English & Literature

Who is Frank Lloyd Wright from The City Reader and what is their importance?

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1867-1959. Considered by many the greatest American architect of the twentieth century, Frank Lloyd Wright is the author of "Broadacre City: A New Community Plan," among other works. He was famous for his prairie houses, which integrated organic architecture with respect for the nature of materials, as well as several commissioned works, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. A proponent of the "American spirit," Wright was plain-spoken but hated the uneducated, philistine aesthetics that had become popular in the United States in the twentieth century. He worked for social change, which is evident in his writings about Broadacre city, the model for which he showed at Rockefeller Center in 1935. The editors of The City Reader compare Broadacre cities to other models, including Garden Cities, or Le Corbusier's Contemporary Cities. For further reading on Wright, the editors recommend Robert Fishman's Urban Utopias of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982).