Born in 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin, Frank Lloyd Wright grew up in an America still very much influenced by the Jeffersonian ideal of an agrarian society. In many ways, he remained throughout his life a nineteenth-century man, for, like Emerson and Whitman, he had a great love for nature. His abiding feeling for the land and his belief in man's need for a direct relationship with nature were essential to his concept of an "organic architecture"—what Wright envisioned as an American architecture distinct from the classical and Renaissance traditions. His antipathy toward European design was matched by a love for non-Western art, particularly that of Japan.