Recognition

 

1966 U.S. postage stamp honoring Frank Lloyd Wright

Later in his life and well after his death in 1959, Wright received much honorary recognition for his lifetime achievements. He received Gold Medal awards from The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in 1941 and the American Institute of Architects (AIA Gold Medal) in 1949. The medal was a symbolic "burying the hatchet" between Wright and the AIA. In a radio interview he commented, "Well, the AIA I never joined, and they know why. When they gave me the gold medal in Houston, I told them frankly why. Feeling that the architecture profession is all that's the matter with architecture, why should I join them?" He was awarded the Franklin Institute's Frank P. Brown Medal in 1953. He received honorary degrees from several universities (including his "alma mater", the University of Wisconsin) and several nations named him as an honorary board member to their national academies of art and/or architecture. In 2000, Fallingwater was named "The Building of the 20th century" in an unscientific "Top-Ten" poll taken by members attending the AIA annual convention in Philadelphia. On that list, Wright was listed along with many of the USA's other greatest architects including Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and he was the only architect who had more than one building on the list. The other three buildings were the Guggenheim Museum, the Frederick C. Robie House and the Johnson Wax Building.
In 1992, the Madison Opera in Madison, Wisconsin commissioned and premiered the opera Shining Brow, by composer Daron Hagen and librettist Paul Muldoon based on events early in Wright's life. The work has since received numerous revivals, including a June 2013 revival at Fallingwater, in Bull Run, Pennsylvania, by Opera Theater of Pittsburgh. In 2000, Work Song: Three Views of Frank Lloyd Wright, a play based on the relationship between the personal and working aspects of Wright's life, debuted at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.
In 1966, the United States Postal Service honored Wright with a Prominent Americans series 2¢ postage stamp. Several of Wright's buildings have been proposed by the United States to be UNESCO World Heritage sites.
In 1957 Arizona made plans to construct a new Capitol building. Believing that the submitted plans for the new Capitol were tombs to the past, Frank Lloyd Wright offered an alternative to the people of Arizona. Wright felt that Arizona's Capitol should inspire the citizens to loftier heights. Wright's architectural dream of the Oasis captures the spirit of his vision - an oasis from the heat of the desert, an oasis from the mediocrity of our past decisions, an oasis for open government and unconstrained ideas.
This collection also includes an early version of the Oasis with three spires, a typewritten transcript where Wright expresses his opinions regarding the various plans for Arizona's Capitol Building, and images of the restoration work completed by Kenneth C. Truong. In 2004, one of the spires included in his design was erected in his memory. Consisting of roughly 1,700 individual pieces of steel, the Frank Lloyd Wright Spire is visible from nearly everywhere in residential Scottsdale and illuminates the night sky with a stunning, futuristic architectural ambiance of teal and blue.