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50 free Frank Lloyd Wright trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Frank Lloyd Wright trivia quiz covers seventy years of building and a private life that made headlines. It starts in Wisconsin with the mother who pinned cathedral engravings in his nursery, the kindergarten blocks he credited for his sense of geometry, the engineering course he never finished, and the Chicago apprenticeship with Louis Sullivan that ended over the 'bootleg' houses. Then come Oak Park, the Prairie style, the Robie House, Unity Temple, the Wasmuth Portfolio and the flight to Europe with a client's wife. The second half takes in Taliesin and the 1914 murders, the Imperial Hotel and the Kanto earthquake, the textile-block houses of Los Angeles, the morphine marriage, the Mann Act arrest, the Taliesin Fellowship, Broadacre City and the Usonian house, Fallingwater's secret extra steel, the Johnson Wax Pyrex tubes, the Price Tower, the Guggenheim's spiral, the mile-high tower that was never built, the Japanese print dealing that once out-earned his architecture, and the grave that was emptied in 1985. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Try our Architecture quiz next.
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Q 01Frank Lloyd Wright was born in 1867, but which birth year did he claim throughout his life?
1869
Biographer Brendan Gill also claimed his middle name was originally Lincoln, though no earlier record supports it.
Q 02Wright's mother's family, the Lloyd Joneses, had emigrated to Wisconsin from which country?
Wales
The family motto, 'The Truth Against the World', came from the Welsh poet Iolo Morganwg; his uncle Jenkin was a leading Midwestern Unitarian.
Q 03How did Wright's mother decorate his nursery to nurture an architect?
With engravings of English cathedrals
She believed her first child would grow up to build beautiful buildings, and tore the pictures from periodicals.
Q 04Which educational blocks, found by his mother in 1876, did Wright credit with shaping his sense of geometry?
Froebel Gifts
'All are in my fingers to this day,' he wrote of the maple cubes, spheres and triangles.
Q 05Wright studied which subject at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before leaving without a degree?
Civil engineering
The university gave him an honorary doctorate of fine arts in 1955, when he was 88.
Q 06Wright's earliest known work is which building, designed by Silsbee's firm for his uncle in Wisconsin?
Unity Chapel
He 'looked after the interior' though not officially employed; he now lies, at least nominally, in the cemetery beside it.
Q 07Adler & Sullivan hired Wright to draw the interiors of which project?
The Auditorium Building
He later called Sullivan his lieber Meister, 'dear master'.
Q 08What did Wright call the independent commissions he secretly designed while under contract to Sullivan?
Bootlegged houses
There were at least nine, mostly Queen Anne or Colonial Revival; the Harlan House gave him away and ended the job.
Q 09After the split, how long did Wright and Sullivan go without meeting or speaking?
12 years
Wright told two versions of the break: that he walked out, and that Sullivan fired him on the spot.
Q 10Which pioneering woman architect took over Frank Lloyd Wright's presentation drawings from 1895?
Marion Mahony
She was the third woman licensed as an architect in Illinois and also designed glass and furniture for his houses.
Q 11Which Chicago planner offered to fund Wright at the École des Beaux-Arts and in Rome, only to be turned down?
Daniel Burnham
Burnham thought it a foolish mistake; Wright found the classical education at odds with his vision of a modern American architecture.
Q 12Frank Lloyd Wright's first independent commission was a house for which client?
William Winslow
It so impressed Edward Waller that he set up the meeting with Burnham.
Q 13In which magazine did Wright publish two affordable house designs in 1901?
Ladies' Home Journal
Edward Bok invited the designs as part of a project to improve modern house design; neither plan was ever built.
Q 21How many people did servant Julian Carlton murder at Taliesin on August 15, 1914?
Seven
He set fire to the living quarters and attacked with an axe; Mamah and her two children were among the dead.
Q 22How did Julian Carlton die seven weeks on from the Taliesin attack?
Starvation, having swallowed hydrochloric acid
He was nearly lynched on the spot but taken to Dodgeville jail; the acid had destroyed his throat.
Q 23Wright's second marriage, to Miriam Noel in 1923, failed within a year because of what?
Her morphine addiction
Q 14The Robie House's dramatic cantilevered roofs are supported by a steel channel of what length?
110 feet
Its living and dining areas form virtually one uninterrupted space.
Q 15The 1911 publication that first exposed Wright's work to Europe is commonly called what?
The Wasmuth Portfolio
Berlin publisher Ernst Wasmuth issued more than 100 lithographs of his designs.
Q 16In which building did Wright say he 'ceased to be an architect of structure, and became an architect of space'?
Unity Temple
He offered his services to his own Oak Park congregation after their church burned down.
Q 17Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo was completed in 1923, the year of what disaster?
The Great Kanto earthquake
It was first thought to have survived unscathed; the lobby was later rebuilt at the Meiji Mura museum after demolition in 1968.
Q 18Wright's Ennis House in Los Angeles, often used in films to represent the future, is built with what?
Textile concrete blocks
He first used the precast, bar-reinforced block system on the Millard House in Pasadena in 1923; his son Lloyd supervised construction.
Q 19Mamah Borthwick Cheney, with whom Wright left for Europe in 1909, was married to whom?
An Oak Park neighbour and client
Wright fell for her while designing Edwin Cheney's house; Edwin granted a divorce, Wright's wife Catherine refused.
Q 20Wright named his Spring Green home Taliesin after what?
A Welsh poet, magician and priest
The land was bought by his mother in 1911, adjacent to the Lloyd Jones family holdings.
He met Olgivanna Lazovich in 1924 while still married; their daughter Iovanna was born in 1925.
Q 24The 1925 fire at Taliesin, blamed on crossed telephone wires, destroyed a collection of what?
Japanese prints
He valued them at $250,000 to $500,000 and rebuilt the quarters as Taliesin III.
Q 25Wright and Olgivanna were arrested in Minnesota in 1926 for allegedly violating which law?
The Mann Act
The charges were dropped; they married in 1928 after his divorce from Miriam Noel.
Q 26How many people joined the Taliesin Fellowship in Wright's lifetime?
625
Twenty-three came in the first year, 1932; Olgivanna had studied under G. I. Gurdjieff, who ran a similar school.
Q 27Which decentralised concept from Wright's 1932 book covered 2,560 acres for 7,000 residents?
Broadacre City
It is seen as a forerunner of the edge city and was never built; The Disappearing City set it out.
Q 28The Usonian ideal emerged most completely in which 1937 residence in Madison?
The Jacobs First House
Built on a gridded concrete slab with radiant heating, it had no basement or attic.
Q 29Fallingwater was built over a waterfall of what height?
20 feet
It cost $155,000 including an $8,000 fee, and was meant as a family getaway for the Kaufmanns rather than a home.
Q 30What did Fallingwater's contractor do without Wright's knowledge?
Added extra steel to the concrete cantilevers
Kaufmann's engineers had doubted the design; post-tensioning of the lowest terrace was completed in 2002.