Frank Lloyd Wright was born in the agricultural town of Richland Center, Wisconsin, United States, on June 8, 1867, just two years after the end of the American Civil War. His father, William Russell Cary Wright was a locally admired orator, music teacher, occasional lawyer and itinerant minster. He had met and married Anna Lloyd Jones, a county school teacher, the previous year when he was employed as the superintendent of schools for Richland County.

Both of Wright's parents were strong-willed individuals with idiosyncratic interests that they passed on to Frank. His mother declared when she was expecting her first child that he would grow up to build beautiful buildings. She decorated his nursery with engravings of English Cathedrals torn from a periodical to encourage the infant's ambition. The family moved to Weymouth, Massachusetts in 1870 where William had been called as a minister to a small congregation.

The family struggled financially in Weymouth and the journey east proved unsuccessful. The Reverend Wright could not provide for his family from the pastorate's small congregation. The Wrights returned to Spring Green, Wisconsin, where the supportive Lloyd Jones clan could help William find employment. They settled in Madison, where William taught music lessons and served as the secretary to the newly-formed Unitarian society

Soon after he turned 14 in 1881 Wright's parents separated. Anna had been unhappy for sometime with William's inability to provide for his family and asked him to leave. William left Wisconsin after the divorce and never saw the family again. As the only male left in the family, Frank assumed financial responsibility for his mother and two sisters.

Wright never attended high school and was admitted to the University of Wisconsin as a special student in 1885. He took classes part-time for two semesters, while apprenticing under a local builder and professor of civil engineering. In 1887, Wright left the University without taking a degree and moved to Chicago, Illinois, still rebuilding from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, where he joined the architectural firm of Joseph Lyman Silsbee. Within the year, he had left Silsbee to work for the firm of Adler & Sullivan.

In 1889, he married his first wife, Catherine Lee "Kitty" Tobin, purchased land in Oak Park, Illinois, and built his first home, and eventually his studio there. His marriage to Kitty Tobin, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, raised his social status, and he became more well-known.

Beginning in 1890, he was assigned all residential design work for the firm. In 1893, Louis Sullivan discovered that Wright had been accepting private commissions. Sullivan felt betrayed that his favored employee had designed houses "behind his back", and he asked Wright to leave the firm.

Between 1900 and 1917, his residential designs were "Prairie Houses" (extended low buildings with shallow, sloping roofs, clean sky lines, suppressed chimneys, overhangs and terraces, using unfinished materials), so-called because the design is considered to complement the land around Chicago. These houses are credited with being the first examples of the "open plan."

The houses considered the masterpieces of the late Prairie Period (1907–1909) are the Frederick Robie House in Chicago and the Avery and Queene Coonley House in Riverside. The Robie House, with its soaring, cantilevered roof lines, supported by a 110-foot-long channel of steel, is the most dramatic. Its living and dining areas form virtually one uninterrupted space. This building had a profound influence on young European architects after World War I and is sometimes called the "cornerstone of modernism." Wright's work, however, was not known to European architects until the publication of the Wasmuth Portfolio in 1910.

Local gossips noticed Wright's flirtations and he developed a reputation in Oak Park as a man-about-town. His large family had grown to six children and the brood required most of Catherine's attention. In 1904, Wright designed a house for Edwin Cheney, a neighbor in Oak Park, and immediately took a liking to Cheney's wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Mamah Cheney was a modern woman with interests outside the home. The two fell in love, even though Wright had been married for almost 20 years. Often the two could be seen taking rides in Wright's automobile through Oak Park, and they became the talk of the town. Wright's wife, Kitty,sure that this attachment would fade as the others had, refused to grant him a divorce. Neither would Edwin Cheney grant one to Mamah. In 1909, even before the Robie House was actually completed, Wright and Mamah Cheney eloped to Europe. The scandal that erupted virtually destroyed Wright's ability to practice architecture in the United States.

Wright and Mamah Cheney traveled extensively throughout Europe. In 1910, during a stop in Berlin, Wright, with virtually all of his drawings, visited the publishing house of Ernst Wasmuth, who had agreed to publish his work there. In two volumes, the Wasmuth Portfolio was thus published, and created the first major exposure of Wright's work in Europe. The later Bauhaus movement's founders claimed to have been inspired by these books.

Wright remained in Europe for one year (though Mamah Cheney returned to the United States a few times) and set up home in Fiesole, Italy. During this time, Edwin Cheney granted her a divorce, though Kitty again refused to grant one to her husband. After Wright's return to the United States in late 1910, Wright persuaded his mother to purchase land for him in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The land, purchased on April 10, 1911, was adjacent to land held by his mother's family, the Lloyd-Joneses. Wright began to build himself a new home, which he called Taliesin, by May of 1911.

During the turbulent 1920's, Wright designed Graycliff, one of his most innovative residences of the period, and a precursor to Fallingwater. The Graycliff estate was constructed from 1926 to 1929 for Isabelle and Darwin Martin on a bluff overlooking Lake Erie, just south of Buffalo, NY. A complex of three buildings and extensive grounds all designed by Wright, Graycliff incorporates cantilevered balconies and terraces, "ribbons" of windows, and a transparent "screen" of windows allowing views of the lake through the Isabelle R. Martin House, Graycliff's largest building. Constructed of limestone from the beach below, warm ochre-colored stucco and striking red-stained roofs, Graycliff's light-filled buildings were designed in Wright's "organic" style. Wright's designs for Graycliff's grounds incorporate water features that echo the lake beyond...a pond, a fountain, sunken gardens and stone walls in a "waterfall" pattern that surround the property. On the summer solstice, Graycliff is aligned with the setting sun on Lake Erie,as Wright intended.

One of his most famous private residences was constructed from 1935 to 1939—Fallingwater—for Mr. and Mrs. E.J. Kaufmann Sr., at Bear Run, Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh. It was designed according to Wright's desire to place the occupants close to the natural surroundings, with a stream and waterfall running under part of the building. The construction is a series of cantilevered balconies and terraces, using limestone for all verticals and concrete for the horizontals. The house cost $155,000, including the architect's fee of $8,000.

It was also in the 1930s that Wright first designed "Usonian" houses. Intended to be highly practical houses for middle-class clients, the designs were based on a simple, yet elegant geometry. He would later use similar elementary forms in his First Unitarian Meeting House built in Madison, Wisconsin, between 1946 and 1951. [1]
Wright is responsible for a concept or a series of extremely original concepts of suburban development united under the term Broadacre City. He proposed the idea in his book The Disappearing City in 1932, and unveiled a very large (12 by 12 ft) model of this community of the future, showing it in several venues in the following years. He went on developing the idea until his death.

His 'Usonian' homes set a new style for suburban design that was followed by countless developers. Many features of modern American homes date back to Wright; open plans, slab-on-grade foundations, and simplified construction techniques that allowed more mechanization or at least efficiency in building are amongst his innovations.

As Wright's career progressed, so as well did the mechanization of the glass industry. Wright fully embraced glass in his designs and found that it fit well into his philosophy of organic architecture. Glass allowed for interaction and viewing of the outdoors while still protecting from the elements. In 1928, Wright wrote an essay on glass in which he compared it to the mirrors of nature: lakes, rivers and ponds. One of Wright's earliest uses of glass in his works was to string panes of glass along whole walls in an attempt to create light screens to join together solid walls. By utilizing this large amount of glass, Wright sought to achieve a balance between the lightness and airiness of the glass and the solid, hard walls. Arguably, Wright's most well-known art glass is that of the Prairie style. The simple geometric shapes that yield to very ornate and intricate windows represent some of the most integral ornamentation of his career.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, New York (1959)
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City is a building that occupied Wright for 16 years (1943 - 59) and is probably his most recognized masterpiece. The building rises as a warm beige spiral from its site on Fifth Avenue; its interior is similar to the inside of a seashell. Its unique central geometry was meant to allow visitors to experience Guggenheim's collection of nonobjective geometric paintings with ease by taking an elevator to the top level and then viewing artworks by walking down the slowly descending, central spiral ramp, which features a floor embedded with circular shapes and triangular light fixtures, in order to complement the geometric nature of the structure.

Often, Wright designed not only the buildings, but the furniture as well. Some of the built-in furniture remains, while other restorations have included replacement pieces created using his plans.

Wright responded to the transformation of domestic life that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, when servants became a less prominent or completely absent feature of most American households, by developing homes with progressively more open plans. This allowed the woman of the house to work in her 'workplace', as he often called the kitchen, yet keep track of and be available for the children and/or guests in the dining room. Much of modern architecture, including the early work of Mies van der Rohe, can be traced back to Wright's innovative work.

Wright also designed his own clothing. His fashion sense was unique and he usually wore expensive suits, flowing neckties, and capes as well as driving a custom yellow raceabout in the Prairie years, a red Cord convertible in the 1930s, a famous customized 1940 Lincoln for many years, each of which earned him many speeding tickets.