Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School Architects Who Impacted Mason City timeline


1867
Frank Lloyd Wright was born to Anna Lloyd Jones and William Wright in Richland Center, Wisconsin, their eldest son.
1871
Birth of Marion Mahoney
1876
Birth year of Walter Burley Griffin and William Drummond.
1883
Birth of Barry Byrne
1886
Frank Lloyd Wright attended the Engineering school of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
1887
Wright employed as a draftsman by Lyman Silsbee, a skilled architect designing in the American Shingle Style in Chicago.
1887
 Wright joined the firm of Adler & Sullivan as a draftsman for Louis Sullivan, who had just brought Chicago’s striking new innovation, the skyscraper, to a mature art form.
1889
Wright designed and built his home in Oak Park, IL helped by a loan from Louis Sullivan.
1893
 Wright fired by Louis Sullivan for “moonlighting”.  Began independent work at Steinway Hall and in his home.  Built a home studio in Oak Park, IL in 1895.
1894
Wright designed the Winslow house for his friend, William Winslow, a first foretaste of the Prairie house yet to be. 
1895
Marion Mahoney, the second woman to graduate in architecture from MIT and the first woman licensed to practice architecture in Illinois, joined Wright in the Oak Park Studio as his draftsman.
1901
Griffin joined Wright in the Oak Park Studio -- the only architect in the studio permitted to do independent commissions.  By 1905 Griffin had become office manager and project director for Wright.
1901
Griffin designed the split-level William H. Emery house in Elmhurst, IL.
1902
Wright designed the Ward Willets house in Highland Park, IL his first “Prairie” house.
1902
Barry Byrne entered the Oak Park Studio as an apprentice.
1902
Hillside School at Spring Green, Wisconsin designed by Wright for his mother’s sisters.
1903
Wright designed the Larkin mail-order office building in Buffalo.
1903
Griffin designed the Robbie Lamp house in Madison, the first small Prairie house with the “L” floor plan.
1904-08
Wright designed Unity Temple in Oak Park of cast concrete.
1905
Wright and Griffin part company on unfriendly terms.  Griffin began independent practice in Chicago in Steinway Hall.
1906
Wright designed the Robie House in Chicago.
1907
Wright’s design for “A Fireproof House for $5,000” was published in a “Ladies Home Journal”.
1908
Wright designed the Meyer May house in Grand Rapids Michigan.
1908
Wright designed & built the Stockman house in Mason City, IA, the third of his “Concrete House Cousins” (after Tan I Deri at Spring Green and the Stephen M. B. Hunt house in La Grange).
1909
Wright designed the Park Inn Hotel and City National Bank in Mason City, IA.
1909
Wright elopes to Europe with Mamah Cheney for “spiritual hegira”.  He completed work on drawings for the German “Wasmuth Edition” of his work while there.
1910
William Drummond took over supervision of construction of Park Inn Hotel - City National Bank project in Mason City.  During that year designed the Curtis Yelland house on River Heights Drive.  Park Inn Hotel and City National Bank project completed in same year.
1910
Marion Mahoney took over design and construction of two houses at Millikin Place, Decatur, and the supervision of one designed by Wright.  These are, respectively, the Robert Mueller and Adolph Mueller houses and the Irving house.  She hired Griffin to do landscape design for Millikin Place.
1911
Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin are married.  At about the same time Griffin began the planning of what was to be his Rock Glen – Rock Crest residential development in Mason City, IA.
1912
Griffin, with the help of Marion’s renderings, won the international competition to design a city plan for Canberra, to be the new capital of Australia. 
1912
The Arthur Rule house and the Harry Page house designed by Griffin and completed.
1912-14   
The Joshua Melson and James E. Blythe houses designed by Griffin and completed.
1913
Griffin and party set sail for Australia.  He left his practice in the hands of Barry Byrne, formerly a Wright apprentice from 1902-1908.  By 1913 Byrne was under the influence of Irving Gill.
1914
Wright completed Midway Gardens.
1914
Wright’s wife, Mamah Cheney, her three children, a Wright draftsman and Taliesin were killed in a fire set by a deranged hired hand at Wright’s bungalow in Spring Green, WI.
1914-16
Completion of Samuel Davis Drake house on Rock Crest by Einar Broaten, apparently after client unsuccessfully requested client to have Griffin design his house.
1914-15
Griffin’s Sam Schneider house in Rock Glen completed under supervision of Barry Byrne, who later added two upstairs sleeping porches.
1914-19
Wright designed the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Japan.
1915 Griffin’s Hugh Gilmore House, in the Rock Glen area in Mason City, IA, was built for James Blythe under the supervision of Barry Byrne. Byrne probably modified original design.
1917
Barry Byrne completed his E. V Franke house in Rock Glen district in Mason City, IA.
1917
Hollyhock house built on Hollywood Boulevard for Aline Barnsdall by Wright.  A transitional design between Prairie School and the concrete blockhouses.
1919-22
Construction of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Japan.
1933  
Wright’s Malcolm E. Willey house, in Minneapolis, a transition between Taliesin I and the first Usonian house.
1935  
Wright’s Falling Water – a concrete house with multiple cantilever balconies built over a waterfall on Bear Run Creek in Pennsylvania.  Wright’s very effective answer to the International Style, and, arguably, his most famous house.
1935 
Griffin traveled to Lucknow, India, where he will reinvent his architectural style to conform to Indian needs.
1936
The Jacobs house, Madison, Wisconsin, Wright’s first Usonian house.
1936
Wright’s Johnson Wax Administration Building, Racine, WI.
1937-   
Death of Walter Burley Griffin in India from peritonitis following a fall from scaffolding at a building site.
1945  
Lowell and Agnes Walter house, Cedar Rock on the Wapsipinnicon River in Quasqueton, Iowa, one of Wright’s signature houses.
1946
Death of William Drummond.
1952  
Wright’s Price Towers, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, a mini-skyscraper with four apartments on each floor, each cantilevered out from a central service column.
1956  
Paul and Ida Trier house, Johnston, Iowa.  One of Wright’s Iowa USOnian houses.
1956  
Wright designed Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, an art museum in a circular snail-shell design providing a continuous, sky lit circular ramp for the display of objects of Modern Art.
1956  
Three Marshall Erdman prefab house plans designed by Wright.  Marshall Erdman is the same firm that designed the Mason City Clinic in a Neo-Prairie School style.
1957  
Wright’s Marin County Civic Center.
1959  
Death of Frank Lloyd Wright
1959  
Usonian House in Rock Glen designed by Curtis Besinger for Tom MacNider.  Besinger had been a Taliesin apprentice at the time the concept of the Usonian house was being developed.  Besinger was chair of the University of Kansas Department of Architecture when he did this design.
1962  
Death of Marion Mahoney in America.
1967  
Death of Barry Byrne
1997
Monona Terrace, built almost 60 years after Wright first proposed the plan for its site leading up from Lake Monona to the State Capitol at the summit of a short hill.  The number of Wright’s buildings built posthumously gives ample evidence of his continuing popularity in our land.
2002
Avenue of the Arts Bridge, connecting Minneapolis Institute of the Arts with Minneapolis Convention Center. Designed after a previous Broad Acre City bridge design by Wright.
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