“Frank Lloyd Wright and the 'Academic Tradition' of the Early Eighteen-Nineties”

AboutArgues that Frank Lloyd Wright, though usually understood solely as Louis Sullivan's protégé, was by 1892–93 "almost certainly the ablest academic designer in Chicago" — accomplished enough in the imitated-Renaissance "academic tradition" then triumphant at the Columbian Exposition (demonstrated in his Blossom House, Harlan House, and his entry in the Milwaukee Public Library and Museum competition) that Daniel Burnham offered to fund six years of study at the École des Beaux-Arts and in Rome, an offer Wright declined, citing Sullivan's influence. Hitchcock traces the emergence of the American academic classical revival through Richard Morris Hunt, H. H. Richardson, and especially the firm of McKim, Mead & White (via draughtsman Joseph M. Wells and the Villard Houses and Boston Public Library), contrasts it with the parallel but distinct "Queen Anne" academic revival of Norman Shaw in England, and situates the World's Columbian Exposition's Renaissance building program as its American culmination. He concludes that Wright's brief but intense academic apprenticeship of 1892–93 fused productively with his earlier Richardsonian and Sullivanian training to shape his mature Prairie style, including the axial, chimney-centered planning first realized in the Winslow House.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0075-4390%281944%297%3C46%3AFLWAT%27%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7