Frank Lloyd Wright’s Chicago!
No trip to Chicago is complete without taking in the built heritage of architect Frank Lloyd Wright,
When high-Victorian architecture was still the rage, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a young architect in Chicago, Illinois, almost singlehandedly revolutionised the family home. He got rid of formal parlours and eliminated doors to create free-form, open-plan houses. Along the way he created many ubiquitous elements of our everyday lives, from family rooms and walk-in wardrobes to the kitchen workstation.
Frank Lloyd Wright has been hailed as America’s greatest architect, and the city of Chicago has the largest collection of Wright-designed homes. It boasts an extensive array of his early buildings, a collective laboratory for his ever-evolving ideas. Today, thanks to the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust, you can visit a number of these structures, most notably in Oak Park’s Frank Lloyd Wright Historic District.
The best place to start is Wright’s own home and studio, designed and built in 1889, when he was just 22. He would live there for the next 20 years with his wife Catherine and six children, constantly remodelling, expanding and experimenting with the space to accommodate his growing family and office.
I drive to Oak Park with a local friend on a bright spring day. It’s now the first suburb west of the city, but when Wright moved here it was still a rural village overlooking open prairie. Armed with audio guides, we take a walking tour of the neighbourhood, which features 25 buildings designed or remodelled by Wright. When I hear a recording of the architect’s voice stating, “Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union,” I am struck by the way his designs stand apart from the other houses. His open, light-filled homes, with their unadorned exteriors and geometric themes, seem to connect with the natural world.
His own Shingle-style home isn’t particularly revolutionary, but it does feature one of his signature elements: a front door that is not immediately obvious. You find it by following what Wright described as a ‘path of discovery’ through the landscape. Once there, you feel embraced by the house.
Inside, our guide explains how Wright rethought concepts of space and light with his box-breaking floor plans. His central fireplace with inglenook (a hearthside recess that’s ‘a room within a room’) is the spiritual core of the home. Built-in furniture creates more space in the rooms, which are painted in the olive and mustard hues of the prairie grass lands. But the most gob smacking innovation is the domed playroom, with its light-diffusing skylight and baby grand piano. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the first family room.
Moving from the secular to the sublime, we next visit Wright’s Mayan-style Unity Temple. Constructed from reinforced concrete in 1908, this is the first house of worship built of a material normally reserved for factories. It’s now designated a National Historic Landmark, and many architects consider it to be the world’s first true modern building. Wright’s design compresses us through a low-ceilinged foyer before we expand out into the community area. The congregation’s seats encircle a central space, creating a sense of tender intimacy. Yellow skylights glow warmly above, even on cloudy days, I’m told.
We’ve just begun to appreciate the full extent of Wright’s brilliance as we head to the Frederick C Robie House, in the Hyde Park neighbourhood of the city’s South Side. This 1910 Prairie-style masterpiece has been named one of the 10 most significant buildings of the 20th century by the American Institute of Architects. It is Wright’s ode to the American home.
Our guide first takes us across the street, so we can appreciate just how sleek, open and flowing the house is. It sits low to the ground, with a horizontal roofline and large, overhanging eaves, because this is flat prairie land and subject to high winds. Wright’s mantra was that a building must suit its environment and be a product of its place, purpose and time.
Approaching the house, we once again encounter a tuckedaway front door. From there, we move through a compressed transitional space and up some stairs to an expansive open living and dining area. The freeform space within is anchored by a central, low-slung fireplace and bathed in natural light. It comes from a continuous ribbon of 175 jewel-like art-glass windows, which shield the people inside from outside eyes and filter the light in ever-changing patterns as the sun charts its course through the day and seasons. Yet another ‘path of discovery’ in Wright’s outstanding architectural legacy.