Most educated Americans can recite the names of at least a few of the principal figures of twentieth-century art—Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Jackson Pollock, maybe Jasper Johns—but ask about the architects of the same era and the only name you are almost guaranteed to hear is Frank Lloyd Wright. He may be the only architect (besides Thomas Jefferson, celebrated for different reasons) whose visage and buildings the U. S. Postal Service repeatedly commemorates. It is as if Wright were the architect who best represents the United States in the eyes of itself.

A survey of all the thought-provoking, eye-grabbing architecture of the last one hundred years would suggest that Wright’s persistent celebrity is a bit mystifying. True, he was what pundits today call an innovator. True, he built more than five hundred buildings, which is, for a firm with only one principal, a lot. But mostly what Wright built in his seventy-year-long practice were single-family dwellings, many of them small. Most of his larger projects are not exactly accessible: his consummate masterpiece, the Imperial Hotel in Japan, was demolished in 1967; another, the Larkin Building in Buffalo, fell to make way for a parking lot; the Marin County Courthouse is off the beaten track (though it does appear as a set in the futuristic dystopian film Gattaca). To get to Wright’s sublime Johnson Wax Building, you need to drive for one and a half hours north from Chicago to Racine, Wisconsin; to Fallingwater, more than an hour southeast from Pittsburgh. Only the Guggenheim Museum in New York is easily accessible and widely visited. Most of Wright’s hundreds of houses that survive remain in private hands.

An energetic self-promoter, Wright led the kind of dramatic, occasionally salacious life that has inspired many a biography and even a novel or two, but neither his tantalizing affairs nor his narcissistic flamboyance quite explains his ongoing celebrity: plenty of egotistical, charming, adulterous, self-promoting architects have failed to earn a fraction of the public recognition that Wright receives. So how are we to account for his extraordinary fame?

Illustration by Joao Ruas

Wright was born and spent much of his career in the Midwest during the years when the idea of American exceptionalism and the concomitant search for a genuinely American identity prevailed. Early on, he joined a cadre of Chicago-oriented intellectuals who derided the East Coast’s Eurocentrism and believed that the responsibility fell to them to develop a culture that embodied all that was uniquely, quintessentially American, which to them meant a brave, democracy-loving people inhabiting a spreading landscape, governed largely by individual freedom and personal self- expression. In Wright’s Prairie Houses of 1900 to the mid-1920s, most of which are in the Midwest, he gave architectural form to his vision of a dignified life for the contemporary American family. Extraordinary houses slung along wind-swept prairies promised refuge and the opportunity for self-actualization. Wright expressed his ideal of domesticityin the Prairie Houses’ woody crafted interiors, fireplace-core, and low-pitched roofs extending dramatically into overhanging eaves; he celebrated individual freedom with light-filled, flowing living spaces that spill out from the fireplace-core into the land in several directions. A truly American architecture, Wright maintained, was above all horizontal: it deferred to the Big Country’s golden valleys and endless skyways.

It was the publication in 1943 of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead that elevated Wright to the status of an icon of American culture; Rand publicly admitted that her hero and protagonist, Howard Roark, was a thinly veiled portrait of Wright. Rand’s Roark was a visionary hero who embraced the opportunities that democracy and freedom allowed: the lone cowboy but civilized, doing things his way, telling the (in Wright’s words) “truth against the world.” No living public person so succinctly embodied America’s exceptionalist aspirations. That perhaps explains why Wright’s architecture, art, furniture, art collection, graphic design, and more have been, over the years, the subject of literally hundreds of exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including ten times (ten!) at the New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).