erhaps it is fitting that while Frank Lloyd Wright's legend helped get the Monona Terrace Convention Center built after decades of haggling, the famed architect's feisty reputation also helped scuttle the project more than once. The architect and Madison had a complicated relationship. If Wright wasn't exactly a prophet without honor in his own hometown, he was, by any measure, controversial in the extreme. Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, a small town 60 or so miles northwest of Madison, on June 8, 1867, the first child of his father's second marriage. In the 1984 book The Master Architect: Conversations with Frank Lloyd Wright, edited by Patrick J. Meehan,Wright talked about his upbringing: "My father came from the East. He was a preacher and a teacher. My mother was a teacher. They met and I was the consequence and for some reason -- which I've never been able to fathom -- my mother wanted an architect for a son. And, being sure that she was going to have a son, I was to be that architect. So, when I was born, in the room in which I was born, on the walls were nine of the wood engravings of the English cathedrals -- engravings by Timothy Cole. So I came into 'English Gothic' and then she followed it up. I never had any other idea -- that I was to be an architect. And, of course, the word was fascinating and is yet." The family traveled around, and settled in Madison in Wright's early adolescence. His father got a job as secretrary of the Wisconsin Conference of Unitarians and Independent Societies. Wright attended Madison schools until quitting Madison High to take a drafting position with architect Alan D. Conover. Wright attended the University of Wisconsin -- studying engineering -- in 1885 and 1886 before decamping for Illinois (in 1887), where he worked for noted architect Louis Sullivan before beginning his own architectural practice in Chicago and Oak Park in 1893.