Lloyd Wright - Early Years

Early Years

Lloyd Wright's mother was Frank Lloyd Wright's first wife, Catherine Lee "Kitty" Tobin. He was the eldest son of the couple, and grew up in the surroundings of the 1889 Wright home and studio in Oak Park. Lloyd briefly attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, before leaving for a job at the Boston-based landscape architecture firm of the Olmsted Brothers. Specializing in botany and horticulture, he continued to pursue the interrelation of landscape and buildings through his life.

He settled in Southern California around 1911, followed by his younger brother John Lloyd Wright. The Olmsteds had sent him to assist with the landscape design of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego with architects Irving Gill, Bertram Goodhue, and Carleton Winslow. The exposition's principal buildings and gardens still remain in Balboa Park. Landscape design led him to work with Los Angeles architect William J. Dodd and in San Diego with Irving Gill, the latter another master architect and mentor to his design career.

Beginning in 1919, his father, working in Japan on the Imperial Hotel, delegated some of the responsibilities to him and architect Rudolf Schindler for designing and supervising construction of the Hollyhock House, in Hollywood, California. The house was commissioned by the oil heiress and philanthropist Aline Barnsdall.

Wright began his independent career in 1920. In 1922 he was a production designer at Paramount Studios, responsible for the extensive castle and 12th-century village sets for the Douglas Fairbanks version of Robin Hood.

In December 1922, Wright prepared plans for the Otto Bollman House in Hollywood that included a repeated pattern of concrete blocks, a precursor to his father's more famous "textile block" houses in the Los Angeles area. From 1923 through 1926 the younger Wright was drawn into the realization of these four houses, and the ambitious attempt to evolve the "textile block" system into a patented construction technique. The first was the 1923 Millard House in Pasadena, where Lloyd designed the grounds, and contributed an adjacent studio building in 1926. Lloyd served as construction manager for the other three: the Storer House (1923), the Samuel Freeman House (1923), and the Ennis House (1924). By all accounts Lloyd's work was difficult as he shuttled back and forth between sites, communicating with his father via telegram, and receiving little constructive support from Taliesin.