June 8 - Frank Lloyd Wright

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright was born on June 8, 1867, near Madison, Wisconsin. The child of a broken home, he became a draftsman in Chicago, worked with architect Louis Sullivan, and built up his own practice in the 1890s. By 1900 he had designed homes in the “Prairie School” style, marked by horizontal lines that complemented the landscape. Between 1934 and 1937 Wright designed and built his most celebrated private residence, Fallingwater, for department store magnate Edgar Kaufmann, Sr., at a site southeast of Pittsburgh. Early in the process, Kaufman paid a surprise visit on Wright to see the first architectural drawings – which did not exist. During the two-hour wait for Kaufmann's arrival, nervous apprentices watched Wright draw plans for a three-level, concrete-and-stone structure cantilevered above a waterfall. Kaufmann was not pleased, since he had wanted to view the falls from below. Wright’s cantilevered terraces were structurally unsound from the beginning; repairs to the home were made in 2002 at a cost of more than $11 million.