Florida Southern College located in Lakeland, Florida, was a small, struggling college back in the early part of the 20th century. The college president at the time Dr. Ludd Spivey had a vision for a "great education temple- and invited Frank Lloyd Wright to design that vision. Dr. Spivey selected Mr. Wright because of a very inspiring autobiography that he had read about him plus his already establish reputation as one of the world's most imaginative architects. Upon Wright's arrival to the college campus, he quickly seized the opportunity because of his life-long interest in education and to forward his ideas onto an educational setting. At that point, Frank Lloyd Wright would begin on one of his greatest projects of career and the new campus would become home to the largest single site collection of his work in the world.
Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect whose name goes synonymously with the development of American architecture in the early 1900's. Born in Wisconsin in 1867, Wright lived on several estates with his family before eventually returning to his birth state to study at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He soon left college to work in Chicago with a well-known architectural firm. There Wright shared many ideas and desires to create unique architecture but eventually separated from the firm to further is own. He wanted to change what he referred to as "chaotic restlessness- in American architecture. (Sommer).
Wright based most of his work on organic architecture. Organic meant natural in its simplest sense of growing, but it also meant encompassed the romantic opposition of the natural and the human, meaning the artificial, the rational and the mechanical. It was something unforced, faithful to the inherent qualities of things and could refer to the site and building materials but also to people and societies that were uncorrupted and faithful to immanent natural impulses (Upton).
