Frank Lloyd Wright, (1867-1959) generally regarded as America's greatest architect, was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, which became the setting for Taliesin East, Wright's home and architectural headquarters for many years. His mother, Anna Lloyd Jones, one of three sisters who were educated school teachers, had a dominating personality thus, determined that her son, Frank, would be an architect.

His father, William Wright, an idealistic, socially-reforming, itinerant Baptist minister was a musically talented pianist and singer, who left his family and dominating wife early in young Frank's life. Responding to his mother's early direction, Frank attended the engineering department of the University of Wisconsin in nearby Madison for under a year before going to Chicago in 1877 to begin his career under Lyman Sylsbee, a talented architect designing in the American Shingle Style. Five months later, Wright worked in the office of Louis Sullivan, the philosophic leader of the revolutionary cadre of young Chicago architects, who accepted the challenge to develop an American architecture not indebted to past precedent and tradition.

Sullivan had brought the skyscraper to a mature art form in Chicago, its birthplace. Wright quickly rose in that important office to become its manager and project director. Fired in 1893 and on his own, in 1895, Wright set up a studio in Oak Park where by 1900, he and the young architects in Chicago, had developed a coherent new style that began to be called, "Prairie School".

As Wright's career developed, a small group of prominent citizens in Mason City, Iowa was interested in building a new bank and hotel in the community. One of them, J.E.E. Markley had two daughters who were attending the Hillside School at Spring Green, Wisconsin that Wright designed in 1902. The school impressed Markely thus, he selected Wright as the architect for the new bank and hotel in Mason City, known as the Historic Park Inn Hotel.

While in Mason City to develop the bank and hotel Markley's neighbor, Dr. G.C. Stockman commissioned Wright to design a residential home for his family, which was completed in 1908. The Frank Lloyd Wright Stockman House was Wright's first and only Prairie School style house designed in Iowa. The plan that Dr. Stockman commissioned for was an adaptation and variation of a $5,000 fireproof home designed by Wright that appeared in the April 1907 issue of "Ladies Home Journal". This residential design was created to address the housing needs of the middle class. The plan showed a four-bedroom house in which the largest possible living space was realized by allowing living room, dining room and veranda to flow together.

In 1910, at age 43, Wright left Mason City before the Park Inn Hotel, now his only remaining hotel which became the prototype for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, and the City National Bank's construction was about to begin. Wright went back to Illinois, deserted his wife, six children and took off for Europe with his next-door neighbor, Mamah Cheney, who left her husband and two children to be with Wright. Wright's "elopement" to Europe with Mamah, concluded his Mason City career.

It is believed that while working in Mason City, Wright discussed the possibility of designing other homes in the community. Walter Burley Griffin and Barry Byrne eventually picked up on Wright's ideas and started a new development. In 1912, Griffin's first two houses were completed, now recognized as the Rock Glen - Rock Crest National Historic District, which is the largest grouping of homes, unified by a common natural setting in the United States. Three more houses by Griffin, one by Byrne, one jointly by Griffin and Byrne and one by Einar Broaten followed them. In addition, William Drummond designed the Curtis Yelland house while he was in Mason City supervising the construction of the hotel and bank complex started by Wright.

Griffin would leave the United States during the development of Rock Crest - Rock Glen area to supervise the lay out of Canberra, to be Australia's new capital, which won the international competition for its design. He left Barry Byrne in charge of his practice in the Midwest and as his possible successor.

Though there were many exceptions, exterior characteristics of the Prairie School house style included widely overhanging, low-pitched hip roofs with clean roof edges and broad, low, central chimneys; bands of windows tightly placed beneath the soffits of the projecting hip-roof lines, with an eye to making the hip roofs appear to hover over lower, more substantial- appearing wall surfaces; taller central house sections with lower projecting wings; multiple horizontal trim bands and a prominent baseboard skirt, visually bringing the entire structure strongly down to earth while making invisible, its foundation and basement windows.

Their inside flow of space emphasized the integration of the significant living areas without intervening obstruction while the design emphasized the horizontal, blunted the distinction between inside and outside and continued Wright's mission "to destroy the box".

In Mason City, the Stockman House (1908) represents one of the first times Wright achieved these important revolutionary goals in a small, middle class home. Mason City's Historic Park Inn Hotel (1909) is the only remaining hotel of the six Wright designed and is the prototype for his world famous Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1914-1922) and the obvious forerunner of his Midway Gardens in Chicago (1914). The City National Bank (1910) in Mason City is considered to be the best of the two banks designed by Wright.

Though Wright's long, creative architectural career continued unremittingly for another forty years, encompassing many further, distinct periods of creativity, he would have enjoyed a significant American and international reputation had his career ended with the completion of his Prairie School period.

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