GREATEST ARCHITECT OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Trailblazer.

A trailblazer in modern American architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright left a legacy of more than seven hundred buildings that spanned more than half a century, from the Robie House in Chicago (1904) to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City (1959). Already elderly when the 1950s began, Wright continued to be active, designing provocative, exuberant masterpieces until his death.

Always an Architect.

From the beginning Anna Wright, a Wisconsin schoolteacher, wanted her son to become an architect. Since the University of Wisconsin offered no courses in architecture, he enrolled as a civil engineer in 1884 but left the university without graduating and went to Chicago in 1887, when many of his early designs were completed. He called himself a farm boy, and in 1900 Wright designed the first of his famous "prairie houses" (a low, ground-hugging type of...