9781422276464

I NTRODUCT I ON T H E M AT R I X

“Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance.” F rank L loyd W right

church organ, and Frank fondly recalled falling asleep night after night to his father’s playing of Bach preludes and Beethoven symphonies. Indeed, Wright came to view music an as integral component of a room. Another influence on the young boy was the time he spent at his uncle James Lloyd Jones’s dairy farm, the Valley, where he gained an inti- mate appreciation of nature despite the ceaseless rounds of chores. In his Autobiography , Wright

Wisconsin Overture Anna Lloyd Jones Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright’s independent-minded Welsh mother, determined before her son was born on June 8, 1867, that he’d be an architect. She hung engrav- ings of the great European cathedrals around his crib in their home in Richland Center, Wis- consin, near Madison. When the boy was seven, she gave him a set of wooden blocks devised as instructional tools for kindergartners by Fried- rich Froebel. The blocks so captured the young Wright’s imagination that critics have pointed out similarities between the geometric masses of the Froebel configurations and the architect’s mature designs. Wright grew up in a family steeped in reli- gion and culture. Anna came from a line of stern Methodist ministers in Wales and her husband, William Carey Wright, whom she married one month before Frank Lloyd was born, was an indi- gent Baptist minister. William Wright played

Frederick C. Robie House Chicago, 1910

Many critics see the Robie House as the fulfillment of the Prairie House style. The building was an amalgam of novel methods of construction and traditional elements of home. The long, low-pitched roof provides an archetypal sense of shelter under its overhanging eaves, but the eaves are like nothing seen before—using welded steel supports to cantilever a full twenty feet beyond the last stone supports. The tiered balconies afford a great degree of privacy because occupants can look outward without themselves being seen.

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