Frank Lloyd Wright was the greatest 20th-century American architect. With a few exceptions, most of the pretenders to that title were heavily influenced by European styles. Wright was brought up in rural Wisconsin and his architecture, in its several forms, remained essentially American
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Wright's rural upbringing, and his age (when he was born, the Civil War was barely over, and he started work as an architect in 1889), set him apart from the major influence on 20th-century architecture: urbanisation. Even in 1939, he saw no future for cities
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Wright's early buildings, such as the house he built in 1890 in Oak Park, Chicago, used cosy, traditional elements but achieved a rather severe formality. His "organic" style, one of whose characteristics was the use of design and materials which integrated buildings into the natural landscape, was still decades away
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The horizontal forms of Wright's famous "Prairie" houses expressed the endless spaciousness of the American landscape. But his best-known house, known as Falling Water, at Bear Run, Pennsylvania (1935), pushed the "organic" metaphor much further: its cantilevered concrete platforms were built over a natural waterfall
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The Guggenheim Museum in New York was a was a triumph of organic architecture, set - subversively - in the world's greatest city, New York. Wright considered every detail, right down to the visual effect of the trees on the sidewalk
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The Guggenheim Museum was completed in 1959, the last year of Wright's life. It employed modernist devices - sky-lit central wells surrounded by galleries - which Wright had first experimented with fifty years earlier. But his style had evolved dramatically in the meantime, from monumentalism to fluid plasticity
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By the end of his life Wright was acknowledged as America's greatest living architect. But he remained an iconoclast, still seeming uncomfortable in his own time. At 88 years of age he still talked passionately about naturalism and the need for an American style of architecture, was still highly critical of cities and skyscrapers - while planning to build the tallest in the world
