The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The man who built for a beautiful future
To mark the 150th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s birth, Jonathan Lorie sets off to discover how the architect left his mark
‘All of this was open prairie when Frank Lloyd Wright moved here in 1889,” says our guide, George, gazing at the Victorian villas of Oak Park, one of Chicago’s leafiest suburbs. “His children played among farms. So the houses he designed here, for city folks moving out, were called the Prairie School. And they changed the face of America.”
We’re standing beside the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, the first house created by America’s most famous architect. And it’s buzzing with visitors, because this month marks the 150th anniversary of his birth – an event celebrated with exhibitions in Chicago and New York and a new Wright Trail across 200 miles of his beloved Midwest. So I’ve come to see what the fuss is all about.
Oak Park isn’t Wright’s most famous site. That would be the Guggenheim Museum in New York, with its swirling snail-shell shape, or Fallingwater, a villa poised above a waterfall in a wood in Pennsylvania. To visit them is to experience Wright’s vision of buildings based on natural shapes and local landscapes. But Oak Park is where his architecture begins and where you can see the greatest number of his buildings in the world.
“Wright built this house as a young man for his wife and children,” explains George, walking me inside, “but already it has elements of his Prairie style.” We wander around a house that’s astonishing for 1889. Outside it’s clad in wooden shingles like some prairie cabin, but inside it’s a modern home – open-plan living rooms, wraparound windows, geometric furniture and a fitted kitchen. Clearly it’s been devised for rational, comfortable family living: a new style for a new way of life, in a country that felt young.
At the exit, George hands me an audio guide to the area. I stroll the elegant avenues, spotting Wright houses among handsome mansions where children play on lawns and rocking chairs wait on porches. There are 29 Wrights here. But his Oak Park idyll ended badly. On East Avenue is the Edwin Cheney House, a bungalow he built for a friend while falling in love with the friend’s wife. The scandal led Wright to flee in 1909 – with his lover Mamah – to a remote part of the prairie 200 miles west, where his family had farms. There on a hill he built a second dream home, called Taliesin or “shining brow”. And that’s where the Wright Trail leads.
I clatter into Chicago on the famous elevated railway and get out near Michigan Avenue. The concrete canyons of America’s second city rise 40 storeys overhead. It’s a different vision of architecture: steel, glass, corporate, thrusting. I spot a row of giant letters spelling TRUMP on a mirrored high-rise. This is where the skyscraper was invented, along with the elevator, and a good way to see it all is on a Chicago Architecture Foundation boat tour of the Chicago River. This starts at the Wylie Tower of 1913, all faux-Renaissance curlicues, runs through the sleek blocks of the financial district, and ends with the Willis Tower of 1974, America’s tallest building at 110 floors.
Closer to Wright’s era is my hotel, the Palmer House of 1873. Walking up the grand stair you sense the opulence and optimism of those days, when Chicago boasted the world’s biggest meatyards, busiest railway and largest post office, when it was the boomtown gateway to the American West. That’s what paid for the architecture. And this is where the new rich came – to the chandeliered bar with its marble columns and frescoed ceiling, and the ballroom with its velvet swags and glittering mirrors. This was America’s gilded age. Next morning I set out for the Wright Trail, in a hire car along the dazzling shore of Lake Michigan. Lake Shore Drive has marinas on one side and glittering condos on the other. I pause at the Emil Bach House in Rogers Park, a 1915 Wright place where you can stay. It’s a fine art deco villa with glimpses of the lake from its garden. Then I take the Interstate highway north to Racine, where Wright designed a blueprint for industry: the Johnson Wax company’s headquarters. “The finest office building in the world,” was how he saw it, “as inspiring a place to work in as any cathedral ever was to worship in.” And even today, it is visionary. I walk past fountains into a lofty openplan workspace where 50 tapering columns like lily stems support a vast glass ceiling for light. It’s furnished with ergonomic steel desks and was one of the first US buildings to be air-conditioned. Back in 1939 Wright was setting standards for working conditions that have hardly been bettered today: and it’s still used by 300 lucky office staff.
But most of the industry has gone from Racine, and I drive away through backstreets of sagging clapboard homes and rusty cars. The glory days are over and last November Wisconsin swung from Democrat to Republican, hoping for something better.
Next stop is Milwaukee, where Wright built a row of kit buildings that he hoped to mass-produce across the country. “Welcome to the American System-Built Houses,” smiles Mike Lilek, trustee of the Wright In Wisconsin charity. We enter an Oak Park-like villa, built in miniature from reproducible parts. “Mr Wright thought ordinary people should be able to have an architect home,” says Mike. “And he wanted to design something fiercely American, something you could say, ‘this is ours’.” He grins. “Sixty per cent of the people I show around say, ‘I could live here, have you got the plans?’” I thank Mike
Essentials
Jonathan Lorie travelled as a guest of Choose Chicago (choosechicago. com), Travel Wisconsin (travelwisconsin. com) and Aer Lingus (0333 004 5000; aerlingus. com).
Aer Lingus flies to Chicago twice daily from £280 each way via Dublin, where speedy Immigration Pre-clearance facilities are available.
Palmer House Hilton Hotel, 17 East Monroe Street, Chicago, has double rooms from $169 (£130) (palmerhouse hiltonhotel. com). To read the full review see telegraph.co.uk/ tt-palmerchicago