Wright's career is generally divided into three periods. His work during this first period (1893 - World War I) was primarily located in the Midwest, and brought forth a new American architectural style - the Prairie house. These long, low buildings stretched out along the flat Midwestern landscape, their horizontality emphasized with bands of windows and spare ornamentation. Low-pitched roofs with broad eaves served to relate them to the ground, creating shelter in the open. Wright left his Oak Park, Illinois studio in 1909, ending his Prairie house period.

Between World War I and the mid 1930's, Wright executed relatively few commissions - the most notable being Tokyo's Imperial Hotel and his series of textile block houses in California - but this second period was full of experimentation with different building techniques and new designs based on geometric forms other than the square or rectangle. He wrote An Autobiography in 1932, a book which inspired many young architects and artists to join his newly-formed Taliesin Fellowship, an institute devoted to artistic endeavor. The Fellowship was (and continues to be) based at his homes in Spring Green, Wisconsin (Taliesin) and Scottsdale, Arizona (Taliesin West).

Wright emerged from this relatively quiet period with several large projects which captured the public imagination, including Fallingwater, which appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1938. At the same time, he developed the Usonian house, designed for families of modest income. The Usonians were generally single-story houses with simple floor plans, based on a grid system, with radiant heat, a small, central kitchen space, and usually flat roofs. For the rest of his career, he continued to devote his attention to residential design - both luxurious and spare - with a remarkable variety of form. At his death in 1959, he had built more than 400 buildings - and designed at least twice that many.