How many buildings did Frank Lloyd Wright design?
Think you do a lot of design projects? According to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation: Frank Lloyd Wright spent more than 70 years designing 1,141 works - including houses, offices, churches, schools, libraries, bridges, museums, furniture, fabrics, art glass, lamps, dinnerware, silver, linens, and graphic arts. Of that total, 532 resulted in completed works, 409 of which still stand. In addition, he was a prolific writer, an educator, and a philosopher.
Wright preached the beauty of native materials and insisted that buildings grow naturally from their surroundings. He freed Americans from the Victorian "boxes" of the 19th century and helped create the open plan with rooms that flowed and opened out to each other.
By changing architecture and changing the way America lived, Wright may have had an even more profound effect. As Wright said, "Whether people are fully conscious of this or not, they actually derive countenance and sustenance from the 'atmosphere' of the things they live in or with. They are rooted in them just as a plant is in the soil in which it is planted."
The soil that sprouted Frank Lloyd Wright was the rural Wisconsin countryside. Throughout his life Wright spoke of the influence of nature on his work and attributed his love of nature to those early years in the rural Wisconsin countryside. During summers spent on his uncle's farm he learned to look at the patterns and rhythms found in nature - the branch of a tree (a natural cantilever), outcroppings of limestone, and the ever-changing sandbars.
Wright later advised his apprentices to "study nature, love nature, stay close to nature."
Source: Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation
