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Published: March 10th 2012
Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio
The first home and studio of Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park.Today is my last day in Chicago.
Since the city is such an architectural showcase, I used it to explore the legacy of the most famous architect in US history,
Frank Lloyd Wright.
He was
born in 1867 in Wisconsin.
His parents believed from an early age he would be an architect, and filled their house with building blocks and other construction toys.
Wright studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin.
In 1887, he quit school, moved to Chicago, and got a job with Louis Sullivan.
He stayed in Chicago for a decade, after which he moved back to Wisconsin (abandoning his wife in the process).
While in Chicago, he lived and worked in the suburb of
Oak Park.
Then, as now, it was known for wealth and conservative taste.
Ernest Hemmingway, who was born here in 1899, called it “the city of wide lawns and narrow minds”.
Wright caused quite a stir.
This shows in his early work, which bears enough resemblance to existing models I thought they were by other people at first.
A commission to design the new Unity Church in 1906 was the breakthrough.
Oak Park now has
Frank Lloyd Wright pillers
Closeup of Japanese inspired pillers on Frank Lloyd Wright's studio. dozens of Wright buildings.
Frank Lloyd Wright House and Studio
The most important of those buildings is his
house and studio, which is open for tours.
Wright designed it in 1889, while still officially working for Sullivan.
From the outside, it looks like a New England colonial, with a pitched roof and wooden shingles.
Inside is another story.
The first room by the door is a narrow entrance hall.
This leads into a much larger living room.
Wright designed it that way to encourage people to move further into the house.
The living room has a fireplace in the middle of one wall.
Wright believed fires represented the warmth of nature, and every building he designed in this period has one (usually several).
The living room has Japanese prints on the walls.
Wright was a huge admirer of Japanese culture, and collected the prints by the thousands.
The next room is a hallway which leads to Wright’s design studio.
The hallway is narrow.
A large log protrudes from the wall halfway down.
When the room was originally designed, the log
Walter Gale Bootleg House
The Walter Gale House, one of the bootleg houses Frank Lloyd Wright designed on the sly while employed by Louis Sulivan. From a distance, it looks like a normal Queen Anne. Close up, the geometric windows are pure Wright. was part of a living tree on the property.
Wright included it as another way of bringing nature into the house.
After the hallway falls the dining room.
It has almost no ornamentation.
Most of the room is taken up by a rectangular wooden dining table surrounded by six rectangular high-backed chairs.
Narrow art glass windows run along the walls, representing trees.
Wright designed everything, including the furniture.
The bedrooms are upstairs, and they all have pitched ceilings to follow the roof line.
The house has no attic, because Wright did not believe in storing a great amount of stuff and viewed attics as useless.
Little windows sit below the roof, flooding all rooms with natural light.
All rooms share a single indoor bathroom; having one at all was a huge luxury at the time!
Wright and his wife Catherine had
four children.
They all shared a large bedroom with a high divider down the middle, girls on one side and boys on the other.
Several of Wright’s kids remember having epic missile fights throwing things over the wall.
Next to
Heurtley House
The Heurtley House, an early Prairie Style house on Forrest Avenue in Oak Park. this bedroom lies a long narrow hallway with a curved roof.
It is barely high enough for an adult to fit.
At the far end, the view explodes into a large open room that Wright used as a playroom.
This is yet another instance of Wright using a small space to encourage movement into a larger space.
The toys in the room at this point consist of the type of building blocks Wright used as a child and an original set of Lincoln Logs; his son John Lloyd Wright
invented them.
Something that looks like a piano keyboard sits in the wall near one corner.
It really is the front of a grand piano; Wright designed a recess in the wall so it would fit without filling the space of the room.
The tour last goes to
Wright’s office.
The stone sign in front reads “Frank Lloyd Wright Architect” with a geometric pattern (what an understatement!).
The outside has statues inspired by Japanese motifs.
Inside is a large and grand octagonal drawing room.
The windows are high on the walls so people would not get distracted while working.
Moore Dugal House
The Moore Dugal House, first designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1909, and redesigned after a fire in 1922. It is the most impressive of all his houses along Forest Street in Oak Park The room has a balcony held up by pulleys and chains.
The table is covered in plan for the Hollyhock House in Los Angeles.
Next to this room is the presentation room.
It is also octagonal, with a series of corkboards on the wall.
It too has windows high on the walls to bring in natural light.
Wright would pin the plans to the walls for clients to evaluate.
Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park
The neighborhood surrounding the Wright House has a
large number of houses he designed.
The Wright House sells a map listing them all, but I found a number just wandering the streets.
Close by on Chicago Avenue are a series of three houses; the first buildings Wright ever designed by himself.
They follow existing design trends and barely look like what people consider a Wright design.
Wright’s distinctive motifs only show up in subtle patterns on the windows and doors.
The houses are called the "
bootleg houses” because he designed them on the sly while still working for Louis Sullivan.
Sullivan fired him when he found out in 1893.
Forrest
Moore Dugal House, side view
The side view of the Moore Dugal House by Frank Lloyd Wright. Note the wall of spheres, a very popular picture. Street, by contrast, is practically a museum, with a series of houses that definitely have the Wright look.
They feature clean horizontal lines, geometric patterns, small windows near the roof, and wide eaves.
Some have Japanese motifs on the walls.
One house, which is pictured in many guidebooks, has a fence made of concrete spheres imbedded in a wall.
The
Huertly House, a single story house of brown bricks with heavy emphasis on horizontal lines, is a typical example.
Forrest Street also contains the
Nathan Moore House, Wright’s first commission after leaving Sullivan.
The look of the house is a cheat.
In 1923, the top floor burned in a fire.
The owner hired Wright again to design a replacement.
Wright replaced the pitched roof that existed before (which looked a lot like his own house) with a more updated look.
Unitarian Temple
My last Wright building was located downtown, the
Unitarian Temple.
Although Wright was not very religious, he was a member of the
Unitarian Church (now the Unitarian Universalist Church) and got the commission for the building.
In the early 1900s, this was a very daring
Beachy House
The Beachy House on Forrest Avenue in Oak Park, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1906 move.
The church went a long way to establishing his reputation.
Wright considered it one of his favorite buildings.
From the main street, the church initially looks like a wall of bricks with long thin windows.
The church has a small lot, and Wright created the wall so street noise would not affect the service.
A path leads down a side street up a concrete staircase.
The top reveals a low corridor connecting two buildings.
The sides of the corridor are made of glass.
This is the entrance of the church.
Wright used glass to connect the inner spiritual realm and the outer physical one.
Inside the corridor, the sanctuary is on the left and the function room on the right.
To reach the sanctuary proper, one must duck into a low corridor, and then go either left or right.
These lead into low ceilinged hallways with indirect light next to the sanctuary.
Latecomers can hear the sermon here without disturbing the service.
At the end of the corridors, the space explodes into a high airy room.
The room
Unity Temple
The street facade of Unity Temple by Frank Lloyd Wright. He deliberately designed it with no windows to keep out highway noise is paneled in wood, and the ceiling is made entirely of skylights.
Other than horizontal and vertical beams, the room has no decoration.
Wright designed the room to symbolize entering into the presence of the Supreme Being.
Compare this with the playroom he designed for his house, which has a similar effect.
The only route out of the room goes directly past the pulpit.
Wright’s design forces people to pass by the pastor (and probably have a few words) after the service.
The other side of the corridor contains the function room.
In most churches, this room would be in the basement.
The centerpiece of the room is a large fireplace.
As noted earlier, Wright put one in every one of his buildings from the period.
The windows are high on the walls and are made of stained glass.
The pattern is one of Wright’s favorite design motifs, a highly simplified tree of life.
It reminded me of what Piet Mondrian would paint two decades later.
The ceiling has hangings lights, which were added by one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s sons in the 1940s.
Unitarian Temple
The temple room by Frank Lloyd Wright, which he called his jewel box. The open skylights bring worshippers closer to the supreme being. After Oak Park, I had a difficult drive out of Chicago.
The city is
notorious for traffic.
I got somewhat lucky in that the roads mostly moved even though they were crowded.
Once outside the metropolitan area, the highway passed through a wildlife refuge.
This area was open swamp and meadow, and rather pretty.
Soon afterward, the scenery became monotonous farms and fields.
It looked just like what I had driven through in Indiana, and was about as dull.
The further I got from Chicago, the more the price of gas dropped; this was amazing to see.
After dark, I encountered my first instance of truly nasty road construction during this trip.
I’ve encountered it before, but always with safety measures like barriers.
Here, there were none.
Traffic was funneled into one lane, which then had to snake through an obstacle course of equipment, work sites, and work trucks.
Drivers really needed to go slow through this stretch.
Rural Midwest drivers’ reputation for politeness must really count for something, because in the northeast this scenario would be a prescription for endless
Unitarian Temple function room
The function room by Frank Lloyd Wright. Note the fireplace on the lower right, a feature of every building he designed in this period. accidents.
Springfield Horseshoe
I spent the night in the state capitol of Springfield.
I mention it mostly because of what I ate.
Springfield has its own unique contribution to street food culture, the
horseshoe.
This delicacy consists of French toast covered in layers of ground meat, French fries, and melted cheese.
For those who can’t handle all of it, there is a smaller version called the pony shoe.
Believe it or not, some of the best in the city is served at an Irish bar called
Darcy’s Pint.
They have an entire section of the
menu dedicated to them.
I managed to finish the dish, and then nearly passed out.
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