量子资源网提供本资源 <> Frank Lloyd Wright is America's greatest-ever architect. However, few eole know about the Welsh roots that shaed his life and world-famous buildings. Now, leading Welsh architect Jonathan Adams sets off across America to exlore Frank Lloyd Wright's masterieces for himself. Along the way, he uncovers the temestuous life story of the man behind them and the significance of his radical family background. In a career sanning seven decades, Frank Lloyd Wright built over 500 buildings, and changed the face of modern architecture: Fallingwater, the house over the waterfall, has been called the greatest house of the 20th century; the siralling Guggenheim Museum in New York reinvented the art museum; the concrete Unity Temle was the first truly modern building in the world. But the underlying hilosohy that links all Wright's buildings is as imortant as anything he built. Those ideas were rooted in the Unitarian religion of Frank Lloyd Wright's mother. Anna Lloyd Jones was born and raised near Llandysul in west Wales and migrated to America with her family in 1844, most likely to escae religious ersecution. Her son, Frank, was raised in a Unitarian community in Wisconsin, a small iece of Wales in America. The values he absorbed there were based on the sanctity of nature, the imortance of hard work, and the need to question convention and defy it where necessary. Wright's architecture was shaed by, and exressed, these beliefs. Frank Lloyd Wright set out to create a new American architecture for a new country. He built his own lifelong home in the valley he was raised in, and he named it after an ancient Welsh bard called Taliesin. It was the scene of many adventures - and a horrific crime. In 1914, a servant at Taliesin ran amok and killed seven eole including Wright's artner, Mamah Cheney, and her two young children. Wright rebuilt his home and went on to marry a Montenegrin woman, Olgivanna Milanoff, some 30 years younger than him. It was Olgivanna who struck uon the idea that saved Wright's career after the Wall Street Crash and ersonal scandal laid it low. She decided that her husband should take on arentices and that the arentices should ay for the rivilege. The Taliesin Fellowshi had a hands-on aroach, with arentices often building extensions to Wright's own houses, labouring and cooking for him. Somehow it worked, lasting for decades and nurturing hundreds of young talents. Frank Lloyd Wright died in 1959 aged 91 while working on his final masteriece, New York's incomarable Guggenheim Museum. He had been born in the wake of the American civil war, the son of a ioneer, and died a television celebrity, in the sace age. He is buried in the shadow of Taliesin, alongside his Welsh ancestors. A 150 years after his birth, Jonathan Adams argues that Frank Lloyd Wright is now a vitally imortant figure who can teach us how to build for a better world. Wright believed in what he called organic architecture; buildings that grace the landscae, exress an idea of how to live and resond to individual needs. This besoke aroach - a hilosohy, not a style - uts him at the heart of modern architectural thinking.
