8 Wright Sites Added to UNESCO World Heritage List

The inscription happened on Sunday, July 7, at the 43rd session of the World Heritage Committee, which took place in Baku. The announcement comes just over four years after ten buildings designed by Wright were submitted to UNESCO, though according to the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, which coordinated the effort, the nomination has been in development for more than 15 years.

The oldest of the eight buildings is Unity Temple, completed in 1909 in Wright's then-hometown of Oak Park, Illinois, while the youngest is the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, which was completed in 1959, the year Wright died at the age of 91 (he did not live long enough to see its opening).

• Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois, 1909
• Frederick C. Robie House, Chicago, Illinois, 1910
• Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1911
• Hollyhock House, Los Angeles, California, 1921
• Herbert and Katherine Jacobs House, Madison, Wisconsin, 1937
• Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona, 1938
• Fallingwater, Mill Run, Pennsylvania, 1939
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, 1959

The two buildings missing from the ten submitted in 2015 are Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, California.

The grouping of eight buildings is one of only 24 sites in the United States on the World Heritage List, which totals 1,121 properties as of the end of the 43rd session. Furthermore, they are the only modern structures from the US on the list. Although eight sites sounds like a generous number, they make up only about 2% of Wright's nearly 400 surviving buildings, and the number is not even half of the 17 works (ten in France) by Le Corbusier that were added to the list in 2016. Nevertheless, the addition of "20th century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright" to UNESCO's World Heritage List "reconfirm[s] how important Frank Lloyd Wright was to the development of modern architecture around the world," per the Conservancy, and makes a strong case for the continued preservation of his legacy.