Frank Lloyd Wright was born on June 8, 1867: despite a relatively early date of birth, he is considered one of the main "modern" architects belonging to the last century, not the century before. But at the same time, he cannot be called a modernist, and he influenced the masters of the modern movement also surprisingly early, even before the appearance of this movement itself - when in 1910 a collection of his projects, including "prairie houses" - simple forms, with free plan and flowing space. This edition was studied by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier - much younger comrades of Wright in the cohort of "geniuses of the XX century."
Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, each in their own way, anticipated the type of architectural "star" - but, of course, in the formation of their own (extraordinary) image and the accumulation of general attention, they were significantly ahead of their contemporaries-artists. However, Wright could give odds to any colleague in the creative profession, including film actors: his life, already saturated with dramatic and sometimes tragic episodes, by his own efforts turned into a collection of incredible stories (a significant part of which he invented or even “directed”) … An incredible vanity and narcissism made him the prototype for the protagonist of Ayn Rand's novel The Source, Howard Roarke. "The cult of personality" determined the order in his workshop ("brotherhood"!) "Taliesin" in Wisconsin and its "branch" in Arizona, where many young architects sought to become apprentices. Wright also gathered famous people there, whether it was the mystic George Gurdjieff or Svetlana Alliluyeva (who left Taliesin and her husband, the lead architect of Wright's bureau, in part because of the heavy atmosphere of that very cult). Wright himself respected Stalin himself - at least in words - and after a visit to Moscow in June 1937 for the sake of speaking at the All-Union Congress of Soviet Architects for some time spoke of him with approval: however, it is unclear whether he simply wanted to shock the American public and thus attract even more attention.
Wright's architecture, for all its undoubted genius, can also be called "star" - subordinate to considerations that are understandable only to the author, often not suitable for a nominal function ("House over the Falls" is not very convenient for life, the Guggenheim Museum - for the exhibition of works of art), accompanied by a lot of beautiful words (not always true or even meaningful). This is a deeply personal architecture, and most of it was created when the personal was just trying to remove from architecture - albeit often only in words, but still. Wright may well be called one of the key figures of "non-modernism", to whom, as it gradually becomes clear, many more masters of the 20th century can be ranked than heroes of the international style. One can only wonder how long F. L. Wright has been neatly inscribed in "official" history when his work so often breaks with the traditional architecture of his time.
