Notas del episodio
Frank Lloyd Wright was born in rural Wisconsin in 1867, though he spent most of his life claiming 1869. His father William, an itinerant preacher and musician, moved the family constantly and walked out when Wright was 18. In 1876 his mother Anna bought him a set of Froebel gifts, maple blocks meant to be arranged on a grid, and Wright said the feel of them stayed in his fingers for life. After dropping out of civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin, he arrived in Chicago in 1887, rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1871, and rose to head draftsman under Louis Sullivan at Adler and Sullivan. Buried in debt from clothes, horses, and violins, he secretly designed at least nine bootleg houses until Sullivan spotted one in Kenwood in 1893, and the two did not speak for 12 years.
Wright turned down Daniel Burnham's offer to fund classical study in Paris and Rome, and built the Prairie style and the open floor plan in houses like the Robie House. In 1909 he abandoned his wife Catherine and six children and fled to Europe with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, a client's wife. In 1914 a staff member at Taliesin set the house on fire and attacked the occupants with an axe, killing seven people including Mamah and her two children. Wright cleared the rubble and rebuilt, then went on to the Imperial Hotel, Fallingwater, and the Guggenheim.
- The 1911 Wasmuth portfolio of over a hundred lithographs that became a textbook for European modernists
- How the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo floated on soft mud and survived the Great Kanto earthquake of September 1, 1923
- The Usonian home, with slab-on-grade radiant heating and a kitchen opened into the living space after the Great Depression
- The Fallingwater contractor secretly adding steel to cantilevers that engineers warned would collapse
- Wright's death in April 1959 at 91, six months before the spiraling Guggenheim Museum opened