The career of architect and designer John Lloyd
Wright was dominated by the problem of reconciling the artistic influence of his father, Frank
Lloyd Wright, with his own, independently
developed ideas about design. Wright believed in
his father's principles of organic architecture and
tried to express them in his own terms. Yet he
resented the assumption that his buildings were
mere pastiches of Frank Lloyd Wright's. Throughout his career, John Lloyd Wright moved in and
out of his father's sphere of influence as the course
of his personal life led him to live in different
places-Chicago; Japan; Long Beach, Indiana; and
Del Mar, California-and pursue a variety of types
of commissions. His work seems to have achieved
artistic independence and success according to the
extent to which he was comfortable with his surroundings and at peace with himself. His most
original designs were produced during a period
when he assumed a confident role in a tightly knit
community, Long Beach of the 1920s and '30s.
Wright never wrote down the story of his own
career, although he recounted some of its key
moments in the context of a biography of Frank
Lloyd Wright, My Father Who is on Earth (1946).
It is only by looking at John's work that his
career can be reconstructed, and a knowledge of
his life brings the character of his buildings into
sharper focus.
The Early Years and Apprenticeship
John Lloyd Wright was born John Kenneth Wright
on December 12, 1892, in the house that his
father, Frank Lloyd Wright, had built for himself
in Oak Park, Illinois. He was the second
son in a
family that would come to number four boys and
two girls.* The children were largely raised and
educated by their mother, Catherine, who ran a
kindergarten for her own burgeoning brood and
some neighborhood children. Their activities
centered on the playroom that Wright added to
the house in 1895, a long, high-vaulted room full
of building blocks and "funny mechanical toys"
which John later described as an almost magical
space in a surpassingly beautiful house. When
childish amusements palled, the children found
their way to the staircase, completed after 1898,
which led to the balcony overlooking their father's
architectural studio. They would whisper and giggle
and toss things onto the drawing boards, disrupting meetings with clients and causing general
consternation.
But their exasperated father put up with them,
for if education was their mother's business, play
and luxury were his. Wright boxed with the boys
and took cold showers with them, bought them
horses, and later shared his shiny yellow Stoddard-
Dayton with them; he introduced the children to
music and beautiful objects; and he tolerated their
presence at dinners and parties. "Papa's parties
were best of all. He had clambakes, tea parties in
his studio, cotillions in the large drafting room; gay
affairs about the blazing logs that snapped and
crackled in the big fireplace. From week to week,
month to month, our home was a round of parties.
There were parties somewhere all of the time and
everywhere some of the time."
This world of laughter and surprise, the fruit
of a devil-may-care attitude toward money and
conventions, ended abruptly in the fall of 1909
when Frank Lloyd Wright left for Europe with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of one of his clients. The scandal broke slowly, but John, then
in his final year at his great-aunts' Hillside Home
School in Spring Green, Wisconsin, soon suffered
the humiliation of his classmates' whisperings and
the loneliness that followed the harsh disruption
of his enchanted childhood. He later wrote that it
took him a long time to get over it. Rather than go
home the next summer, he stayed in Wisconsin to
work on his great-uncle Lloyd-Jones's farm, just as
Frank Lloyd Wright once had done after his own
father left home. From there John went on to the
University of Wisconsin, but like his father and
brother Lloyd before him, he showed little interest
in his studies. When the university suggested in
1911 that he would do better to forgo higher
education, he left. But rather than return to
Chicago and reminders of home, he struck out
directly on his own.
At age eighteen, John began his career with
more energy than purpose. He went first to
Portland, Oregon, where he worked for a paving
contractor, but he soon migrated south to San
Diego, where his brother Lloyd was planting
bushes for Olmsted Brothers, landscape architects
of the Panama-Pacific Exposition. At first he
hawked posters designed by Lloyd- and when
he tired of that, he got a job pressing pants but
burned through a pair of white flannels on the
third day of work. As John later recalled, it was at
this dismal moment that he had a nostalgic vision
of parties and clambakes and decided that what he
really wanted was to become an architect. It is hard
to believe that he had given no thought to architecture before; something must have rubbed off in
the Oak Park years. Perhaps it took being away
from the overwhelming presence of his father to
turn him in that direction.
In any case, whether on impulse or by premeditation, when John saw a sign for a draftsman in
the window of the Pacific Building Company, a
residential contractor, he applied for and landed a job drawing "cobblestone" bungalows. Shortly
afterward, when Pacific promoted him to chief
designer, John concluded that he was ready for a
position with an architectural firm and found one
with Harrison Albright, one of the more successful
commercial architects in Los Angeles. The job was
not quite what he had expected: he "drove Mr.
Albright about in his Chalmers Detroit, ran
errands, typed letters with one finger and made
miscellaneous sketches."
Even so, John was learning something about
architecture, for in 1912 Albright put him in
charge of a commission for a house in Escondido
for a Mrs. M.J. Wood. John solved the problem
of this first independent design by borrowing his
father's 1906 scheme for the Grace Fuller house
in Glencoe, Illinois. He modified it slightly by
changing the fenestration and adding a pair of
posts visually "supporting" the cantilevered roof
at each end of the house. The placement of the
staircase at the core of the house, the use of built-
in furniture, and the simple treatment of the
unpainted, rectilinear wooden moldings inside the
house were all features which would reappear in
John's work. The solid corners and discontinuous
windows of the house also reflected his belief,
contrary to his father's, that each room must be
designated as a separate entity on the exterior of
the building.
John later wrote that his sentiments toward
this first house as it rose out of the ground
amounted to "the closest feeling to worship I had
ever known." He was in love with the materials
and couldn't stay away from the site. Architecture
had become something he simply had to do.
Albright soon gave him another opportunity, this
time to design the Workingman's Hotel, a philanthropic enterprise intended for day laborers and
underwritten by J.B. Spreckels, a sugar baron,
shipper, and real estate speculator who was one
of Albright's regular clients. The design was influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright's few projects for multiple dwellings and his City National Bank
Building (Mason City, Iowa, 1907), but it is far less
derivative than the Wood house. The Workingman's
Hotel provided John with the first of a number of
opportunities to collaborate with Alfonso lannelli,
a young Italian immigrant sculptor, who did the
corner pier sculptures of the hotel. Although the
design of the building was altered somewhat in
construction, it was still a major work for twenty-
year-old John.
With two serious commissions to his credit, carried
out with the aid of reference books and Albright's
other staff, John decided that it was finally time to
get some formal architectural schooling. As he later
recounted,
I did not want to ask Dad to take me into his office for he
had not encouraged me toward this end, so I wrote to Otto
Wagner, the great Austrian architect who had a school of
modern architecture in Vienna. I asked Mr. Wagner if I
could serve him as apprentice for a few years in exchange
for my room and board. His prompt reply translated was:
".. .Come on..."
I felt I was on the way toward making Dad proud of
me, so I wrote to him asking his help to buy the ticket to
Vienna. I enclosed photographs of the Wood House and
the Workingman's Hotel. He telegraphed: "Meet me in Los
Angeles in two weeks..." He thought his office would be
better for me than Otto Wagner's. "I'd like to know what
Otto Wagner can do for you that your father can't do!"
This was the way he invited me to work for him. [My
Father, p. 67]
Thus began a struggle that was to last most of John
Lloyd Wright's life, between his father's extraordinarily dominating personality and style and his
own independence and artistic development.
On returning to Chicago in late 1913, John
was placed in charge of his father's office, now
located in Orchestra Hall on Michigan Avenue,
where he handled business matters when Frank
Lloyd Wright was at Taliesin, the home he had
built for himself and Mamah Cheney at Spring Green, Wisconsin. The elder Wright gave John a
copy of Discourses on Architecture by the French
architect E.E. Viollet-le-Duc and arranged for a
private course of engineering to fill the gaps in his
architectural education.
At about this time John married Jeanette
Winters, a young woman he had met in Los
Angeles. (They were divorced in 1920.) The
young couple moved into a tiny wooden building
at 938 Lincoln Parkway (now Michigan Avenue
at about Delaware Place), probably a nineteenth-
century worker's house. They dubbed their home
"Bird Center," decorating it with jig sawed and
painted birds.
Toward the end of 1913, Edward Waller, Jr.,
the son of an early client, commissioned Frank
Lloyd Wright to design Midway Gardens, an
indoor-outdoor dining and entertainment complex
on the Midway Plaisance. John's time was soon
consumed by preparing working drawings for the
project and acting as superintendent of its frenzied
construction, which was scheduled for completion
by summer 1914. He also brought in his friend
lannelli as one of the chief decorative artists
on the project.
As work progressed, the elder Wright often
came down from Taliesin for extended periods, and
he and John virtually lived at the site. It was there
that on August 14, 1914, Frank Lloyd Wright received word that Taliesin was on fire. He and John
caught the first train back, only to find that
Mamah and six others had been murdered by an
insane servant. John stayed with his father to help
him bury the woman he loved in an unmarked
grave on the Taliesin grounds, and then returned
to Chicago to look after the office. Ironically, this
was the first time that John had ever been to
Taliesin and looked into the inner recesses of the
world that his father had made for himself when
he left Oak Park. The experience revealed to him
something of the emotional wellsprings of his
father's creative existence and aroused sympathetic
feelings which would eventually have repercussions
in his own life.
The Midway Gardens opened shortly after the
Taliesin tragedy, and after a few finishing touches
were carried out, there was a lull in the business.
Most of Frank Lloyd Wright's designs were made
at Taliesin, so John probably had little to do but
prepare working drawings for the few houses that were constructed during this period (mostly those
in a small development underwritten by Sherman
Booth in Glencoe, Illinois). He passed the time by
experimenting with the design of toy construction
blocks, an interest which was most likely the
outgrowth of his own childhood in Oak Park,
where blocks were prominent playthings. A Frank
Lloyd Wright-style construction made with blocks
of John's design appeared in the elder Wright's
exhibition of work for the Chicago Architectural
Club in 1914. The survival in Alfonso lannelli's
correspondence of some letters from John on
stationery from the Orchestra Hall office indicates
that John was also given some responsibility for
arranging decorative schemes for his father's
buildings. One letter, for example, requests lannelli
to prepare a sketch and model of a sculpted or
painted frieze for a kindergarten, probably the
Avery Coolness playhouse in Riverside, Illinois,
which had been built in 1912.
Though John learned a great deal during his
apprenticeship, the experience was marred by his
father's inconstancy in money matters. Despite
continual pleas and admonitions, the elder Wright
refused to pay his son a steady salary, forcing John
to live on sporadic handouts. Nevertheless, he
agreed to accompany his father to Japan to start
work on a major commission, the Imperial Hotel in
Tokyo, and to serve in the same role of chief assistant that he had played at Midway Gardens. Father
and son sailed for the Orient in January 1917.
For the next sixteen months, John worked with
his father in testing earthquake-proof foundations
and took charge of developing working drawings
and a plaster model while Frank Lloyd Wright
traveled back and forth to America. He also
worked up sketches for the private commissions
which the elder Wright had begun to receive from
the Japanese. It was one of these assignments
which finally precipitated a crisis in mid-1918
over the father's failure to pay his son's salary.
Wright cabled John from America to collect a payment from Viscount Inouye on a residential
design. John later wrote,
I worked all the next day and night to complete the
sketches for the layout Dad had left with me delivered
them to the Viscount the next day and collected two thousand dollars on account. After deducting twelve hundred
dollars for salary due me, I cabled the remaining eight hundred to Dad.
The next day I received a cable: 'you’re fired! Take the
next ship home..." Out went the lights! [U. Father, p. 101]
The apprenticeship was over. Although John
suspected that his father might take him back after
a proper show of contrition, he chose instead to
return to Chicago on his own. There he settled
again in "Bird Center" and began to make his
living by designing wooden toys, most of which
were distributed by Marshall Field & Company.
These included an assortment of construction
blocks and jig sawed birds, like the ones he used to
decorate his studio, as well as such items as chess
pieces and toy animals, all sold under his Red-
square" label. But his most successful toy by far, was his log cabin construction set, Lincoln Logs,
which he designed in Japan in 1917 and put on the
market in 1918. Although he later sold the patent
for Lincoln Logs, the product marketed today is
substantially the same as his original design.
But John did not stop thinking about architecture. Indeed, his intense involvement with toy
design, and particularly his experimentation with
construction blocks, only strengthened the foundation which his father had already laid for John’s
interest in rhythmic pattern, prefabrication, and
construction from interchangeable elements, it was
also during this period that John sought out his
father's old employer, Louis Sullivan, who was by
then living more on the charity of friends than on
the income from rare commissions. He spent hours
in Sullivan's deserted Auditorium Building office,
listening to the master talk about organic architecture. Gradually, John's old desire to see his own
buildings rise out of their sites reasserted itself.
John Lloyd Wright designed many buildings around the
United States. Following is a biography of John by Sally Kitt Chappell
and Ann Van Zanten and published by the