Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright (b. 1867–d. 1959) was perhaps the most well-known American architect, and one of the most important figures in modern architecture of the 20th century. After apprenticing in Chicago, importantly with Louis Sullivan in the firm of Adler and Sullivan, Wright began his independent practice in 1893 in the suburb of Oak Park. There, to 1909, Wright developed the spatially expansive and stylistically innovative type of the Prairie House. In this period Wright also designed his first major larger works, the Larkin Co. Administration Building, Buffalo, New York (1902–1906), and Unity Temple, Oak Park (1905–1909). Wright created a home and studio, Taliesin (1911–1913), amid the farmlands of his maternal family in southern Wisconsin. He also designed the Midway Gardens (1913–1914) in Chicago. Wright spent much of the next eight years in Tokyo working on the Imperial Hotel there, which survived the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. He also designed Hollyhock House (1919–1921) in Los Angeles for Aline Barnsdall, and in 1923–1925, living in Los Angeles, Wright built four “textile block houses.” Based at Taliesin, rebuilt after a second fire in 1925, and in winters from 1937 at Taliesin West near Scottsdale, Arizona, Wright worked with apprentices who formed the Taliesin Fellowship, to create such key works as Fallingwater (1934–1937), at Bear Run in southwestern Pennsylvania, and the S. C. Johnson Company Administration Building (1936–1939) in Racine, Wisconsin. Wright also wrote on new ideas for urbanism, especially his Broadacre City, first exhibited in New York City in 1935. The following year Wright built the first of many Usonian houses designed for clients with modest incomes and featuring many dimensional and material economies while maintaining a sense of spaciousness. In the last phase of his career following World War II, Wright and his apprentices continued to build houses for a national clientele, and such larger works as the S. C. Johnson Company Research Tower (1943–1950) in Racine, the H. C. Price Company Tower (1952–1956) in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, the Marin County Civic Center (1957–1970) in California, and his most influential late work, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1943–1959) in New York City. Wright’s later public buildings also included a series of religious structures, perhaps most notably Beth Sholom Synagogue, Elkins Park, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1954–1959), and Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, Wauwatosa, near Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1956–1963). Oxford University Press online bibliographies usually have 50–150 citations. This bibliography of scholarly literature on Frank Lloyd Wright is limited to about four hundred citations, which is a small percentage of the thousands of publications on Wright from his earliest years through his death in 1959 and continuing through 2020. For publications on Wright through 2002, see Donald Langmead, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Bio-Bibliography (Langmead 2003, cited under Research and Reference Guides), with its over 3,500 entries. For a complete list of references on Wright since 2002, the reader may profitably consult several relevant online scholarly databases such as the Avery Index to Architecture Periodicals, Bibliography of the History of Art, America: History and Life, and Applied Science and Engineering. In this Oxford Bibliography article, publications contemporaneous with the completion of Wright’s works have largely been omitted in favor of later historical accounts of them. For scholarly writing, if an author’s article or book chapter was substantially incorporated into a later book by that same author, references to such earlier articles or chapters have been omitted. Also, the large literature on Wright which is almost exclusively photographic or popular has been mostly omitted, with the exception of local and comprehensive guidebooks to Wright’s architecture. Photographic volumes with substantive essays have been included. Unpublished dissertations and theses have not been included. These can be searched through such databases as Dissertations & Theses Global.