Frank Lloyd Wright

Wright's Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, was finished in October 1908 and dedicated on September 26, 1909. Its structure was poured concrete reinforced with steel, a choice that the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust's research report describes as using reinforced concrete as an architectural medium and not only as a structural element.

Fallingwater, a weekend house Wright designed for the Edgar Kaufmann family at Bear Run, Pennsylvania, was built from April 1936 to 1937, and the Kaufmanns moved in that December. Rather than facing the falls from across the stream, as the family had expected, the house was cantilevered directly over them.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York opened on October 21, 1959, about sixteen years after the 1943 contract and roughly six months after Wright's death in April 1959. Visitors follow a continuous ramp that winds up to a skylit dome instead of moving through conventional galleries.

According to a recollection by the Taliesin apprentice Edgar Tafel, published in Carnegie Magazine, Edgar Kaufmann telephoned on September 22, 1935 to say he was driving from Milwaukee to Taliesin to see the Fallingwater drawings, and Wright then began drawing the house while the apprentices watched. The Fallingwater website relays accounts by several apprentices that the design was produced within hours, and records that Wright had first visited the Bear Run site in December 1934.

In 1936 Kaufmann had outside engineers review Wright's plans, and steel was added to Fallingwater's first-floor cantilever at their recommendation; cracks appeared in the terrace parapet walls after the formwork came off, and Wright attributed them to the added steel. In an undated letter reproduced in Carnegie Magazine, Wright told Kaufmann that if he lacked his confidence he would drop the whole matter, and Kaufmann replied in similar terms while asking Wright to come to Pittsburgh to sort it out. A structural evaluation commissioned by the Conservancy in 1995-96 later confirmed continuing deflection of the cantilevers.

The exchange illustrates the profile's willingness to stay in open disagreement with a client. The record also shows Kaufmann answering just as directly, and the two continued to plan projects together until Kaufmann's death in 1955. Conflict Tolerance

By 1932, at age sixty-five, Wright had built for only two paying clients in nearly five years. That autumn he and his wife Olgivanna launched the Taliesin Fellowship, and twenty-three apprentices gathered at Taliesin in October 1932 to farm, quarry stone and build the community's own quarters while learning architecture. Senior fellows later superintended construction of Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax headquarters, and one account credits Edgar Kaufmann Jr., who joined the Fellowship in 1934, with persuading his father to commission the Fallingwater house.

One reading is that the Fellowship shows a pattern of creating an opening when commissions were scarce rather than waiting for one to appear. The sources also point to outside factors, including the Depression and the Kaufmann family connection, in how the following years unfolded. Proactive Agency