Frank Lloyd Wright: The Man Who Built America

Explore the famed architect’s works and design philosophy.

Considered by many to be America’s greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright built over five hundred buildings over the course of a seven decade career, changing the face of modern architecture.  In Frank Lloyd Wright: The Man Who Built America, airing Friday, July 14 at 9 p.m. on WXXI-TV, follows architect Jonathan Adams he travels across the United States to explore Wright’s masterpieces and the Welsh roots that shaped both his life and signature design. The program is distributed to the public television system by American Public Television.

Fallingwater, the house over a waterfall in Pennsylvania, has been called the greatest house of the 20^th century. The spiraling Guggenheim museum in New York reinvented the art museum. But the underlying philosophy that links all of Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings is as important as anything he built.

Wright was raised in a Unitarian community in Wisconsin, a small piece of Wales in America. His mother had been born and raised in west Wales, emigrating to America with her family in 1844, likely to escape religious persecution. The values he absorbed while growing up were based on a love of nature, the importance of hard work, and the need to question convention and defy it where necessary. These beliefs had a direct influence on Wright’s architecture, as well as in the name of the home he built in the valley where he was raised: Taliesin, named after an ancient Welsh bird.

Host and architect Jonathan Adams argues that more than 150 after his birth, Frank Lloyd Wright is a vitally important figure whose belief in organic architecture that complements the landscape and responds to individual needs. That revolutionary vision continues on, teaching and inspiring us to build for a better world.