Frank Lloyd Wright

Raised in rural Wisconsin, Wright studied civil engineering before apprenticing in Chicago with Louis Sullivan at Adler & Sullivan. He opened his own practice in 1893 and established a studio in his Oak Park home in 1898. His philosophy - organic architecture, designing in harmony with humanity and the environment - drove the Prairie School movement and later the Usonian home concept within his Broadacre City vision for American urban planning. The fame grew alongside turbulence: he left his first wife Catherine for Mamah Cheney in 1909; in 1914 a staff member murdered Mamah, her children, and others at his Taliesin estate; his second marriage to Miriam Noel lasted four stormy years before he married Olgivanna Lazović in 1928. Through seventy years he mentored hundreds of apprentices in his Taliesin Fellowship and designed churches, schools, skyscrapers, hotels, museums, integrating every interior element down to the tableware. In 1991 the American Institute of Architects named him the greatest American architect of all time.