Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867–April 9, 1959) was one of the most prominent architects of the first half of the 20th century.

He was born in the agricultural town of Richland Center, Wisconsin and brought up with strong Unitarian and transcendental principles. As a child he used to spend a lot of time playing with the Kindergarten educational blocks by Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel (popularly known as Froebel's blocks) given by his mother. These consisted of various geometrically shaped blocks that could be assembled in various combinations to form three dimensional compostions.

Wright commenced his formal education in 1885 at the University of Wisconsin School for Engineering, where he was a member of a fraternity, Phi Delta Theta. He took classes part time for two years while apprenticing under Allen Conover, a local builder and professor of civil engineering. In 1887, Wright left the university without taking a degree (although he was granted an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the university in 1955) and moved to Chicago, where he joined the architectural firm of Joseph Lyman Silsbee. Within the year, he had left Silsbee to work for the firm of Adler and Sullivan. Beginning in 1890, he was assigned all residential design work for the firm. In 1893, after a falling out that probably concerned the work he had taken on outside the office, Wright left Adler and Sullivan to establish his own practice in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, IL. He had completed around fifty projects by 1901.