Frank Lloyd Wright Trivia
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50 free Frank Lloyd Wright trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Frank Lloyd Wright trivia quiz covers seventy years of building and a private life that made headlines. It starts in Wisconsin with the mother who pinned cathedral engravings in his nursery, the kindergarten blocks he credited for his sense of geometry, the engineering course he never finished, and the Chicago apprenticeship with Louis Sullivan that ended over the 'bootleg' houses. Then come Oak Park, the Prairie style, the Robie House, Unity Temple, the Wasmuth Portfolio and the flight to Europe with a client's wife. The second half takes in Taliesin and the 1914 murders, the Imperial Hotel and the Kanto earthquake, the textile-block houses of Los Angeles, the morphine marriage, the Mann Act arrest, the Taliesin Fellowship, Broadacre City and the Usonian house, Fallingwater's secret extra steel, the Johnson Wax Pyrex tubes, the Price Tower, the Guggenheim's spiral, the mile-high tower that was never built, the Japanese print dealing that once out-earned his architecture, and the grave that was emptied in 1985. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Try our Architecture quiz next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Why did Wright's 1959 New York Times obituary call him 89 when he was 91?
His own lie
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.
Q 02Wright's mother's family, the Lloyd Joneses, had emigrated to Wisconsin from which country?
Wales
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'.
Q 03By Wright's own account, how did his mother decorate his nursery to raise an architect?
With engravings of English cathedrals
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.
Q 04Which educational blocks, found by his mother in 1876, did Wright credit with shaping his sense of geometry?
Froebel Gifts
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'.
Q 05Wisconsin's university taught no architecture, so which subject did Wright study there before leaving without a degree?
Civil engineering
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.
Q 06Wright's earliest known work, in 1886, was helping to fit out which kind of building for his uncle?
A family chapel
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.
Q 07Which famous maxim was coined by Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect Wright called his 'lieber Meister'?
Form follows function
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.
Q 08What did Wright call the independent commissions he secretly designed while under contract to Sullivan?
Bootlegged houses
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.
Q 09Which construction toy did Wright's son John invent after watching the Imperial Hotel being built in Tokyo?
Lincoln Logs
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.
Q 10Marion Mahony, who produced Wright's presentation drawings from 1895, later rendered her husband's winning design for which capital city?
Canberra
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.
Q 11Which Chicago architect offered to pay for Wright to study abroad, only to be turned down?
Daniel Burnham
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.
Q 12Which name is given to the low, horizontal houses Wright designed around Chicago in the early 1900s?
Prairie style
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.
Q 13In which magazine did Wright publish two affordable house designs in 1901?
Ladies' Home Journal
Q 21Who murdered seven people at Taliesin in 1914?
A servant
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.
Q 22Which duo recorded the 1970 song 'So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright'?
Simon & Garfunkel
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.
Q 23One of Wright's last commissions was a pink-walled, blue-roofed civic center for which California county?
Marin
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.
Q 14In Wright's Robie House, the living and dining rooms are divided only by what?
A fireplace
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.
Q 15The Wasmuth Portfolio spread Wright's reputation among architects on which continent?
Europe
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.
Q 16Wright kept Unity Temple, his Oak Park church of 1908, within a tight budget by building it of which material?
Poured concrete
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.'
Q 17Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo was completed in 1923, the year of what disaster?
The Great Kanto earthquake
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.
Q 18Wright's Ennis House in Los Angeles, often used in films to represent the future, is built with what?
Textile concrete blocks
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.
Q 19Mamah Borthwick Cheney, for whom Wright left his family in 1909, was married to whom?
An Oak Park neighbour and client
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.
Q 20Which dictator's daughter married Wright's son-in-law, the architect William Wesley Peters, in 1970?
Joseph Stalin
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.
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.
Q 24Wright's first Los Angeles house, built for oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, is named after which flower?
Hollyhock
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.
Q 25Wright and Olgivanna were arrested in Minnesota in 1926 for allegedly violating which law?
The Mann Act
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.
Q 26What name did Wright give his own design philosophy?
Organic architecture
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.
Q 27Which decentralised city did Wright propose in his 1932 book The Disappearing City?
Broadacre 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.
Q 28Which name did Wright give the affordable houses he launched with the Jacobs House in 1937?
Usonian
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.
Q 29Where did Wright place Fallingwater in relation to its waterfall?
Directly above it
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.
Q 30What did Fallingwater's contractor do without Wright's knowledge?
Added extra steel to the concrete cantilevers
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.