We mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Frank Lloyd Wright this year (1867−1959) for many reasons. He affirmed a truly American architecture, celebrating the unique topographies of our landscape, from the early Prairie Style, exemplified by the Robie House (1907) in Chicago, Illinois, through the later work in the Southwest such as Taliesin West (1937) in Scottsdale. He was innovative, too, such as building Fallingwater (1935) in western Pennsylvania for the Edgar J. Kaufmann family on a waterfall or designing the Guggenheim Museum (1959) in Manhattan as a spiral of galleries rather than in angular array. America’s greatest architect can also be lauded for pioneering ideas that helped promote today’s sustainable thinking, even though he would not have thought himself an environmentalist intent on world-saving. He was rather an architect intent on affirming the relationship between the built and natural environments –– a green thought for sure.
