In 1911, Wright joined the landscape firm Olmsted and Olmsted in Boston, Massachusetts, where he specialized in botany and horticulture. Wright would be later sent to San Diego, California to assist with the landscape design of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition with architects Bertram Goodhue, Carleton Winslow, and Irving Gill. The exposition's principal buildings and gardens still remain in Balboa Park. Landscape design led him to work with Los Angeles architect William J. Dodd, and in San Diego with Irving Gill, the latter another master architect and mentor to his design career. In the mid-1910s, Wright formed a landscape partnership with Paul Thiene, a colleague from the Olmsted firm, before opening his own practice in 1916. Beginning in 1919, his father, working in Japan on the Imperial Hotel, delegated some of the responsibilities to him and architect Rudolf Schindler to supervise construction of the Hollyhock House, while Wright worked on the Imperial Hotel in Japan. The house was commissioned by the oil heiress and philanthropist Aline Barnsdall.