Tracing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Influence

Over his 70-year career, Frank Lloyd Wright designed more than 1,000 structures—museums, homes, churches, commercial buildings—532 of which were built. But thanks to his ideas (and his fame) his influence maps far beyond his work. From the 1930s onward, to be inspired by Wright could mean working alongside him as an apprentice or fellow at his home, studio, and architectural school Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and later Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona—like E. Fay Jones, one of Wright’s esteemed protégés. It could also mean admiring Wright’s ideas from afar. One of the best examples of this is Joseph Eichler, who in the early ’40s rented a Usonian-style house designed by Wright in Hillsborough, California, and was so inspired by its long, horizontal lines and walls of windows that he developed his Eichler homes with similar modernist principles.

Wright’s influence reached other architects from his generation and later ones, too. He popularized the term organic architecture, referring to the philosophy of designing in harmony with natural surroundings, and was among the group of Chicago-area architects to introduce Prairie style as an extension of the early-20th-century Arts and Crafts movement. Unsurprisingly, many of Wright’s actual descendants also pursued careers in architecture: His son, Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., also known as Lloyd Wright, became a landscape architect and designed a number of Southern California homes and landmarks. Meanwhile, Lloyd Wright’s son, Eric Lloyd Wright, also went on to become an architect and spent much of his career restoring his father’s and grandfather’s buildings.

But the web of Wright’s architectural influence doesn’t stop there: Here are nine architects whose works were touched by Wright’s ideas, whether directly or from a distance. Wright treated his residential projects as testing grounds for his evolving visions; unsurprisingly, his impact on future generations of architects shines in the homes they designed.

Rudolph Schindler’s textile block details

Austrian-born architect Rudolph Schindler (1887-1953) designed and built his most important works in Southern California during the first half of the 20th century. He relocated to Los Angeles in 1920 at the request of Wright, who’d hired him at Taliesin a few years prior, to supervise the construction of Wright’s Mayan Revival Hollyhock House, which in 2019 became L.A.’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site (and is open for tours in East Hollywood). He also designed two apartments for Wright’s Samuel Freeman House in the Hollywood Hills. Schindler decided to stay in L.A. and open his own practice; in the ’30s, he designed the Greek village-inspired Bubeshko Apartments in the Silver Lake area, which have decorative wall caps that resemble Wright’s iconic textile blocks from both aforementioned projects.

Richard Neutra’s approach to connection with nature

Richard Neutra (1892-1970) is also known for his 20th-century Southern California modernist designs, like fellow Austrian émigré and Taliesin apprentice Schindler. Among Neutra’s most famous works is the 1946 Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, designed for the same (eponymous) client who commissioned Wright a decade prior for Fallingwater in rural Pennsylvania. Over his career, Neutra developed his own concept for a design approach based on a connection between humans and nature, coining the term "biorealism." Neutra’s principles of biorealism are evident in the ’50s wooden, rectangular Goodman House in San Bernardino, California, which he designed with clerestories at the bottom of a glass wall and mitered corner windows, similar to features of Wright’s Usonians.

Bruce Goff’s early Wright mentorship

The iconoclastic architectural footprint of Bruce Goff (1904-1982) is most predominant in Oklahoma and across the Midwest, where his family moved around during his childhood. At age 12, Goff apprenticed at a Tulsa architecture firm and started correspondence with a much-older Wright and Wright’s own mentor, architect Louis Sullivan. Over the course of their long, complicated friendship, Goff developed his own highly imaginative style, but was also inspired by Wright and Sullivan’s ideas about organic architecture and modernism. Some of Goff’s earliest (albeit more traditional) buildings are still standing in Tulsa, including the Art Deco Boston Avenue Methodist Church, as well as the McGregor House, one of Goff’s first-known designs (created while he was still in high school), which is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places—and on VRBO as a rental. The home evokes Wright’s wide, Prairie-style overhangs, along with a tiered roof.

John Lautner’s embrace of organic architecture

Inspired by Wright’s 1932 autobiography, John Lautner (1911-1994) applied to the Taliesin Fellowship in Wisconsin and apprenticed to Wright throughout the mid-’30s. He oversaw the construction of Wright’s Prairie-style Wingspread in Wisconsin, the Mayan Revival Ennis House in L.A., and the Abby Longyear Roberts House, a lesser-known Wright project actually commissioned by Lautner’s mother-in-law near where he grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Though Lautner is known for his Southern California residential designs and his seminal contributions to Googie architecture, he shared Wright’s passion for organic architecture. His ’60s Sheats-Goldstein Residence in L.A.’s Beverly Crest neighborhood, for example, uses skylights, walls of windows, exterior covered pathways, and an open plan to blend the interior spaces with the outdoors.

William Wesley Peters: protégé and son-in-law

One of the first Taliesin apprentices, William Wesley Peters (1912-1991) left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work under Wright in 1932. A few years later, he also became Wright’s son-in-law—he married the architect’s stepdaughter, Svetlana, who later died in a car accident—and assisted Wright on many projects throughout his career. Upon Wright’s death in 1959, Peters found his own beat as chairman of Taliesin Associated Architects, the firm established by four of Wright’s apprentices to carry on his architectural vision. Not far from Taliesin, Peters’s saucer-shaped Bank of Spring Green has nods to similar lines seen in Wright’s Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Milwaukee and the David and Gladys Wright House in Phoenix, which Wright built in 1952 for the namesake residents, his son and daughter-in-law.

Edgar Tafel’s structural touches

Edgar Tafel (1912-2011) spent most of the ’30s at Taliesin, working with Wright on Fallingwater and Wingspread, as well as the SC Johnson headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin. In the early ’40s, he established his own practice in New York City and designed many projects there, including two churches in Greenwich Village, where he was a longtime resident. A weekend house Tafel designed for his parents in 1946 in Croton-on-Hudson, located an hour north of Manhattan, features a carport, built-ins lining the bedroom wing’s hallway, and cypress walls throughout—all clear nods to Wright.

Joseph Eichler’s modernist tract houses

While neither Joseph Eichler (1900-1974) nor Claude Oakland (1919-1989) were direct apprentices of Wright, both the real estate developer and his most prolific architect were deeply influenced by Wright’s approaches. Eichler’s experience living in Wright’s Sidney Bazett House during his early days as a developer coaxed him to employ similar natural light and space-saving storage tactics, like walls of windows and atriums and tucked-away built-ins, in his own trademark tract houses. Many of the nearly 11,000 Eichlers built between the late-’40s and mid-’60s were designed by Oakland.

Paolo Soleri’s utopian visions

Italian-American architect Paolo Soleri (1919-2013) worked with Wright as a Taliesin West fellow in the late ’40s. From the mid-’50s to the late ’60s, Soleri built his own home and workshop—with the help of his own volunteer apprentices—just down the road in Arizona’s Paradise Valley and called it Cosanti, which blends the Italian words "cosa" and "anti," meaning "against things." In the ’70s, some 60 miles north of Wright’s architecture school, Soleri tested his progressive urban planning ideals at Arcosanti, an experimental community designed according to his concept of "arcology," which bridged architecture and ecology (not unlike Wright’s organic architecture). Soleri and Wright had very different visions for American utopias; Wright’s Broadacre City concept sought to decentralize urban areas in favor of more sprawling setups, while Soleri envisioned a densely built, communally-oriented environment. Still, his 1949 Dome House in Cave Creek, Arizona, designed with another Wright apprentice, Mark Mills, has many references to Wright’s architectural style, among them banquette seating and floating stairs.

John Rattenbury’s desert designs

John Rattenbury (1928-2021) helped cofound Taliesin Associated Architects after Wright’s death. But the Canadian architect was first inspired by Wright after reading a 1948 issue of Architecture Forum; in 1950, he applied to the fellowship and was accepted, working alongside Wright at Taliesin West until his mentor’s passing. A nearby Phoenix home by Rattenbury is a study in geometry based on one of Wright’s concepts. It draws clear nods to Wright’s final residential design: the Norman Lykes House, with its stainless-steel kitchen counters and cylindrical living rooms, which Rattenbury completed for Wright the same year, in 1967. In New Jersey, the Rattenbury-designed Kessler House also evokes some Wright signatures; the owners actually commissioned Rattenbury because they admired Wright’s Fallingwater and wanted a home with a similar feel.

Top Image (from left): Photo of Taliesin West by DeAgostini/Getty Images; photo of Fallingwater courtesy the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy; photo of Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House by Slim Aarons/Getty Images

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