The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959) designed dramatically innovative buildings during a career of almost 70 years. His work established the imagery for much of the contemporary architectural environment.

The most famous, although never the most popular or successful, among American architects, Frank Lloyd Wright set himself the task, as no previous architect had, of designing distinctive and varied architecture for the diverse terrains of a nation that stretched over the valleys, deserts, woods, and mountains, spanning an entire continent. Herald of thesis that architecture should express its time, its site, its builders, and its materials, Wright argued from that romantic, specifically Hegelian thesis that the United States, as a new nation with a new society on a new frontier with a new technology, should express those unique conditions and should build its special aspirations into buildings that would be distinctively and wholly its own--a new style that...