PHOENIX, Ariz., April 9--Frank Lloyd Wright, regarded by many as the greatest architect of the twentieth century, died early today in St. Joseph's Hospital. He was 89 years old. Mr. Wright, who had considered himself to be "the greatest living architect," was admitted to the hospital Monday night for emergency surgery to remove an intestinal obstruction. His physician said he was "getting along satisfactorily and then suddenly died." From his estate, Taliesin West, northeast of Phoenix, Mr. Wright designed a new Capitol for Arizona. He proposed an "oasis in the desert, its fountains and greenery contrasting with the sand and rocks around it." The plan created a controversy, but was rejected. When a group of architects proposed a skyscraper type of building for a Capitol, Mr. Wright looked at the drawing and described it as "a sidewalk-happy chimneypot with a derby hat on top, a poor version of a poor original--the United Nations Building in New York." This was typical of Mr. Wright's comments, for which he was almost as well known as his buildings. He condemned retiring at 60 as a "murderous custom" and pleaded for a curb to America's "lust for ugliness." A gradual change in the architect's fame, fortune and attitude might have been marked on May 28, 1953, when he received the Gold Medal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He then said: "A shadow falls; I feel coming on me a strange disease--humility." During his lifetime Mr. Wright was in turn the great radical of American architecture and the acknowledged leader of a flourishing modern school of building. This change in status of the white-haired iconoclast of American architecture did not evolve through any relaxation of his uncompromising theory that form in building should follow function, but rather in the public's gradual acceptance of his doctrine and deviations. Hailed in Europe in his early years as the creator of an American architecture, he did not so readily gain acceptance in his own country, where the skyscraper was king. Although trained by Louis Sullivan, who was known as the "father of the skyscraper," Mr. Wright was strong in his condemnation of that peculiarly American architectural phenomenon. Mr. Wright scathingly condemned the topless towers of New York. He had no use for the great steel and stone cities; he denounced the "box" house in this country, declaring that "a box is more of a coffin for the human spirit than an inspiration." His own philosophy of architecture was enunciated in low terrain-conforming homes that became known as "prairie architecture"; in functional office buildings of modest height utilizing such materials as concrete slabs, glass bricks and tubing; in such monumental structures as the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo that withstood the great earthquake of 1923. Mr. Wright was born on June 8, 1869, at Richland Center, Wis., the son of William Cary Wright and the former Anna Lloyd-Jones. His family was intensely religious. His father became a minister, and gave Mr. Wright a religious training. From his mother, who was a school teacher, it was said that he developed the idea of being an architect. From both parents he developed a strong individuality and the rebellious quality that characterized him and his work. As a boy he attended public school in Wisconsin and then was sent to the University of Wisconsin to study civil engineering. Deciding he wanted to be an architect, Mr. Wright left college in his last year and headed not for Paris and the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but, with his typical individuality, for Chicago. There he found work in the drafting room of Mr. Sullivan, the French-Irish Bostonian who had rebelled against classic architecture taught in France and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although he and Mr. Sullivan were inevitably to disagree, they had in common an opposition against the classic form. Mr. Sullivan taught the young apprentice the ground rules of architecture and instilled in him his ideas for radical design. After four years they quarreled and Mr. Wright set up his own office. But throughout his life he referred to Mr. Sullivan, who died in 1927, as "der Meister" and freely acknowledged his great debt to the man who built the famed Wainwright Building in St. Louis and the Chicago Auditorium. Mr. Wright naturally took to rebellion. From the very beginning his designs were different from anything that had been built before--"designed-for-living" bungalows. He built the first one for himself. It was the home for his bride, the former Catherine Tobin, whom he married when he was 21. She was 19. They met at a church social, married and went to live at Oak Park, a Chicago suburb noted for its many churches. There the Wrights's six children were born: Lloyd and John, who became architects; Catherine, David, Frances and Llewellyn. The architect's Oak Park houses were low bungalows, free of fancy woodwork, dormer windows, corner towers or towering chimneys. The horizontal planes of the structures were accentuated. They "hugged the earth." Among architects the houses created a sensation. Soon Mr. Wright's designs became known in this country as "prairie architecture" because they fitted so snugly into the flat landscape for which they were made. In Europe they were widely hailed and in Germany several books were written about them and a portfolio of them was published. America, for the most part, still chose to ignore both the builder and his creations. Suddenly Mr. Wright gained fame, not through his already substantial contribution to modern American architecture, but through scandal and tragedy. In 1909 he went to Germany to arrange for publication of the portfolio of his work and some essays on architecture he had written. A short time before, he had built a house for E. H. Cheney, a neighbor at Oak Park. When the architect sailed for Germany, Mrs. Cheney went with him. When they returned, Mr. Wright built perhaps his most famous structure, his own home, Taliesin ("Shining brow" in his ancestral Welsh), in Spring Green, Wis. He built his country home on a commanding site overlooking the Wisconsin River. It was to be a "refuge" for Mrs. Cheney, whose husband had divorced her. On Aug. 15, 1914, tragedy struck Taliesin. Mrs. Cheney, her two children and four other persons were killed by a crazed servant, who also burned the house to the ground. Mr. Wright later rebuilt Taliesin, determined, as he said, "to wipe the scar from the hill." Meanwhile, publication in Germany of Mr. Wright's work had come to the attention of the Emperor of Japan, who, in the fall of 1915 sent a delegation of officials and architects to see him and to ask him to submit plans for a $4,500,000 hotel the Emperor hoped to build in Tokyo. The architect made sketches, which were accepted, and he went to Japan to superintend the building of the hotel. His greatest problem was to foil the earthquakes that periodically brought destruction and death to Japan. The brilliance with which he solved his problem was demonstrated twice--once before the hotel was completed, when a minor quake shook Tokyo, and again when it had been up for two years. The Imperial Hotel was an elastic structure, the walls and floors having a sliding quality never before attained. Its plumbing was designed so that pipes would not break and the electric wiring was placed so that temblors would not cause short circuits and charge the building with high- voltage death. It was completed in 1922. A year later fierce quakes rocked Tokyo and Yokohama. Nearly 100,000 persons died under collapsing walls and falling roofs or were burned to death in the holocaust that followed. Days later, when communication between Tokyo and the outside world was re- established, word went out that the Imperial Hotel was the only large structure that had survived the disaster. In the next few years domestic trouble continued to harass the architect. He had been estranged from his first wife, who finally consented to divorce him after his return from Tokyo. His second marriage, to Miriam Noel, a sculptor, was brief. They were married in 1923 and divorced in 1927. The next year Mr. Wright married Olga Lazovich. They had a daughter, Iovanna. In 1927, when he lost Taliesin by foreclosure of a mortgage, Mr. Wright called in his friends, many of them wealthy business men, and incorporated himself under Wisconsin laws, selling stock on his earning power. He regained Taliesin, built several houses and planned extensive projects, most of which were too "visionary" and did not materialize. In 1929 he incorporated himself again and established the Taliesin Fellowship Foundation, where he trained many apprentice architects. Through controversy and criticism the architect rose steadily while his critics declared he was not only ahead of his time, but also ahead of all time, and his disciples and admirers made extravagant claims for his work. In 1940, when a comprehensive exhibition of Mr. Wright's work was shown in New York, he was reckoned as a great force in American architecture, but not as the last word. Gradually he began to gain vogue and commissions. Among the structures for which the architect became famous were the Midway Gardens in Chicago, the Larkin Company administration building in Buffalo, the S. C. Johnson Company building at Racine, Wis.; the Falling Water House of Edgar J. Kaufmann at Bear Run, Pa., which he built above a waterfall, and the Price Tower at Bartlesville, Okla. There also was the circular Friedman house near Pleasantville, N.Y., in a cooperative development known as Usonia Houses. Usonia was the descriptive word used by Mr. Wright to typify what he considered to be the ideal American architectural style. He added Taliesin West, his own home in Phoenix, Ariz., to the rapidly growing list of Wright showplaces throughout the nation. This home, situated in Paradise Valley, he used as he did Taliesin East, as headquarters for his foundation teaching program. Approximately forty young apprentice architects yearly spent the term from April through November in the Wisconsin Taliesin and from December through March in the Arizona home. One of Mr. Wright's largest commissions was the $10,000,000 campus of Florida Southern College in Lakewood. The project was begun in 1936 and sixteen structures were to be completed by 1960. Again Mr. Wright received mixed reactions for one of the edifices--a modern chapel building. Even as an octogenarian who had received many prizes and honors, including election to the American Academy of Art and Letters, the white-haired individualist was still capable of stirring up the critics. Mr. Wright was the author of many books, including "Modern Architecture" and "Two Lectures on Architecture," 1931; "An Autobiography," and "The Disappearing City," 1932; "An Organic Architecture," 1939; "When Democracy Builds," 1945; "Genius and Mobocracy," 1949; "An American Architecture," 1955, and "A Testament," 1957. He received the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture from King George VI in 1941, the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects in 1949, the Italian Star of Solidarity in 1951 and the Gold Medal of the City of Florence in 1951. Mr. Wright held honorary degrees from Wesleyan, Princeton University, the University of Venice and Florida Southern. He was an honorary member of the Academie Royale des Beaux Arts of Antwerp, the Akademie der Kunst of Berlin, the Royal Institute of British Architects and of the National Academies and architectural societies in Mexico, Portugal, Uruguay, Cuba, Brazil and Finland. He was a member of the National Academy of Design, the American Institute of Decorators and Phi Delta Theta. Rejections were still possible even to the famous octogenarian. His plans for a building in Yosemite National Park were rejected ("politics," he snorted); and Venice turned down his plans for a glass and marble palace on the Grand Canal ("the tourists have won," he said). Mr. Wright opened fire on plans for the Air Force Academy in Colorado, dubbed it a "factory for birdmen." He built a skyscraper in a small Midwest town; was commissioned to do a million-dollar synagogue in Philadelphia and a $45,000,000 cultural center in Baghdad; planned a mile-high building for Chicago's lakefront; designed prefabricated houses. And so he continued to live his later years, much as the earlier ones, hard at work and deep in discussion with his fellowman. At 89 he continued his teaching at Taliesin with sixty-five architectural students. Working a full day, he emerged often to make a public appearance in flowing tie, white hair under porkpie hat, and to make a characteristic utterance. Besides his wife and children, Mr. Wright leaves a sister, Mrs. Maginel Wright Barney of New York; nine grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. His daughter Frances died last February. One of his grandchildren is Anne Baxter, the film actress. After more than a half-century of renown Frank Lloyd Wright received in 1945 his first commission in New York--the new home of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue between Eighty-eighth and Eighty-ninth Streets. He did not live to see it completed. When the dean of architecture received the commission, a project involving more than $2,000,000, he said: "For the first time art will be seen as if through an open window, and, of all places, in New York. It astounds me." One of Mr. Wright's favorite targets for caustic comment and criticism was New York's forest of skyscrapers. An exponent of what he called "organic" architecture--a term that baffled many--he devised a museum building he saw as a "little temple in a park." When the design of his initial venture here was published, an avalanche of cheers and derision was loosed. The "little temple" was hailed by Wright partisans; by others it was called, variously, a "washing machine," a "hot cross bun," a "marshmallow." Even some of the stanchest supporters of the gifted architect "shuddered" to envision the museum-- cylindrical in shape--in its environment of staid, decades-old apartment buildings. Mr. Wright was imperturbable. When he submitted plans for his six-story building to the city authorities in 1953, the Department of Housing and Building refused to grant a license. It said the structure would violate building codes. With an elasticity that infrequently characterized his reaction to criticism, Mr. Wright complied with the request to make a few alterations. He stood firm on other disputed specifications, such as a plexiglass dome for the building and glass doors. The plans to start building were delayed several times but, finally, the museum was in construction in 1956. It is expected to be completed in a month or two. Criticism came from a new source--the artists. Mr. Wright planned a continuous gallery in the form of a spiraling ramp from ground floor to the top. The pictures wouldn't hang right, the artists complained. Mr. Wright was adamant--the artists were wrong, he said. The grade of the ramp was no steeper than the grade of a sidewalk from building line to curb. It was an open secret, too, that the museum staff was bitter about the ramp, and found serious fault with Mr. Wright's lack of adequate provision for art storage and overlooking space for a restoration laboratory.