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- "...having a good start, not only do I fully intend to be the greatest architect who has yet lived, but fully intend to be the greatest architect who will ever live. Yes, I intend to be the greatest architect of all time." - Frank Lloyd Wright
- Considered the most influential architect of his time, Frank Lloyd Wright designed about 1,000 structures, some 400 of which were built. He described his "organic architecture" as one that "proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man and his circumstances as they both change." As a pioneer whose ideas were well ahead of his time, Wright had to fight for acceptance of every new design. The famous American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, was the son of William C. Wright and Anna Lloyd Jones in the United States in the small rural community of Richland Center, Wisconsin on June 8, 1867.
His early influences were his clergyman father's playing of Bach and Beethoven and his mother's gift of geometric blocks. He entered the University of Wisconsin at 15 as a special student, studying engineering because the school had no course in architecture. Wright left Madison in 1887 to work as a draftsman in Chicago.
In order to study architecture and learn the traditional, classical language, Wright, the country boy, had to go Chicago. Wright worked for several architectural offices until he finally found a job with the most cultured architect of the Mid-West, Louis Sullivan, soon becoming Sullivan's chief assistant. That same year, in 1887, Wright carried out his first design, in a wooden version of the eclectic, Queen Anne Style, the Hillside Home School. His Charnley House of 1891 is a perfect amalgamation of these sources into his own version of Free Style Classicism.
While working on key buildings for Sullivan and Adler, to pay his many debts, in 1892 Wright 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. Sullivan disapproved, and Wright set up his own office.
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