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Frank Lloyd Wright's Impact on Architecture and Civil Engineering

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One of the most influential and well-known architectural engineers in America during the twentieth century has got to be Frank Lloyd Wright. He’s created and designed many creative and functional buildings for most of his career which spanned to about seventy years. His futuristic and modern designs were unique and creative, yet they were still functional for one to live in them. His eccentric thinking has brought about and greatly influenced the image of twentieth century architecture. His works have paved the way to the designs and structures of the civil engineers and architects that we have today in the twenty-first century. Frank Lloyd Wright was born in June 8, 1869 in Richland Center, Wisconsin. He was the eldest of the …show more content…

Architects from all around the world went to Chicago to help rebuild the city after it experienced a tragic fire. After learning the basics of architecture from Silsbee, Wright landed himself a job with the Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan firm, which was one of the progressive firms in the country at the time. Wright grew quite a friendship with Sullivan, and learned many things from him. Since the Adler and Sullivan firm was both an engineering and architectural firm, Wright was taught the ideology of “form follows function”, which helped him know that a building design’s functionality matter more than how it looks. By time he was around his early 20s, he has already worked on most of the best buildings in Chicago such as the Auditorium Building, which is now the Roosevelt University. In 1889, Wright married Catherine Lee Clark Tobin, in which they met at a social held at his uncle’s church. He and Catherine had six children, in which two became architectural engineers. To help support for his wife and family, Wright took on extra work designing houses. Wright took some designs from his firm and added some ideas into them, which eventually ended his relationship with Sullivan and the firm. In 1893, Wright created his own architectural firm. In 1909, Wright abandoned his wife of 20 years as well as his children, and ran off to Europe with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, who was a wife of a formal client.

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