“The mission of an architect is to help people understand how to make life more beautiful, the world a better one for living in, and to give reason, rhyme, and meaning to life.”
-Frank Lloyd Wright, 1957

“For years I have been keen on architecture and felt that the ugliness of our buildings actually menaced my happiness and felt breathlessly that I must help in the cause of good architecture.”
-Theodate Pope Riddle, 1900

Theodate Pope Riddle and Frank Lloyd Wright share the birth year of 1867, and both had Midwestern roots. Theodate was born in Salem, Ohio and spent her formative years in Cleveland. Wright was born in Wisconsin and began his professional career in Chicago, later opening his own studio in Oak Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, in 1898, the same year Alfred Pope purchased property that became Hill-Stead.

Though the two never met, it is unquestionable that Theodate, working within the small radius of Connecticut and New York, knew of Wright, who has been described as the “greatest American Architect of all time” (American Institute of Architects). She wrote to her mother on May 26, 1919, of an impending project of his while traveling in Japan: “… We spent ten days there [in Tokyo] in the very well known but terrible, run down Imperial Hotel – the management is planning a new magnificent building designed by Frank Wright of Chicago to take its place.”

The B. Harley Bradley House (pictured bottom left) was built in 1901 for the Illinois businessman and his wife, Anna Hickox Bradley. The house is widely considered the first of Lloyd Wright’s iconic prairie-style homes that reflected the flat midwestern landscape. Their family lived in it until 1913 when they moved to Iowa.

Hill-Stead, Theodate’s breakthrough architectural project (pictured bottom right), was also built in 1901, for her parents Alfred A. Pope and Ada Brooks Pope. The couple lived here together until Alfred’s death in 1913.