content= The Early Years
Frank Lloyd Wright spent a few semesters in the Engineering School at the University of Wisconsin before leaving for Chicago in 1887. At the age of twenty, he was hired as an apprentice in the office of J. Lyman Silsbee who designed All Souls' Unitarian Church where Wright's uncle was minister. The young architect's first work was nominally a Silsbee commission --the Hillside Home School built for his aunts in 1888 near Spring Green, Wisconsin. While construction was underway on the Hillside Home School, Wright went to work for the Chicago firm of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, working as a draftsman on the Auditorium Building, which, at the time of completion in 1890, was the largest building in Chicago. He remained with that firm until 1893, during which time he absorbed Sullivan's influence and designed several houses, including one for himself in Oak Park, Illinois that was constructed with Sullivan's financial assistance.
"Moonlighting" on his own commissions led to a break with Sullivan in 1893, and Wright set up a separate practice. His first commissions were primarily for the design of private homes in the more affluent suburbs of Chicago and include the W. H. Winslow house of 1893-94 in River Forest, Illinois --considered by Wright to be his "first." Unfortunately, many of the buildings he designed around the turn of the century have not survived.