Frank Lloyd Wright’s last commission, the Gammage Auditorium, also known as the ASU Gammage, debuted in 1964. Completed five years after Wright’s death in 1959, Wright designed the auditorium at the request of Arizona State University’s president Grady Gammage.

Neither man lived to see the auditorium constructed as both Wright and Gammage died in 1959. However, both parties had respected aides and family members who made the building possible. William Welsey Peters, Wright’s aid and assistant, helped with the process of completing the plans for Gammage; however, he stayed true to Wright’s design.

The building took twenty-five months and $2.46 million to build. The auditorium, which functions as Arizona State’s multifunctional performing arts facility, seats up to 3,000 people and stands eighty feet tall. Originally planned as an opera house for Baghdad, Iraq, the Gammage changed its final location to ASU because of conflicts in the Middle East. Luckily, Grady Gammage managed to convince Wright to design and build the auditorium on the ASU campus. As Wright had intended to build in Iraq, the design follows Middle Eastern ideals and designs, such as Arabic overlapping cutout designs.

The Gammage remains known as the only public building designed by Wright in Arizona. While the Gammage is Wright’s last work, it fails to resemble his other designs, such as Falling Water and the Guggenheim Museum. However, considering Wright’s career as an architect spanned over a sixty year period, it is not unusual for his later projects such as Gammage to differ from his early designs.