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In the next twenty years he designed and built, for clients scattered throughout the Midwest, nearly 100 houses for which no precedent existed anywhere. In leafy suburbs of Chicago these houses still look strangely civilized and sheltered, with low vistas and wide-spreading eaves. "Taking a human being for my 'scale,' " Wright has said, "I brought the whole house down in height to fit a normal one—ergo, 5' 8" tall, say. ... I broadened the mass out all I possibly could, brought it down into spaciousness. ... I was working toward the elimination of the wall as a wall to reach the function of a screen, as a means of opening up space. . . . The planes of the building parallel to the ground were all stressed—to grip the whole to Earth. . . ."
Meanwhile the new type of public architecture which Sullivan had made powerful was sidetracked by the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Eastern conservatives turned the fair into a magnificent tour de force of neoclassic buildings, and for a quarter-century eclecticism held the stage in U. S. public architecture. Wright kept off the stage. In 1905 he produced, in protest, a well-lighted administration building for the Larkin Co. in Buffalo, severely without ornament, the first office building in the U. S. to use 1) metal-bound, plate-glass doors and windows, 2) all-metal furniture, 3) air conditioning, 4) magnesite as an architectural material.
Change. Wright had a lifetime's hard work, several lifetimes' invention behind him at 40. He had carried out a great adventure in building. But though Wright had freed domestic architecture he did not feel himself free. Making what provision he could for his wife and six children, he went to Italy with a woman named Mamah Borthwick Cheney. They were never married. Wright thus broke with personal convention as he had long since broken with artistic convention. On their return in 1911, he put all he knew of architecture into the building of Taliesin as a new home for them both. Changes of this kind are ill-fated by ancient superstition, but few have met such a fate as Frank Lloyd Wright's. In 1913, just after he had finished his most light-hearted job, a "goodtime place," as Wright called it, the Midway Gardens in Chicago, a telephone call from Spring Green smote him with catastrophe. A Barbados Negro servant had run amok at Taliesin, murdered its mistress, her two children, an apprentice and three others, burned the living quarters to the ground. Wright went to Taliesin, buried his mistress alone, and lived there alone for months. Then he began to rebuild Taliesin. Finished in 1915, finer than before, the house was Frank Lloyd Wright's professional triumph over the worst blow of his life.