(traffic noise) (light music) ♪ (host) Frank Lloyd Wright is the greatest ever American architect.

Buildings like the Guggenheim Museum, the Johnson Wax building, and Fallingwater are masterpieces that redefined what was possible and became famous the world over.

(birds chirping) But I think the true nature of Frank Lloyd Wright's genius has become lost, buried under tales of his tempestuous life, or made into the stuff of coffee-table books.

I'm Jonathan Adams, an architect from Wales, and my 30-year career has taken me all over the world.

Throughout it all, Frank Lloyd Wright has been a constant touchstone.

♪ Now, I'm going to travel across America to get to know Frank Lloyd Wright's greatest buildings for myself.

I want to understand how they were conceived, how they work, and how they make us feel.

♪ Most of all, I want to explore the underlying philosophy that all these buildings share.

Frank Lloyd Wright called it organic architecture.

And today, 150 years after his birth, I think it puts him back at the heart of modern architectural thinking.

♪ (water rushing) (birds chirping) ♪ (traffic rushing) (chatter) In a career that spanned seven decades, Frank Lloyd Wright built over 500 buildings.

And the one he's best known for is his final one, the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

(tranquil music) ♪ (vocalizing) ♪ The Guggenheim isn't just something that's beautiful to look at.

All his life, Frank Lloyd Wright strove to create buildings that expressed an idea of how we should live and understand the world.

♪ (Frank Lloyd Wright) I'd like to have a free architecture.

I'd like to have architecture that belonged where you see it standing, and was a grace to the landscape instead of a disgrace.

And the letters we received from our clients tell us how those buildings we built for them have changed the character of their whole land, and their whole existence is different now than it was before.

♪ (Jonathan) Wright's own life was turbulent, involving financial ruin, adultery, and tragedy.

Through it all, he stuck to a personal creed based on hard work, a love of nature, and a fierce independence of thought.

♪ They sound like thoroughly American ideals.

(birds chirping) But I think to understand what really shaped Wright's ideas and the man himself, you have to begin the story far away from America, and closer to where I come from.

(gentle music) ♪ (birds chirping) ♪ Frank Lloyd Wright's Welsh roots are no secret.

He was proud of them and spoke of them all his life.

♪ His mother, Anna Lloyd Jones, was born in 1838 near Llandysul in West Wales.

Her family was large and devout, and at their chapel, they practiced a radical brand of Christianity known as Unitarianism.

All his life, Frank Lloyd Wright would draw inspiration from this freethinking spiritual inheritance.

(birds chirping) (minister) Unitarianists see God in anything and in all things.

We often talk of the wonder, the awesomeness, the magnificence of-- of nature, and of the world that we're all a part of.

We've always placed a huge emphasis on the individual's freedoms to choose and to pick and to decide for themselves where their understanding of God and of human nature lie.

Unitarianism fit in with the people here, the people who were everyday, hard-working, low-paid people looking for that freedom and for that spirit of liberalism.

(birds chirping) It might have been the search for religious freedom that took Anna's family away from Wales.

In 1844, the Lloyd Jones clan-- parents, children, aunts, and uncles-- left home, bound for a new, freer life... in the new world.

(bright music) ♪ The family sailed to New York and then, with pioneer spirit, set off westward to find a new home.

♪ What they were looking for was something familiar, something like the land they knew and understood.

♪ Finally, they came upon their new Wales.

Wooded, gently sloping land near Spring Green, Wisconsin.

To Frank Lloyd Wright, this place would become a lifelong spiritual touchstone, known simply as The Valley.

♪ (Meryle) The valley that they chose to live in became so identified with them and their purpose and their way of living that some people called it the Valley of the God Almighty Joneses.

They didn't really want to become Americans, you know?

They wanted to be Welsh... on American soil.

(Jonathan) It was into this world that, in 1867, Frank Lloyd Wright was born.

It was here, too, that his values were shaped.

(quacking) (birds chirping) Throughout his childhood, Frank would spend his summers here in the valley, laboring on the farm, living a rural life, and hearing the Welsh language of his aunts and uncles.

For the rest of his days, he would look back on those summers as a kind of paradise.

(tranquil piano music) Frank's mother encouraged his early ambitions to build.

After studying engineering at a local college, he left home to seek an architectural apprenticeship.

♪ (train clacking) ♪ As luck would have it, the nearest city was one of the most exciting places in the entire world for an aspiring young architect: Chicago.

♪ New styles of building were being created here, including the skyscraper.

♪ Before long, Wright's youthful energy and talent landed him a job with the city's leading architect.

And it was in Chicago, too, that he found his first love.

Catherine Tobin, known as Kitty, was just 16 when they met.

Within two years, they were married, and had a child of their own on the way.

Frank Lloyd Wright was a young man in a hurry.

Borrowing money from his boss, he bought a plot of land here in the respectable suburb of Oak Park.

The place where, it was said, the saloons ended and the steeples began.

And it was here that he first built a home for himself.

(birds chirping) ♪ It might be difficult for anyone looking at this today to see it as anything other than a slightly quirky gable-fronted suburban house.

It's only when you put it alongside all of the other houses of the same period, here or anywhere else in the Western world, that you realize just how strange it is.

Take this massive symmetry.

It's highly classical, but stylized.

You can see the faint outlines of the triangle pediment of a Greek temple, with the two bays at the bottom instead of columns supporting the weight.

It's classical discipline applied to a small cottage.

The upper part of the house conveys a huge sense of weight and sanctity.

So you might expect the inside to be pokey and dark.

(door creaking) But what you actually find is the opposite.

The rooms all flow, one into another.

It must've been a huge surprise to people back in the 1880s.

This is open plan before the idea of open plan really existed.

Perhaps this is where it began.

(cello music) ♪ The free flow of Wright's design reflects an idea of family life, learned in the Unitarian value of his childhood: honest, equal, and communal.

He even inscribed these values above the hearth, clear for all to see.

♪ In its open spaces and its open spirit, Frank Lloyd Wright's Oak Park home was his first step towards a new kind of architecture.

♪ Over the next few years, Wright's career took off.

His house attracted the attention of curious neighbors, and commissions flowed in.

♪ He would eventually design over 50 houses for local clients.

Many, like his own, subtle experiments with traditional forms.

♪ By now, Frank and Kitty had six children.

Wright was in his late 30s, and more than ready for his big break.

But when that came, it was a bolt from the blue.

(birds chirping) Every Sunday, Frank Lloyd Wright and his young family would walk a half mile to worship at the local Unitarian church.

It wasn't the kind of building that he really approved of.

It was vaguely Gothic with a pretentious spire.

And then, one night in 1905, it was struck by lightning and it burned to the ground.

(flames crackling) (solemn music) Never slow to see his chance, Wright proposed a new building for the site.

It was unlike anything seen before in America.

♪ Wright's plans for the new building cast aside all traditional styles, as he seized the chance to express his own spiritual and architectural beliefs.

♪ Gone would be ornament, arches, and the showy spire.

♪ What emerged instead was Unity Temple, the world's first truly modern building.

♪ Few people even today would guess that this is a church.

The building doesn't even have an obvious way in.

The very material the Unity Temple is constructed from seems unsuitable for a place of worship.

These walls and every detail of the exterior are made from solid, unadorned, reinforced concrete.

Wright's justification was that it was cheap-- a utilitarian material used for low-grade engineering structures.

The impoverished church committee was persuaded to go along.

But Wright's real reason for using concrete was that it was a new and exciting technology with unlimited potential.

It put Frank Lloyd Wright just where he wanted to be: on his own at the frontier of architecture.

(birds chirping) If the exterior of Unity Temple expressed an idea of the divine, it was in austere geometric forms.

But the space that those forms created on the inside was among Frank Lloyd Wright's most beautiful and spiritually uplifting rooms.

(tranquil music) ♪ The sanctuary of Unity Temple is a perfect square.

Golden light streams in through colored glass in the coffered ceiling... while ornament and structure combine to unite the whole.

♪ (minister) This building is unique.

It is hard to figure out how to even get into the sanctuary.

And when you find it, it just opens up and it's a gem of a space.

♪ I love the intimacy, this capacity to worship while in community with one another, being able to see one another.

It's the most important part of the building for the most of us.

♪ (Jonathan) Wright based the distinctive interior layout of Unity Temple closely on the Lloyd Jones family chapel back in Wales.

But his new building's overall radicalism was still too much for some in its congregation.

It's said that they prayed for ivy, and were happy when ivy came.

(cheery music) ♪ All the while that Unity Temple was taking shape, Frank Lloyd Wright was busy designing houses.

By now, he had his own architectural practice, and his designs had become far more daring.

♪ Pointed roofs had started to flatten out, as windows widened.

Cellars and attics vanished, and houses spread out, low to the ground.

♪ Wright was inspired by the vast open spaces that stretched away beyond Chicago.

The buildings even became known as prairie houses.

He brought this early vision to perfection with the Robie House, a gorgeous steamship of a building with windows like prows.

It sailed through an open green landscape, a vessel of the Midwest prairie.

♪ The Robie House looked as modern and powerful as the Great Lakes steamers that docked in Chicago.

♪ It was an impressive feat of engineering.

The huge projecting roof was Wright's most daring to date.

♪ Inside, too, Wright used this building to experiment, creating a sense of drama around the simple act of entering.

(door opens and closes) You come into the Robie House through the front door, which is actually at the back, and you find yourself in this low, dark lobby, which pushes you towards this flight of stairs.

And as you climb the stairs, you get glimpses of light at the top, which lead you upwards and build a sense of anticipation.

But then, you're forced to turn.

And you turn again, and then there's another few steps which lead you up, and one final turn... and then you're released into this fantastic wide room, surrounded by windows and bathed with natural light.

(gentle music) ♪ Wright liked to call conventional houses "boxes," and their rooms "boxes within boxes."

In the unlimited free flow of the Robie House, to use his own phrase, he destroys the box.

♪ One final thing about the Robie House that's true of almost all of Wright's houses-- if you commissioned one, you didn't just get the building, you got the furniture too, which Wright designed, along with a list of dos and don'ts.

Curtains and blinds were out, as were paintings on the wall and ornaments.

Wright had astonishing self-belief, almost to the point of being overbearing.

He called interior decorators "inferior desecrators."

It wasn't unusual for former clients to arrive home to find that Wright had made an unannounced visit and rearranged all their furniture.

In the case of the Robie House, he even designed a dress for Mrs. Robie to wear here.

(light upbeat music) ♪ Frank Lloyd Wright, now in his early 40s, was riding high and creating a real stir.

But increasingly he was chafing against conventional family life in a polite suburb.

(birds chirping) (Meryle) He himself started to see that the world was a lot bigger than Oak Park, and at a certain point he realized that he was interested in looking much further forward.

How did he become someone to be reckoned with?

Well, one way to do that is to dress differently and to go out more and... to have girlfriends, I suppose.

I think that was the start of what one might call almost anti-social behavior.

♪ (Jonathan) Wright's unconventional conduct crossed a line when he began an affair with the wife of a client.

Mamah Cheney was a feminist, a freethinker, the ideal partner for a radical man, albeit a mother of two.

When their relationship was discovered, Wright took decisive action.

Closing down his studio, he abandoned his family, and, together with Mamah, fled to Europe.

(solemn music) ♪ When the couple returned a year later, it was to set up home together.

♪ Wright knew they wouldn't be welcome in Oak Park, so he began building a new house on land owned by his mother.

♪ It was in the one place that for him represented safety, community, and integrity.

The valley of his childhood.

He even gave his new house a centuries-old Welsh name: Taliesin.

♪ Taliesin sits on the brow of a hill.

As Wright liked to point out, its Welsh name actually means "shining brow."

It's been compared to an Italian villa or even to a mediaeval Welsh farmstead.

A fortified state built at a time when he needed to feel secure.

♪ But Taliesin is very much more besides.

More than any other building, it embodies Wright's ideal of how architecture and nature should coexist.

(birds chirping) I said that Taliesin sits on a hill.

Frank Lloyd Wright would have taken pleasure in correcting me.

He preferred to say that it was of the hill, that it graces the hill, that the hill and the house are improved by each other so that they become a unity.

(Richard) Taliesin I learned a lot from.

The way that he marries his buildings with the landscape and the way--their juxtaposition with each other and the way that spaces flow through them.

It sort of comes out of the landscape.

It's constant and it's green hills and trees and grass and such.

I remember being unbelievably impressed.

(Jonathan) Wright summed up the philosophy that lay behind Taliesin in a simple phrase: organic architecture.

It's a memorable expression, but just what is it that makes a building organic?

Well, here he used local materials.

Stone, sand, and timber sourced from nearby.

What's more, the same materials are used inside and outside, so that interior and exterior flow together.

Windows are low and linear, so that when you're seated inside, you have a continuous view through tree tops, as if you're elevated, floating among them.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) But it's important to say that for Wright, organic architecture didn't just mean using local materials and blending a building into a landscape.

What he meant was that the philosophy of the building, what it says about how we should live, would, when blended with the character of the site, give rise naturally and organically to its unique form.

♪ In this case, a building that belongs to its hill and could never be built anywhere else.

♪ Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney lived happily at Taliesin, for all that local newspapers dubbed their house a love bungalow.

Wright was defiant.

Around the building he carved the Welsh symbol that represented his Unitarian family motto, "Truth Against the World."

But the dream of this new world wasn't to last.

(solemn music) ♪ Taliesin, like almost all large houses of its time, was built to be run by servants.

But Wright's liberal principles meant that here they lived on the main floor with everybody else, not in some pokey garret.

Treat your servants as your friends, Wright had written.

♪ In 1914, a new servant was taken on at Taliesin, Julian Carlton, a butler and all-round help.

♪ One day in September, when Frank Lloyd Wright was away, the unimaginable happened at Taliesin.

While Mamah and her children were sitting down to lunch, Julian Carlton ran amok.

Using petrol, he set fire to the house.

As its terrified residents fled, he attacked them with a hatchet.

(dark music) ♪ (flames crackling) Seven people died here, including Mamah Cheney and her two young children.

Taliesin was all but destroyed.

The seemingly senseless slaughter made national headlines.

Julian Carlton refused to speak about what he'd done.

He starved himself to death in jail two months later.

(somber music) ♪ Mamah Cheney was buried in the valley, in sight of the ruins of Taliesin.

(birds chirping) ♪ (geese honking) ♪ The years after the calamity were turbulent ones for Frank Lloyd Wright.

He had gone from the happiest time of his life to the time of deepest despair.

He threw himself into the rebuilding of Taliesin, but much of the decade he spent working abroad.

♪ When he returned to America, it would not be to the Midwest, scene of his previous triumphs and his greatest tragedy.

Instead, he turned to a new horizon and an extraordinary new phase in his work.

(light music) (gate whirring) ♪ Wright received five commissions to build houses in Los Angeles.

The biggest and boldest of them was designed for a wealthy LA couple, the Ennises.

♪ If Taliesin is of the hill, the Ennis house really is on the hill.

This is a fortress.

It's a mysterious interior place that sits proud in its landscape.

(contemplative music) Is it organic?

It's a building that perfectly suits its city, the ambition and boldness of LA, and the bright sun that shines here all year round.

♪ (birds chirping) For Frank Lloyd Wright, now 57 years old, the Ennis House was a creative rebirth.

The design was inspired by the ancient forms of Mayan temples.

But to build it, Wright devised a brand-new construction method.

(clanking) The entire house was made out of patterned concrete blocks, 27,000 of them, all manufactured on-site.

As the building rose, steel rods were threaded between them for support.

Wright liked to say he was weaving here rather than building.

I think you can see what he meant.

You have the steel rods running along these joints, interleaving the warp and weft, and then the concrete blocks that form the finish.

He also said that he wanted to elevate an unloved building material, the humble concrete block, into something much more beautiful, and he certainly succeeded.

(birds chirping) (atmospheric music) ♪ Entering the Ennis house feels like stepping into an adventure.

The forbidding exterior really gives you no idea what to expect.

♪ Inside, the house is made from exactly the same concrete blocks as outside.

♪ But whereas the exterior is solid and massive, these columns create a series of intriguing interlinked spaces.

♪ Well, this really is-- It's an incredible space.

♪ Being inside this rock-like structure makes you feel as if you're in a complex of caves.

It's a really powerful sense of mystery.

No idea how far it extends or where you're being taken.

I think that's what must have made it such an exhilarating place to live.

♪ There's a timelessness and drama to the Ennis house, and it's no surprise that it's proved a favorite with Hollywood filmmakers.

It's been featured in horror films and thrillers, and most famously in the seminal 1980s science-fiction film Blade Runner.

♪ The sheer originality of Wright's creation means it can fit easily into any world of the imagination.

♪ It's remarkable, given how instantly recognizable this building is.

♪ (insects chirping) (distant siren blaring) The Ennis house was a triumph for Frank Lloyd Wright.

But as the 1920s drew to a close, storm clouds were once again gathering.

(solemn music) ♪ Wright had found a new love.

Olgivanna Milanoff was Montenegrin, a professional dancer, and some 30 years his junior.

♪ Their relationship became mired in scandal.

Business suffered and worse was to follow.

(bell ringing) The Wall Street crash of 1929 decimated American architecture, and for three years Frank Lloyd Wright had not a single commission.

♪ Always a spendthrift, he was finally flat broke.

Now in his mid-60s, Wright was coming to be seen as yesterday's man, a talent who had faded away.

♪ Some simply assumed that he was dead.

♪ (birds chirping) Then, at Taliesin, something remarkable happened.

A plan was hatched that would define Wright's later life.

It was ingenious but simple.

The legendary Frank Lloyd Wright would offer apprenticeships.

The Taliesin Fellowship was born.

(contemplative music) ♪ (Meryle) The fellowship did a lot of things for Wright.

♪ It provided him with young men and women who wanted to learn and who were very happy to work in the garden, in the farm.

They were building, they were cooking, cleaning, and most of them had the money to support Wright in a way that he couldn't possibly otherwise have managed.

♪ (Vern) Mr. Wright said, "This is not a school and I am not a teacher.

You're here to help me with my work, and if you get something out of that, that's good."

You were really here to help him, but, you know, when you're helping a master, unless you're just totally immune to it, your life gets changed.

It's as though there was, like, a real magician, not a fake, and that magician made things happen just by being there.

♪ (Jonathan) But in the huge drafting room at Taliesin, real architectural work was in short supply.

All Wright and his apprentices could do was to draw and dream.

Then, at last, a commission came in.

The result would relaunch Frank Lloyd Wright's career and take it to new heights.

(solemn music) ♪ In 1933, a wealthy Pittsburgh businessman, Edgar Kaufmann, decided to rebuild his holiday cottage deep in the Pennsylvania woodland.

(birds chirping) ♪ As chance would have it, his son was an apprentice at Taliesin.

♪ Wright and Kaufmann met and the deal was done.

♪ The story of the origins of Kaufmann's new house has the quality of a legend.

Frank Lloyd Wright visited and surveyed this very challenging site, and he'd had detailed maps of it drawn up.

But afterwards, months passed with no sign of progress.

(contemplative music) Then, at Taliesin one day, the phone rang.

Mr. Kaufmann was in the area.

Could he call by and look at Frank's plans for the new building?

Wright sat down in his drafting room and in just two hours set down an astonishing vision.

♪ What he had designed has been called the greatest house of the 20th century.

Fallingwater.

(water burbling) ♪ 80 years on from its construction, it still takes your breath away, looking fantastically modern and yet timeless.

♪ This really is a phenomenal sight.

I've been looking at buildings for a very long time now and I've not seen anything quite as thrilling as this.

♪ (Daniel) Fallingwater, that's the one quintessential building to me.

It's the way it's situated on--in its landscape, the way it occupies a space which is much bigger than its physical size.

In our minds it's a vast city of horizontals and verticals.

♪ In that one building he created modern architecture.

(water trickling) ♪ (Jonathan) Now the fundamental call that Wright made was also the most daring.

Edgar Kaufmann had expected that his new house would be sited somewhere around here, looking back at the waterfall.

Nobody anticipated that Wright would site the building directly on top of the fall itself.

And yet that one inspired decision led directly to this extraordinary, floating, almost dreamlike building that we see today.

(water burbling) The huge slab of rock from which the water drops was echoed by Wright in Fallingwater's extraordinary projecting terraces.

(wondrous music) The effect is to harmonize the building with its setting.

Something conspicuously manmade, yet in sympathy with nature.

♪ Inside, too, every detail of Fallingwater responds to the natural world in which it is set.

♪ The floor is polished stone and evokes the rippled surface of the river below just before it goes over the falls.

♪ The long lines of windows lift you into the treetops, while the vibrant chairs and rugs are like birds or flowers.

Bright splashes of color in the deep canopy.

♪ There's a wonderful feeling of security here, of being in a shelter in the wild.

♪ (water burbling) There's even room at Fallingwater for a staircase that leads nowhere, just down to the water where you can stand and contemplate.

(uplifting music) ♪ After barren years, Fallingwater was Frank Lloyd Wright's most spectacular success and a vindication of his lifelong architectural philosophy.

♪ No other building of Wright's more clearly expresses his personal idea of organic design.

The waterfall on its own was undoubtedly beautiful, but it's enhanced by this vision of a building that seems to have grown out of the rocks and trees, while still pushing technology to its limits.

Very few buildings anywhere from any time in history express an uplifting idea of humanity's place in the world like this one does.

♪ (upbeat music) ♪ While Fallingwater was being built, work was progressing rapidly on a second breakthrough project.

♪ The site could hardly have been more different.

A flat industrial lot on the outskirts of a dull Wisconsin town.

The commission didn't sound inspiring either.

An office building for a cleaning products company.

But once again Wright worked his magic.

♪ When you look at it today, the Johnson Wax Building is straight out of vintage science fiction.

Even on a gray day like this, it still fills me with a sense of joyous possibilities.

♪ It's when you step inside, though, that the genius of the building fully reveals itself.

(whimsical music) ♪ Wow, what an awe-inspiring room.

♪ The great workroom of the SC Johnson building has been called the greatest room in all American architecture, and you can see why.

♪ Wright's answer to the dreary surroundings was simple enough.

No windows.

Instead, he created an artificial interior world that is itself as inspiring and uplifting as a wild landscape.

♪ Delicate light enters through patterns of Pyrex tubes, while huge, otherworldly columns leap up to the skies.

♪ The beauty of Wright's design was clear for all to see.

But back in the 1930s, the technical challenge of turning vision into reality was making some people distinctly nervous.

These extraordinary columns were like nothing the local building control officers had ever seen, and so before construction could begin, they insisted on testing one under a full load.

Wright, as confident a showman as he was an engineer, was happy to oblige, and to invite the press along.

(rattling) Six tons of sandbags were loaded onto the column.

The officials were satisfied.

But Frank Lloyd Wright had a point to prove.

10 tons went on, then 20, and finally, 60 tons.

(wondrous music) Wright strode up to the column, kicked it, hit it with his cane.

♪ It was only when the wooden props holding the column upright were removed that it finally crashed down.

(clattering) ♪ There was so much weight on it that a sewer 20 feet underground fractured.

♪ The strength and ingenuity of Wright's columns allowed him to create a vast, cathedral-like room.

♪ It embodied his lifelong Unitarian belief in the sanctity of nature and the sanctity of work.

♪ (Greg) It's called the Great Workroom for a--for a good reason.

It's a great place to work.

When you're working here it's like working in a glade of trees.

♪ With the sun streaming down through the glass tubing in the ceiling and creating these wonderful vistas of a sense of outdoorness.

It's an incredible place to work.

♪ (atmospheric music) ♪ (Jonathan) The twin triumphs of the Johnson Wax Building and Fallingwater ushered in a new period of creativity and success for Wright.

♪ It's been said that American lives have no second act.

Well, here was one, perhaps bigger and bolder than the first.

♪ (birds chirping) By now, Frank Lloyd Wright was 70 years old and life was good.

His home was still Taliesin, now standing proud once more in the Wisconsin Valley of his childhood.

He was happily married to Olgivanna.

But there was one thing about life at Taliesin that she could no longer bear.

(wind whistling) The long, frozen winters when temperatures plummeted to minus 20 and snow settled for months on end.

(peppy music) And so in 1937, a convoy set off from Taliesin in the depths of December.

♪ The cars were packed with provisions, the tools of the trade, and the entire Taliesin Fellowship.

♪ From now on, winter would be spent at a new home in the sun.

♪ The parched Arizona desert was the most extreme environment that Frank Lloyd Wright had ever built in.

♪ It would test his philosophy of organic architecture to the limit and result in a kind of building never seen before.

♪ Taliesin West is such a unique and beautiful place.

It was designed and constructed over seven years, and it was loosely based on a diagram that connects the various angles of the building to geological features and to prominent hilltops on the horizon.

It's like a piece of free-form architectural jazz.

♪ Taliesin West was constructed entirely by members of the Fellowship.

Building supplies were hard to come by in the desert, so Wright improvised, turning to the boulders that littered the site.

(birds chirping) I love this material.

Wright called it desert masonry.

And I bet that anyone who studied here during those years could take me straight to their section of the wall, and that they would recognize their own boulders, almost as if they were personal friends.

(birds chirping) The massive walls of Taliesin West seemed to grow out of the desert floor itself.

But on top of them, Wright placed canvas.

It was so delicate it had to be replaced each year as if pioneers were making camp.

(contemplative music) ♪ Inside and outside were never more happily merged.

It was a kind of natural air conditioning, a building that worked with its environment and not against it.

It was actually green architecture before that phrase even existed.

♪ (fan whirring) ♪ The open, airy world of Taliesin West created a relaxed, communal way of living and working.

♪ Today, it's home to the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, a place where students still work and live together.

The allure of Frank Lloyd Wright lives on.

(clanking) (Cruz) When you see the level of freedom and experimentation they had, that it was not, uh, concerned with-- with a particular style or keeping things as they are, but actually into challenging and questioning what architecture means.

And I think that's what we really can take away from--from the experience of being in his legacy, right?

♪ (insects chirping) ♪ (Jonathan) The years passed and Frank Lloyd Wright approached the age of 90.

(wondrous music) He was now the grand old man of American architecture, lauded by his peers at home and abroad, interviewed on television, a household name.

(interviewer) I understand that last week in all seriousness you said, "If I had another 15 years to work, I can rebuild this entire country, I could change the nation."

(Frank) I did say that and it's true.

(Jonathan) He continued to work tirelessly, designing a Unitarian church, a skyscraper, a synagogue, and, as ever, houses.

♪ (uplifting music) (traffic whirring) ♪ But in the self-proclaimed capital of American architecture, he had failed to make any mark.

♪ With his final masterpiece, Frank Lloyd Wright would change all that.

♪ (Meryle) There is a wonderful picture of him six months before he died on top of the Guggenheim Museum, and he's looking on top of the world.

I think that's a very apt metaphor for him.

♪ I think Frank was having a lot of fun, saying, "Here it is, take it or leave it," you know?

"I'm the boss here, this is what I'm giving you."

(distant sirens blaring) (Jonathan) The evolution of the Guggenheim is fascinating, and it's a great illustration of how Wright worked.

So much in his late career was there in embryo in his early days, but his philosophy and his imagination never changed course.

Here he turned to an old, unbuilt design that featured a ramp for cars to drive up.

First, he turned it upside down so that the building was wider at the top.

Then he turned it inside out, putting the ramp on the interior.

The result became one of the most famous buildings in the world.

(upbeat music) ♪ The Guggenheim Art Museum was Frank Lloyd Wright's poke in the eye for New York City and the people he called "The Glass Box Boys," the modernist architects and critics who had no time for his work.

♪ Into their landscape of soaring vertical lines, glass, and right angles, he smuggled a low, curvaceous newcomer... ♪ ...and it stole the show.

♪ Inside, the Guggenheim was the logical culmination of Wright's lifelong desire to open up interiors and create a free flow of space.

It's a building with just one room and one path to follow.

Some people prefer to start at the top.

Others, like me, would rather begin at the bottom.

But once you're on your way, Frank Lloyd Wright is leading you every step you take.

In traditional museums, you're sometimes not sure where you're going, whether you missed a room, or if there might be better art hiding just around the corner.

Here, everything is open.

You can see where you're going, how far you have to go, and the artworks that await you.

You're drawn naturally up the path.

And after looking closely at the painting in front of you, you can turn away and relax to an open vista, the movement of people, and glimpses of artworks on the walls.

You're not just looking at art, you're getting a lesson in the act of looking at art.

(mellow music) ♪ Back in the 1950s, however, many people thought that Wright's design for a circular art museum was little short of madness.

♪ "The sloping walls," they said, "would mean that paintings leaned backwards."

♪ The windows would allow in too much or too little light.

♪ And as for Wright's choice of color, that was better not mentioned.

♪ In the end, that un-Wrightian thing, a compromise, was reached.

The color was off-white, the paintings were fixed on brackets off the wall, and daylight was mixed with fluorescent light.

♪ (Richard) I'd say I like the building more because I don't really try and fight it any longer.

What we like to say to one another is, "We're a circle in a world of squares."

It was a bloody expensive building, but you see the unbelievable joy and astonishment, particularly first-time visitors, and that doesn't come through so often in today's world.

(whimsical music) ♪ (Jonathan) Frank Lloyd Wright died in April 1959, six months before the Guggenheim Museum opened.

♪ His life had encompassed a huge swathe of history.

Born in the wake of the American Civil War, the son of a pioneer, he died a television personality in the Space Age.

♪ He had changed architecture, not just in America, but around the world.

♪ Frank Lloyd Wright was laid to rest in the one place that meant most to him: The valley of his childhood, among his ancestors.

♪ (bright music)