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Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect for 73 year.  Not withstanding the length of his career,  Wright’s accomplishments are truly awesome.

When you visit the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, you can see Wright’s genius in his designed houses. All these Wright homes are over 100 years old. Today, these Wright houses look like contemporary home

Prairie Homes

The W.W. Willits house- first Prairie House- 1902

Wright created the prairie house with a horizontal line, meant to blend with the flat midwestern landscape. Wright designed broad, open spaces instead of strictly defined rooms of the Victorian era. He said ” the reality of a building is not the container but the space within”

The W.W. Willits house, built in Highland Park, Illinois in 1902, was the first house that embodied all the elements of the prairie style. His masterpiece of the prairie style is the Robie House, built in Chicago in 1909. The Robie House is considered one of the most important buildings in American architecture- a forerunner of modernism in architecture. Tours of the Robie House attracts visitors year round.

Robie House – designated by the American Institute of Architects as one of five greatest American houses.

Wright did not aspire simply to design a house, but to create a complete environment, and he often dictated the details of the interior. He designed stained glass, fabrics, furniture, carpet and the accessories of the house. Legend has it that, in at least one case, he even designed the gowns of his client’s wife.The controlling factor was seldom the wishes of the individual client, but Wright’s belief that buildings stongly influence the people who inhabit them. He believed that “the architect is a molder of men, whether or not he consciously assumes the responsibility .

The name prairie house is derived from a 1901 story, A home in a Prairie Town, that appeared  in the Ladies Home Journal about the house Wright designed for the magazine. After the magazine was published, Wright became the toast of Europe. He traveled to Germany where a best selling book of his drawings was published. Although Wright became a celebrity architect in Europe, in the United States, the architectural establishment was very critical of his work.

Larkin Building

Larkin Building

Wright’s practice was not only houses. In Buffalo Wright designed the Larkin Building. Larkin Company administration building, the first entirely air-conditioned modern office building on record.  It is block like and extremely simple in its forms, and has very little ornamentation….the Larkin building was decisively vertical…Indeed, it was the first consciously architectural expression of the kind of American structure which Europeans were beginning to discover to their delight: the great clusters of grain silos and similar industrial monuments that men like Corbu and Gropius found so exciting in the early 1920s.

“I think I first consciously began to try to beat the box in the Larkin building [Wright said years later]. I found a natural opening to the liberation I sought when [after a great struggle] I finally pushed the staircase towers out from the corners of the main building, made them into freestanding, individual features.”  — Frank Lloyd Wright.

Unity Temple- a Unitarian Church

Unity Temple

The architecture of Unity Temple represents a dramatic departure from customary design for a house of worship, even by modern standards. Frank Lloyd Wright designed this structure over 100 years ago specifically to “not merely create a religious structure, but one that fitly embodies the principles of liberal religion for which this church stands… unity, truth, beauty, simplicity, freedom and reason.”

There are very specific reasons why the building was designed and constructed in such a unique manner.  This is a cubist structure of poured concrete- one of the first of poured concrete buildings.

Unity Temple is considered to be one of Wright’s most important structures dating from the first decade of the twentieth century. Because of its consolidation of aesthetic intent and structure through use of a single material, reinforced concrete, Unity Temple is considered by many architects to be the first modern building in the world. This idea became of central importance to the modern architects who followed Wright, such as Mies Van Der Rohe, and even the post-modernists, such as Frank Gehry.

right had long been intrigued by Japanese culture (he was an avid collector of Japanese prints), so when the opportunity came to build a project in Tokyo, the Imperial Hotel he lobbied for the project. Commissioned in 1916, the hotel was to represent the emergence of Japan as a modern nation and symbolize Japan’s relation to the West. To that end, Wright designed the building as a hybrid of Japanese and Western architecture.