All the established hotels of big cities in the world opened their business between 1889 and 1910. The Savoy Hotel started in 1889, The Waldorf -Astoria Hotel in 1893, The Hyde Park Hotel in 1904.

The Imperial Hotel, a western style hotel opened in1890 proposed by the Foreign Minister, Kaoru Inoue, who felt insulted by no modern hotels to treat foreign guests. The first three-storied hotel designed by Ken Yokoyama was burned down by fire. After that a spectacular building was built in 1922, taking seven years to complete and the hotel was familiar to Japanese people till the demolition in 1968. The part of the hotel has been reserved at the Meiji Village near Nagoya, where we can see public offices and private houses built in the Meiji Era.

It was Frank Lloyd Wright that designed the prestigious construction. He was born at Richlandcenter in Wisconsin on June 8,1869, when it was a stormy night symbolized his life thereafter. His grand father came from the Wales and was a Unitarian. His father was a musician, who influenced his life through music. His mother taught him the beauty of nature when he was small. His family moved to Boston but his parents found that the life of the city was not good for him and three years later they came back to Wisconsin. He was sent to the farm of his uncle when he was 11. The life on the farm was very severe for him. He, who had to get up at four every morning tried to escape from his uncle's house again and again. As time passed away, he began to be resigned to his hard destiny and he found what he was interested in such a life.

In 1885 he entered the civil engineering department of the University of Wisconsin and his mother wanted him to be an architect and made him apprentice at a professor 's office after school was over.

When he was studying at school, he witnessed the collapse of a building, which found the designer of the construction guilty and the judgement banned him from engaging the job. That gave Wright a lesson.

After briefly studying civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Wright moved to Chicago, where he went to work in 1887 as a draftsman in the office of Adler and Sullivan. Two of the finest buildings of Wright's early period -the Larking Company Administration Building (1904;demolished1950) in Buffalo, N.Y., and the Unity Church (1906) in Oak Park, Ill.-reflected an anti -urban bias, houses he designed in the same period -for example, the Robie House (1909) in Chicago, and the Martin House (1904)in Buffalo-reached out into the landscape with large, glazed walls, low -slung roof overhangs, terraces, and similar devices.

Wright proclaimed that the structural principles found in natural forms should guide modern American architecture. He praised the virtues of an organic architecture that would use reinforced concrete in the configurations found in seashells and snails and build skyscrapers the way trees were built-that is, with a central "trunk" deeply rooted in the ground and floor cantilevered from that trunk like branches.

The most spectacular buildings of his mature period -Imperial Hotel (1915-22; demolished 1968); Fallingwater(Kaufmann House;1936); Taliesin West(1938-59);and New York City's Guggenheim Museum(completed 1959)-were based on forms borrowed from nature, and the intentions were clearly romantic, poetic, and intensely personal.

According to Wright few foreign architects who had been invited to Japan respected Japanese people and the style and tradition of Japan. He intended to teach Japanese people how to use the facilities of civilization, that is, water supply, drainage, electric service, and heating. The members of the committee of Imperial Hotel Construction said that it was sacrilegious to make use of such a low cost material as Oya ishi, stone produced near Utsunomiya, Tochigi Prefecture to build a grand hotel. Wright's principle of the construction of Imperial Hotel was quakeproof and the harmony of the surroundings of the Imperial Palace, taking account of the style of traditional Japanese construction. The roof was covered with bronze, and reinforced concrete and Oyaishi were used for the foundation and wall. A large pond was made in front of the hotel against fire.

The 20 students of the universities that majored in architecture helped Wright his work. Despite language barrier Japanese carpenters did their job very well. Wright found that they were intelligent, hardworking and skilled, and they were glad to witness that the hotel was being making day by day. He said that he had not seen such an impression of carpenters in America. He sometimes he was taught by Japanese carpenters.

On September 1,1923 one year after the completion of Imperial Hotel they had the Great Kanto Earth quake in the Kanto Area including Tokyo. When Wright learned the news of the quake, he was confident that his Imperial Hotel would not fall down. However he could not sleep well that night.

A few days after the disaster Kiyachiro Okura sent Wright a telegram, which told him that the hotel had not been scarred at all.

It was an engineering triumph for him. The telegram also said that all the guests of the hotel had been out of danger. Wright was pleased to hear the news, which made him famous all over the world, because for almost a generation Wright was an architectural outlaw in the United States, although his buildings were much acclaimed in Europe.

Wright died in Phoenix, Ariz., April 9, 1959. Whenever I passed away in front of the hotel I remembered the former Imperial Hotel and Wright, the American designer.