Anna Lloyd-Jones: the Woman Behind Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright has been hailed the most innovative American architect of the twentieth century.

Few people realize that it was one woman, Anna Lloyd-Jones, who profoundly shaped his destiny.

Born in West Dyfed, Wales, Anna at age six, her parents and five of her ten siblings, emigrated to New York. By 1844 they had arrived in Ixonia, Wisconsin. The family bought and sold acreage until they finally settled on the lush prairie banks of the Wisconsin River, near Spring Green.

Anna’s brothers became farmers, and one studied for the ministry. Two of her sisters became teachers, as did Anna.

In 1866, Anna at age 28 was still unmarried. Characterized by a fiercely independent spirit and austere personality, she may have scared off potential suitors. However, she met William Cary Wright, a widower with three small children, and married him.

Frank Lincoln Wright was born on June 8, 1867, and from the start, Anna idolized him.

While she was not particularly fond of her three step-children, she was determined that her son would grow to become someone of importance. For whatever reason, she landed on the idea of architecture as his calling.

While Frank was still in a crib, Anna tore out pictures from Harpers Weekly and hung them on the nursery walls for inspiration. Each illustration showed in detail a famous European cathedral.

With Frank as a toddler, Anna and William transferred to Iowa and William became a local pastor. For the next eight years, Anna and William would move, again and again, always looking for better employment.

Anna did not trust any local teacher to properly educate her son, so she taught him herself. After discovering Froebel blocks, invented by the German educator who instituted the concept of kindergartens, Anna purchased a set for Frank.

He was nine years old and instantly became fascinated with arranging and rearranging the smooth Maplewood rectangles, squares, cubes, and cylinders. Along with the blocks, Anna purchased squares of shiny paper and long cylindrical rods so that Frank could buttress his creations.

As Frank experimented with the Froebel blocks, he soon realized that all construction was based upon geometric shapes.

Two years later, while his parents’ marriage began to deteriorate, Frank was sent to help out on the Lloyd-Jones farm back in Spring Green, Wisconsin.

Frank hated the drudgery of farm life but took great delight in studying the landscape around the farm. He soon began to notice that even nature was designed upon geometric patterns. This idea would influence his life career.

By 1885, Anna’s brother, Jenkin Lloyd-Jones had become a prominent preacher within the Unitarian church in Chicago, Illinois. He hired an architect, Joseph Silsbee, to draw up plans for a chapel in the Jones Valley, near the Lloyd-Jones farm.

No documentation exists about the construction, except that a young boy offered to work as an assistant. Frank would have been ten years old at this time.

Six years later, Anna and William were living in Madison, Wisconsin when William filed for divorce from his loveless marriage. He gave Anna and the children the house but expected her family to support her. He walked away, and Frank never saw his father again.

Anna now threw her energies into helping her son gain admission to college. While Frank did not possess a high school diploma, Anna worked with him on his application, and he was admitted as a ‘special student’ to the University of Wisconsin. He would enroll in an engineering course, which to Anna was the precursor to architecture.

Not used to the rigors of academia, Frank did not excel at college and left after two semesters. With Anna’s counseling, he headed for Chicago, with only $7.00 in his pocket and stayed with her brother, Jenkin. In a short time, he joined Silsbee’s Chicago firm and started life as a proper architect’s assistant.

From there he moved onto another firm and eventually became America’s best-known designer of organic architecture – using the shapes and colors of the natural environment to give a building its feel of being one with nature.

Frank changed his name legally to Frank Lloyd Wright. It was Frank’s nod to the pervasive influence of his mother. Anna must have been delighted.

As Frank Lloyd Wright gained fame with his architecture, and scandal with his three marriages and a mistress, Anna stayed in the background, never far away. When he moved into his first house in Oak Park, in the distant Chicago suburbs, Anna moved nearby.

His first marriage crumbled, and Anna gave him acreage back on her family farm in Spring Green, so he could build a new house. He did, and named it Taliesin, a Welsh term meaning ‘under the brow’ (of the landscape).

Frank would go on to design some of the most celebrated buildings, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the iconic Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania.

 A larger than life figure, he wore a cape and pork pie hat in chilly weather, and always dressed monochromatically, with a splash of vibrant red for his accent.

I had the privilege of visiting his Arizona estate, Taliesin West, where the desert biome is present in every aspect of his home and studio. My favorite quote from that visit is: The bottom of the sky is the hem of heaven.

When he died on April 9, 1959, at the age of 91, he was buried back in Wisconsin, in a grave near Anna’s side. However, when Frank’s last wife passed away, she left instructions for his body to be exhumed, cremated, and his ashes mixed with hers and interred at Taliesin West in Arizona.

I’m sure Anna was not pleased.

If you like to read more in-depth stories of strong women, here are the links to my two novels, Cut From Strong Cloth www.bit.ly/2SWkCIN and Last Curtain Call www.bit.ly/2TFgOQG.

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