ABSTRACT
Beginning in his teen years, Wright was intimately and extensively involved with education. Educational theories and practices of the late eighteenth century up to those of immediate experiences insinuated themselves into his personal and professional lives and his theoretical ideas and design expressions. Education is one key to understanding his personal life, yes, but withal it was an impetus to become a revolutionary and reformist architect. It was education as an act of acquiring knowledge through farming and working with nature’s way, through observing educational activities, listening to recitations of family beliefs in Emersonian Transcendentalism and Unitarianism, receiving his father’s artistic sensibilities and practices, through Froebel’s thoughts on kindergartens, the theology of his uncle Reverend Jenkin Jones, the practical architects Joseph Silsbee and Dankmar Adler, the dedication of Hamlin Garland, the impractical pragmatics of a philosophical Louis Sullivan, through wife Catherine’s strong familial and social commitments, and who or what else? Education was not just information or know-how or means but a holistic adventure, intellectually, religiously, and socially driven and satisfying; at least, that was the dream.
