Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) was an American architect whose career of more than seventy years produced the Prairie houses, Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum, and a theory of organic architecture rooted in landscape and material. Eight of his buildings are inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List. This page gathers the ArchEyes case studies of his work, with photographs, plans and sections.

Key Buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright

FallingwaterMill Run, 1937Johnson Wax HeadquartersRacine, 1939Unity TempleOak Park, 1908Robie HouseChicago, 1910Solomon R. Guggenheim MuseumNew York, 1959TaliesinSpring Green, 1911Hollyhock HouseLos Angeles, 1921Taliesin WestScottsdale, 1937

Understanding Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture

Born in Wisconsin, Wright trained in Chicago in the office of Adler and Sullivan, where Louis Sullivan became his acknowledged master. Establishing his own practice in Oak Park in 1893, he developed the Prairie house: low, horizontal buildings with deep overhanging roofs, bands of windows and a central hearth, in which interior spaces flow into one another rather than being divided into boxes. The Robie House in Chicago is its most complete example, and Unity Temple in Oak Park, cast in concrete, applied the same spatial ideas to a place of worship. Many Prairie houses also received leaded glass windows and furniture designed by Wright himself.

Wright called his approach organic architecture: buildings that grow from their site, use materials according to their nature and unite structure, ornament and furniture in a single design. Taliesin, his home and studio in Wisconsin, and later Taliesin West in the Arizona desert, were built as working demonstrations of these ideas and as the base of his apprenticeship, the Taliesin Fellowship. In Los Angeles, the Hollyhock House explored a more monumental, abstracted ornament.

After a difficult period in the 1920s, Wright produced in his late sixties two of his best-known works. Fallingwater, built for the Kaufmann family over a waterfall in Pennsylvania, cantilevers concrete terraces from a core of local stone. The Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine encloses its Great Workroom in a forest of slender dendriform columns lit through bands of glass tubing. In the same years he developed the Usonian house, an affordable dwelling for the American middle class, represented here by the Pope-Leighey House.

His final major work, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, opened in 1959, six months after his death: a continuous spiral ramp around a skylit atrium that remains one of the most recognizable buildings in the world. Wright’s emphasis on landscape, horizontality and the open plan shaped modern domestic architecture across the United States and beyond.

The Key Buildings above are chosen by significance; the full archive below follows publication date. Each case study includes technical information, drawings where available and links to related works.