Richland County, Wisconsin – Home of famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 projects, which resulted in more than 500 completed works. Frank Lloyd Wright was born in the farming town of Richland Center, Wisconsin on June 8, 1867. Eventually, he became one of the most renowned architects in the world, and is said to have found much inspiration for his work from the beautiful and scenic hills and bluffs in and around Richland Center, WI.

When he was 10 years old, he and his family settled in Madison, Wisconsin in 1877. He was educated at Second Ward School, Madison from 1879 to 1883. After a brief stint at the University of Wisconsin where he took some mechanical drawing and basic mathematics courses, Wright departed for Chicago where he spent several months in J. L. Silsbee's office before seeking employment with Adler and Sullivan.

Wright evolved a new concept of interior space in architecture. Rejecting the existing view of rooms as single-function boxes, Wright created overlapping and interpenetrating rooms with shared spaces. He designated use areas with screening devices and subtle changes in ceiling heights and created the idea of defined space as opposed to enclosed space.

Through experimentation, Wright developed the idea of the prairie house - a long, low building with hovering planes and horizontal emphasis. He developed these houses around the basic crucifix, L or T shape and utilized a basic unit system of organization. He integrated simple materials such as brick, wood, and plaster into the designs.

In 1914 Wright lost his wife and several members of his household when a servant burned down Taliesin, his home and studio near Spring Green, Wisconsin. Following the tragedy, he re-directed his architecture toward more solid, protective forms. Although he produced few works during the 1920s, Wright theoretically began moving in a new direction that would lead to some of his greatest works.

Wright’s A.D. German Warehouse, an imposing brick-clad structure, stands immediately adjacent to downtown Richland Center, Wisconsin. A high band of concrete frieze designed with Mayan influences tops the structure.  This unique “Mayan” fortress, built in 1915, remains an important link with Wright’s later pioneering use of concrete cast-on-site architecture. 

The building rests on a cork pad providing shock absorption and stability.  Wright later used similar construction when designing the famed Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.  It no longer stands, but the A.D. German Warehouse does!  It is now the only structure of its kind left.

Originally, Frank Lloyd Wright was named Frank "Lincoln" Wright. He changed his name after his parents divorced to honor his mother's Welsh family, the Lloyd Joneses. His father, William Carey Wright (1825 – 1904) was a locally admired orator, music teacher, occasional lawyer and itinerant minister in Richland Center. William Wright had met and married Anna Lloyd Jones (1838/39 – 1923), a Richland County school teacher, the previous year when he was employed as the superintendent of schools for Richland County.

Legendary Achievements

Frank Lloyd Wright's Legacy to Richland Center

As motorists make their way along well-traveled Church Street in Richland Center they likely notice an imposing rectangular shaped building on the southwest corner of one intersection. Many if not most city residents are aware of the building's significance, but visitors may be less so. The edifice, known as the A.D. German Warehouse, is important because it is the only building designed by world-famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright in the city of his birth.

He was born on June 8, 1867, to William Russell Cary Wright and Anna Lloyd Jones Wright at a location that is shrouded in mystery. Some area old-timers insist that word-of-mouth passed down over time indicates that the house Wright was born in was located at the site of the current post office on the corner of Mill Street and Central Avenue. Still, there is no direct evidence that can prove this assertion or any of several others.

What is known is that Wright, despite a less than thorough education, rose to prominence as one of the world's most renowned architects. His claim to fame includes such noteworthy accomplishments as The Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, the Johnson Wax headquarters in Racine, and Taliesins East and West, in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and Scottsdale, Arizona, respectively.

Although Richland Center's A.D. German Warehouse is less well-known than some of Wright's masterpieces it nonetheless is something of a mecca for Wright enthusiasts. One can frequently observe people standing across the street taking photographs of it. Present owner Harvey Glanzer recently spoke about focusing his attention on the warehouse, but it currently is not open to the public. Still, it stands as a reminder of the architect's origins in Richland Center and of the once-prominent entrepreneur—A.D. German himself—who commissioned its construction in 1917. A series of business misfortunes prevented German from realizing the building's potential as a sort of business hub of wholesale goods, shops, a restaurant, and even a theater. The building had a succession of owners over the decades and has had its share of ups and downs, including having been known as a speakeasy during the Roaring Twenties. It had a brief renaissance during the late 1970s and early 1980s when an attempt was made to run it as a museum.

After the failure of that enterprise it has remained mostly unused, with many people sighing over wistful might-have-beens. However, its status as an example of Wright's genius remains intact. It is one of but a few surviving buildings of Wright's from the decade of 1910-1919. And while other of Wright's buildings have low importance ratings in Thomas A. Heinz's "Frank Lloyd Wright Field Guide," the A.D. German Warehouse is rated high in importance as a site of historical and artistic significance.

But those of us who revere the building for its local significance didn't need an expert to tell us that.

Almost forgotten at age seventy, Wright re‐emerged to dominate the American architectural scene with his three great works of the late 1930s, the Edgar Kaufmann “Fallingwater” House in Pennsylvania, the Johnson Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin, and the first “Usonian,” the Herbert Jacobs House, in Madison, Wisconsin. Like the early Prairie House, the Usonian House was Wright's answer to the housing needs of a new generation. Over the next twenty years Wright built hundreds of these low‐cost dwellings for America's rapidly expanding middle class. The Broadacre City project of 1932, an idealized community composed of these individual houses, was Wright's visionary counterproposal to suburban sprawl.

At the end of the twentieth century, Frank Lloyd Wright remained America's most influential and most famous architect. His buildings of the Prairie Period, an indigenous alternative to the dominant classical style imported from Europe, not only founded the “organic” tradition in American architecture, but also directly inspired the beginning of modern architecture in Europe. Wright established by example the fundamental attributes of a modern American architecture shaped by the landscape, the materials of its construction, and the daily lives that take place within its spaces.