50 Fun Facts About Frank Lloyd Wright

Why did Wright's 1959 New York Times obituary call him 89 when he was 91?

His own lie. Born in 1867, Wright later moved the year to 1869, the year his sister Jane was born, and the newspaper took his word and printed June 8, 1869 as his birthday.

Wright's mother's family, the Lloyd Joneses, had emigrated to Wisconsin from which country?

Wales. The Lloyd Joneses were Unitarians who left in 1844 seeking religious freedom; Wright later gave his Wisconsin home a name from their language, Taliesin, 'shining brow'.

By Wright's own account, how did his mother decorate his nursery to raise an architect?

With engravings of English cathedrals. He wrote that she expected her first child to grow up to build beautiful buildings, and hung his nursery with pictures torn from periodicals.

Which educational blocks, found by his mother in 1876, did Wright credit with shaping his sense of geometry?

Froebel Gifts. His mother, a teacher, bought the kindergarten set after seeing it on show, and Wright wrote decades later that its maple cubes, spheres and triangles were 'in my fingers to this day'.

Wisconsin's university taught no architecture, so which subject did Wright study there before leaving without a degree?

Civil engineering. He stayed only a few terms, working for the dean of engineering to help support his family, then left for Chicago in 1887; in 1955 the university gave him an honorary doctorate.

Wright's earliest known work, in 1886, was helping to fit out which kind of building for his uncle?

A family chapel. Unity Chapel was designed by Joseph Silsbee for the Lloyd Jones clan, and the teenage Wright 'looked after the interior'; within a year he had followed Silsbee to Chicago for his first job.

Which famous maxim was coined by Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect Wright called his 'lieber Meister'?

Form follows function. Wright called Sullivan his 'dear master' for the rest of his life, even though Sullivan had broken with him for designing houses on the side.

What did Wright call the independent commissions he secretly designed while under contract to Sullivan?

Bootlegged houses. His contract barred outside work, but he took the commissions anyway to pay for his expensive tastes; when Sullivan found out in 1893, Wright's job was over.

Which construction toy did Wright's son John invent after watching the Imperial Hotel being built in Tokyo?

Lincoln Logs. John Lloyd Wright got the idea from the workers assembling his father's hotel, and sold his notched wooden logs under the name of Abraham Lincoln, the president born in a log cabin.

Marion Mahony, who produced Wright's presentation drawings from 1895, later rendered her husband's winning design for which capital city?

Canberra. Her renderings carried Walter Burley Griffin's entry in the competition to design Australia's new capital; she had worked for Wright on and off for fourteen years before she married Griffin.

Which Chicago architect offered to pay for Wright to study abroad, only to be turned down?

Daniel Burnham. He offered to pay for several years of study abroad, with a senior job in his firm to follow; Wright said no, and the refusal hardened his resolve to find a new architecture for America.

Which name is given to the low, horizontal houses Wright designed around Chicago in the early 1900s?

Prairie style. Wright meant the long, low roofs and deep eaves to echo the flat Midwestern land they stood on, and did away with attics, basements and boxed-in rooms.

In which magazine did Wright publish two affordable house designs in 1901?

Ladies' Home Journal. Neither plan was built as published, but the two designs set out the open, ground-hugging house he went on to build for clients across the Midwest over the next decade.

In Wright's Robie House, the living and dining rooms are divided only by what?

A fireplace. Wright made the hearth the heart of his houses and let the rooms flow around it; outside, the Robie House's roofs reach far beyond its walls on steel beams.

The Wasmuth Portfolio spread Wright's reputation among architects on which continent?

Europe. Wright put the folio together for Berlin publisher Ernst Wasmuth while living abroad; the young Austrian Richard Neutra was so struck by it that he later crossed the Atlantic to work for him.

Wright kept Unity Temple, his Oak Park church of 1908, within a tight budget by building it of which material?

Poured concrete. The congregation had $45,000 to replace a church that had burned down, and 'there was only one material to choose,' Wright said: 'Concrete was cheap.'

Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo was completed in 1923, the year of what disaster?

The Great Kanto earthquake. A telegram telling Wright his hotel had come through made his name as an engineer; later inspections found hidden damage, and the building was demolished in 1968.

Wright's Ennis House in Los Angeles, often used in films to represent the future, is built with what?

Textile concrete blocks. Thousands of patterned blocks were cast by hand from granite dug on the site and tied together with steel rods; the look has drawn film crews ever since, Blade Runner's among them.

Mamah Borthwick Cheney, for whom Wright left his family in 1909, was married to whom?

An Oak Park neighbour and client. Wright fell for her while designing a house for her husband, the engineer Edwin Cheney; Edwin gave her a divorce, but Wright's own wife refused him one for more than a decade.

Which dictator's daughter married Wright's son-in-law, the architect William Wesley Peters, in 1970?

Joseph Stalin. Svetlana Alliluyeva, who had defected to the United States, came to Taliesin West that year at the invitation of Wright's widow and married Peters soon after; they divorced in 1973.

Who murdered seven people at Taliesin in 1914?

A servant. Julian Carlton set the house on fire while Wright was away in Chicago, and Mamah Borthwick was among the dead; Wright rebuilt it in her memory, only for it to burn again in 1925.

Which duo recorded the 1970 song 'So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright'?

Simon & Garfunkel. Art Garfunkel, who had studied architecture, asked Paul Simon for a song about Wright; Simon, with their own parting on his mind, wrote a farewell and put the architect's name on it.

One of Wright's last commissions was a pink-walled, blue-roofed civic center for which California county?

Marin. It was built after his death in 1959; its offices have glass walls around open, sky-lit wells because Wright thought people should be able to see their government at work.

Wright's first Los Angeles house, built for oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, is named after which flower?

Hollyhock. It was Barnsdall's favourite flower, and Wright worked stylised hollyhocks into the roofline, windows and furniture; she fell out with him, barely lived there and gave the house to the city.

Wright and Olgivanna were arrested in Minnesota in 1926 for allegedly violating which law?

The Mann Act. It made it a crime to take a woman across state lines for 'immoral purposes'; Wright, not yet divorced from his second wife, had driven Olgivanna to a Minnesota lake cottage. The charges were dropped.

What name did Wright give his own design philosophy?

Organic architecture. He meant buildings in harmony with the people in them and the land around them; since house, furnishings and setting were one thing to him, he designed the furniture, rugs and dinnerware too.

Which decentralised city did Wright propose in his 1932 book The Disappearing City?

Broadacre City. Every family was to have at least an acre and get about by car; his apprentices built a twelve-foot-square model that went on show at Rockefeller Center in 1935, but no such city was ever built.

Which name did Wright give the affordable houses he launched with the Jacobs House in 1937?

Usonian. Herbert Jacobs, a young newspaperman, had challenged Wright to design a decent house for $5,000; the answer had no basement or attic and warmed its concrete floor from below.

Where did Wright place Fallingwater in relation to its waterfall?

Directly above it. The Kaufmanns, owners of a Pittsburgh department store, expected a weekend house with a view of their favourite falls; Wright said he wanted them to live with the waterfall, not look at it.

What did Fallingwater's contractor do without Wright's knowledge?

Added extra steel to the concrete cantilevers. Kaufmann's engineers thought the terraces too weak and Wright, overruling them, was furious when he found out; they sagged by inches all the same and had to be strengthened in 2002.

In which Arizona city did Wright build his winter home and studio, used from 1937 until his death?

Scottsdale, Arizona. After winters in rented quarters to escape the Wisconsin cold, he bought raw desert in the McDowell foothills and had his apprentices build Taliesin West from its rock and sand.

How did Wright intend visitors to see the art in his Guggenheim Museum in New York?

Walking down a spiral ramp. His plan was to send visitors to the top by lift and let them drift down past the paintings; he died six months before the museum opened in October 1959.

Wright's only realised skyscraper, the 19-storey Price Tower, stands in which state?

Oklahoma. Wright had first drawn the tower in the 1920s as an apartment block for New York that was never built; decades later he planted it, like a tree with floors for branches, in the oil town of Bartlesville.

The world's largest single-site collection of Wright buildings stands on a college campus in which state?

Florida. Florida Southern College in Lakeland hired Wright in 1938, and twelve of the eighteen buildings he drew went up over twenty years; he called them a 'child of the sun', rising out of the ground into the light.

Which Wisconsin city opened Wright's Monona Terrace in 1997, nearly 60 years after his first design?

Madison. Wright kept reworking the civic centre for the city of his boyhood until he died, and never saw it built; it won approval only in 1992 and opened as a convention centre.

What material did Wright famously use for tubing in the Johnson Wax Headquarters?

Pyrex glass. Bands of the tubing stand in for windows and fill the great workroom with soft light; nobody could seal the joints, so the roof leaked whenever it rained and the company's president kept a bucket on his desk.

Which body gave Wright its Gold Medal in 1949 although he had long refused to join it?

American Institute of Architects. Wright never joined and mocked the institute in public for decades; it gave him the medal anyway, and in 1991 named him the greatest American architect of all time.

Wright called Bach and which other composer 'princely architects in my spiritual realm'?

Beethoven. Wright's father, a preacher and musician, taught him the piano with raps on the knuckles; as an old man Wright told his apprentices that music was the one art he could not live without.

Which Japanese printmaker did Wright honour with a 1906 exhibition in Chicago?

Hiroshige. Wright had come home from his first trip to Japan the year before with hundreds of prints, though chronically short of cash; the Art Institute show, hung with prints he lent, is described as the artist's first retrospective.

For a time Wright earned more from what than from architecture?

Dealing in Japanese prints. He sold woodblock prints to rich collectors whose hoards later filled American museums; the trade collapsed around 1920, when some of his prints were found to have been retouched.

Wright's signature red, used on the steel at Fallingwater and the beams at Taliesin West, is named after which nation?

Cherokee. Red was his calling card: he signed his drawings with a red square and set a red tile into buildings he judged complete works of art, and from the 1930s he specified this earthy shade by name.

In 2019 eight Wright buildings, Fallingwater and Taliesin among them, were jointly given which honour?

UNESCO World Heritage status. UNESCO's advisers wanted Wright represented by a group of buildings, not just one or two, and the joint nomination took some fifteen years to complete.

Wright's eldest son, the architect Lloyd Wright, designed two early stage structures for which Southern California venue?

The Hollywood Bowl. His pyramid-shaped shell of 1927 proved controversial and gave way a year later to his semicircular one; he also managed the building of his father's Los Angeles houses, the Ennis House among them.

Which everyday roadside building did Wright see built to his design just once in his lifetime, at Cloquet, Minnesota?

A gas station. Wright pitched it to a client in the oil business as 'the future city in embryo', with a cantilevered roof and a glass lounge above the pumps, hoping such stations would grow into neighbourhood meeting places.

What happened to Wright's remains in 1985?

They were dug up, cremated and taken to Arizona. It was his widow Olgivanna's dying wish that his ashes join hers in a memorial garden at Taliesin West, which left an empty grave in his family's Wisconsin graveyard.

Wright's Larkin Building in Buffalo, demolished in 1950, was the headquarters of a mail-order company that sold what?

Soap. The site was hemmed in by smoky rail lines, so Wright sealed the building, turned it inward around a tall sky-lit court and gave it an early form of air conditioning.

Wright's unbuilt 1956 skyscraper, designed to stand a mile high, was named after which state?

Illinois. The Mile High Illinois was meant for Chicago's lakefront; Wright, who had spent decades condemning skyscrapers, drew one more than four times the height of the Empire State Building, and nobody tried to build it.

Critics greeted Wright's Guggenheim Museum by comparing it to which household appliance?

A washing machine. Before it even opened, 21 artists signed a letter protesting that paintings could not hang properly on its curved, sloping walls; Wright said it would make the Metropolitan Museum 'look like a Protestant barn'.

In 1956 a 12-year-old boy wrote to Wright offering his paper-route money for a design of what?

A doghouse. Wright pleaded pressure of work and told Jim Berger to write again in a year; when he did, full drawings arrived for a small triangular kennel for Eddie, the family's Labrador, to match their Wright house.

Wright named the windmill tower he designed in the 1890s for his aunts' Wisconsin school after which pair of lovers?

Romeo and Juliet. The tower is two shapes locked together, a diamond he called Romeo and an octagon he called Juliet, each holding the other up; he later put a gramophone at the top to play Bach across the valley.