SOURCE: "1914: In the Cause of Architecture," in Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941, pp. 46-58.

In the following essay, originally published in 1914, Wright responds to detractors of the "Prairie School" of architecture—a movement formed of his disciples and imitators—by dissociating himself from this school.

"Nature has made creatures only; art has made men." Nevertheless, or perhaps for that very reason, every struggle for truth in the arts and for the freedom that should go with the truth has always had its own peculiar load of disciples, neophytes, and quacks. The young work in architecture here in the Middle West, owing to a measure of premature success, has for some time past been daily rediscovered, heralded and drowned in noise by this new characteristic feature of its struggle. The so-called "movement" threatens to explode soon in foolish exploitation of unripe performances or topple over...