leaving behind a combined total of eight children and two spouses, called on his deepest conviction - a rather exaggerated "Truth Against the World"? His articles that used to be titled "In the Cause of Architecture", now became, implicitly, "In the Cause of Justifying my Free Religious and Marital Beliefs". His Free Style Classicism coincided with Free Style ethics. This crisis produced a change in style, a change in philosophy. He started moving continously, sometimes hiding from the law, and building only thirty-four commissions in the next twenty-one years. The first thing he did was to retreat to his family homestead and build fortress for Mrs. Cheney and himself, a defensive bastion in the wilderniss from which they could fight off the onslaught of big-city morality. The 'marrying' of the building and hill became the first principal of organic architecture, a principal he was later to contradict.

Unfortunately Wright also had another principal of architecture - one door for all purposes - that was abet the most tragic act that can befall anyone. A Barbados servant who, they said, was underpaid and driven mad by the unconventional lovers, had executed a revenge. He started a fire during lunch and stood by the only escape door, and then murdered, one by one, seven people, among them Mrs. Cheney and two of her children. Wright himself was so overwhelmed that it took him ten years to recover his confidence and return to more stable existence. He paid tribute to Mrs. Cheney, his greatest love, the one for whom he had thrown away a normal career, by building her the simplest grave. Wright built Taliesin Two on the ashes of Taliesin One and developed even further his defensive style. Tragedy followed tragedy. Taliesin Two was burned, and during the fire neighbours not only helped douse the flames, but helped themselves to some of Wright's oriental art as well. The only piece of luck that ocurred for this ill-fated man was that Miriam Noel walked out on him, and he then met, quite by change, the woman who was to rescue him from further self-destruction: Olgivanna Milanoff, an Eastern European aristocrat and something of a romantic herself. They met in Chigago in 1924, at a performance of the Petrograd Ballet.

The misfortunes that Wrigth recounted didn't stop there. Indeed the unfortunate Miriam Noel, now inflamed by his new love, pressured him with police writs, law suits and federal agents for the next four years. After hiding for a month, with Olgivanna and their daugther Iovanna, the three were discoverd by the police and had to spent a humiliating night n jail. In spite of all the trouble, several important things emerged from this chronicle of disasters: first in Olgivanna, he found the romantic attachment that could help, not destroy him; secondly, he started work on that mammoth job of introspection, An Autobiography, which was to result in his new self-assesment as the struggling and sometimes persecuted architect; lastly he combined the bastion style, in several western houses, with a new romantic manner evolved from California. "Fallingwater" was built in this period of time. While Wright was designing extravagant metaphors for millionairs trying to escape from the city, he was also trying to build inexpensive houses for the poor, in such a way as they might escape the city too. During the Depression, he changed his style and image yet again, leaving 'Wright the outcast romantic' for his new role as 'Wright the grand, social visionary'. In the late twenties he became as respectable as he had been at the turn of the century. He gave countless lectures at major universities started his Taliesin Fellowship - a visionary social workshop in itself - and in his mid-sixties adopted the persona of the quick-witted social sage. He wished to supply an impoverished America (an impoverished self for that matter) with an answer to Marxist revolution. This he called by the metaphor Broadacre City. Although Wright believed in capitalism, he thought that the land, the means of production as social credit - capital itself - should be distributed, not concentrated into monopolies.

On January 17th 1938 Wright appeared on the cover of Time magazine; later it would be a two cent stamp. After his early experience with the yellow press, and then his success as the respectable architect, in the thirties, he started to realise the emergent rules of a commercial society. From this date to his death in 1959 he spent as much time given interviews, and being a celebrity, as in designing buildings. In the age of media stars - radio, film, soon tv - Wright mastered them all, and instinctively helped create the system with which we are still settled: the 'star system of architectural heroes'. By 1950 Wright's sure instinct for promotion had paid off professionally. But the media attention, the time, energy and personal involvement it demanded, executed their revenge. Most of the buildings produced in these years betray an excessive vulgarity, or overruling ambition, which the young Wright would have called 'grandomania', and most people today call kitsch. Frank Lloyd Wright died in 1959.

William C. Wright
His father, William C. Wright, was an itenerant preacher at the Richland Center Baptist Society, and when this didn't prove financially rewarding he became a school teacher, lawyer and politician, but he never entirely lost his fundamental religion. By always entertaining at the piano, W.C.W. may have given his son the notion of architecture as frozen music, not only by giving him a taste for Bach and Beethoven, but obviously a liking for popular Victorian songs as well. Tis sweet to Meet, and Each other Greet' was one melody W.C.W. composed and sold as sheet music. W.C.W. must have also given his som a taste for continuous moving by moving more than thirty times in his life.

Anna Lloyd-Jones
Anna Lloyd-Jones was married to William C. Wright but her husband divorced her in 1885. She steered her son into architecture, and no doubt she also gave him a sense of fierce independence which characterised the Lloyd-Joneses. Like the proverbial Jewish mother she provided the bulwark on which he rested for strength, especially when later he too was ostracised for divorce. Significantly, she gave him Froebel blocks to play with which taught him the lessons of integrating structure, construction and space into a unity he would later call organic' (because indivisible like living tissue).

Mamah Borthwick Cheney
Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the second wife in Wright's life, was strong-spirited, beautiful and as independent as he was. Unlike Catherine, his first wife, she could stand up to his intellectual free-thinking. In fact she was already translating feminist books on free love, from German and Swedish, and promoting the new style of motherhood, on how members of a family shouldn't treat each other as so much personal property.