How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Introduction

Frank Lloyd Wright is unlike­ly to be dis­placed as the arche­type of the genius archi­tect any­time soon, at least in Amer­i­ca, but even he had to start some­where. At nine years old, as archi­tec­ture YouTu­ber Stew­art Hicks explains in the video above, Wright received a set of blocks from his moth­er, who hoped that “her son would grow up to become a great archi­tect, and she thought the cre­ativ­i­ty unlocked and prac­ticed with these blocks could kick-start his jour­ney.” Evi­dent­ly, she was­n’t wrong: “by the time Wright attempt­ed to design his first build­ing years lat­er, he spent count­less hours arrang­ing the blocks,” famil­iar as he was with “pro­por­tion, sym­me­try, bal­ance, and oth­er prin­ci­ples of design well before he ever picked up a pen­cil.”

Of course, most of us played with blocks in child­hood, and few of us now bear much com­par­i­son to the man who designed Falling­wa­ter and the Guggen­heim. But his moth­er’s toy selec­tion was just one of many fac­tors that influ­enced the archi­tec­tur­al devel­op­ment that con­tin­ued through­out Wright’s long life.

In fif­teen min­utes, Hicks explains as many of them as pos­si­ble: his ear­ly oppor­tu­ni­ty to work on “shin­gle-style” homes, whose cru­ci­form lay­out he would adapt into his own designs; his arrival in a Chica­go that was still rebuild­ing after its great fire of 1871, when there were vast sky­scraper inte­ri­ors to be cre­at­ed; the new Mid­west­ern man­u­fac­tur­ing mon­ey pre­pared to com­mis­sion homes from him; and his inspir­ing encoun­ters with Japan­ese aes­thet­ics, both at home and in Japan itself.

After return­ing from a 1905 Japan trip, Wright got to work on Uni­ty Tem­ple in Oak Park, Illi­nois. He had it built with the rel­a­tive­ly new mate­r­i­al of rein­forced con­crete, thus get­ting “in on the ground floor of a tech­nol­o­gy that could com­plete­ly trans­form what build­ings could do,” mak­ing pos­si­ble “soar­ing can­tilevers, grace­ful curves,” and oth­er ele­ments that would become part of his archi­tec­tur­al sig­na­ture. A few decades lat­er, the Unit­ed States’ sub­urb-build­ing boom made Wright’s rur­al-urban “Uson­ian” homes and “Broad­acre City” plan look pre­scient; indeed, “almost every sin­gle house inside of a post­war sub­urb bears his trace.” His will­ing­ness to appear in print and on film, radio, and tele­vi­sion kept him in the Amer­i­can pub­lic con­scious­ness, and he made sure to instill his prin­ci­ples into gen­er­a­tions of stu­dents. Frank Lloyd Wright may be long gone, but he made sure that his vision of Amer­i­ca would live on.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Beau­ti­ful Visu­al Tour of Tir­ran­na, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Remark­able, Final Cre­ations

What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusu­al Win­dows Tell Us About His Archi­tec­tur­al Genius

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Lost Japan­ese Mas­ter­piece, the Impe­r­i­al Hotel in Tokyo

What It’s Like to Work in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Icon­ic Office Build­ing

Frank Lloyd Wright Reflects on Cre­ativ­i­ty, Nature and Reli­gion in Rare 1957 Audio

Frank Lloyd Wright Cre­ates a List of the 10 Traits Every Aspir­ing Artist Needs

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Son Invent­ed Lin­coln Logs, “America’s Nation­al Toy” (1916)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.


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