Frank Lloyd Wright: The Dramatic Life of America’s Most Controversial and Creative Architect

Frank Lloyd Wright has been called the greatest American architect of the first half of the Twentieth Century. During a career that spanned seven decades, he worked on over a thousand projects, five hundred of which were built. Born in rural Wisconsin in 1867, Wright had a tumultuous personal life punctuated by many professional vicissitudes and scandals, which make his story feel like a dramatic work of fiction. Wright’s most famous residence, Fallingwater, built in 1935 in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, was named by The Smithsonian Institution as “one of the 28 places to see before you die.” Wright’s other most famous legacy is the controversial Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Wright said his distinctive museum would make the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art “look like a Protestant barn.” Wright’s body of work also includes hotels, office buildings, and churches, which Silvin will describe using over 200 slides, renderings, newsreels, and interviews, giving the audience a feeling of living with this unusual, often called arrogant genius.