This file photo shows New York’s Guggenheim Museum, one of eight masterworks by US architect Frank Lloyd Wright that have been designated by UNESCO as World Heritage sites (STAN HONDA)

Washington (AFP) – Eight masterworks by US architect Frank Lloyd Wright, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, were selected as World Heritage sites Sunday, a first in the field of architecture for the United States.

Wright, who died in 1959, was cited for his influential 20th-century designs that incorporated organic motives, blurred boundaries between the inside and outside, and made unprecedented use of steel and concrete.

UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee agreed on the designation at a meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, along with the landscape of the Prosecco wine region in Italy.

The Wright-designed buildings chosen for the designation include Fallingwater, a spectacular house built over a waterfall in Mill Run, Pennsylvania.

The Guggenheim in New York, perhaps the architect’s best-known creation, is famous for its spiral shape recalling a nautilus shell.

Other buildings designated World Heritage sites included the Herbert and Katherine Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin; the Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois; the Fredrick C. Robie House in Chicago, Illinois; Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin; Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona; and Hollyhock House in Los Angeles.

“Together, the buildings showcase Wright’s influence on the course of architecture around the world,” the US State Department said in welcoming the honor. 

The group joins 23 other World Heritage sites in the United States but is the first in the field of architecture.

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