Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Wins Fast Company’s 2024 Innovation by Design Award
How Frank Lloyd Wright became a household name for Gen Zers
For its wide-reaching and discerning licensing plans, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation is a winner of Fast Company’s 2024 Innovation by Design Awards.
Fast Company | by Sam Lubell | July 23, 2024
In 1955, just a few years before he died, Frank Lloyd Wright—hoping to raise money and proliferate his designs—began to license his intellectual property to a few design industry manufacturers. But the effort was limited, according to Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation CEO Stuart Graff, and the scope would later narrow almost exclusively to reproductions and museum-shop fodder.
In 2016, the foundation—which is the design company of the year winner for Fast Company’s 2024 Innovation by Design Awards—began partnering with dozens of design manufacturers to create new works inspired by the architect’s approach. This resulted in more than a thousand new products, including prefab homes built alongside Lindal Cedar Homes that are inspired by Wright’s Usonian residences—open floor plans, a strong horizontal emphasis, and an intentional connection to nature.
Between 2016 and 2023, the foundation almost doubled its yearly royalty income. Last year, Kith and New Balance launched a line of sneakers and apparel inspired by Wright’s Broadacre City, a 1930s plan promoting radical approaches to urban organization. The color palette—Cherokee red, soft apricot, and olive green—draws from the project’s original model, while Broadacre maps adorn the shoe liners.
Steelcase’s Frank Lloyd Racine Collection is informed by Wright’s furniture for the S.C. Johnson Administration Building (1939) in Racine, Wisconsin—famed for its luminous Great Hall, brimming with tall, thin “mushroom” columns. The curving forms of Wright’s desks, chairs, and other pieces were designed to integrate with the complex’s rounded brick buildings and meandering details. New pieces are slightly larger (to support today’s larger people) and offer an expanded palette of materials and colors, including new oak work tops and more than 80 paint finishes and stain options.
Partnering with so many companies and designers, added Graff, is helping the foundation appeal to a younger, more diverse audience. “Wright’s ideas aren’t fixed in a moment in time. They’re applicable to meet the moment,” says Graff, who believes that pushing these ideas forward is exactly what Wright would have done. “We encourage [designers] to be bolder, take on more risk.”
This story is part of Fast Company’s 2024 Innovation by Design Awards. Explore the full list of companies creating products, reimagining spaces, and working to design a better world. Read more about the methodology behind the selection process.