Día De Los Muertos

I've been traveling and writing about those travels in this blog for about 13-1/2 years now. Some of the things that I've written about have taken place over minutes while others have taken several days stitched together by a common thread. In the case of one post, I actually wrote about something that didn't even actually happen, if that makes sense. 

In the last few years (let's say dating back to late 2022), we've traveled to some destinations to experience a unique, place-specific celebration that has occurred over days or weeks (although we have never been there - wherever "there" is - for the entirety of the weeks-long celebration). In December of 2022, we spent a week touring through the various Christmas markets in and around Vienna, Austria. We followed that experience up about 15 months later by participating in Lunar New Year celebrations in Singapore. Then we made a sakura pilgrimage to Tokyo to see the annual cherry blossoms flower in that city in 2025.

This year, it was time to take in the Día de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, celebrations in Mexico. We picked Mexico City for our participation in that annual ritual. We figured if we are going to spend time in Mexico for this event, why not go big! Mexico City was awesome by the way.

Marigolds. All over the City for Día de los Muertos.

I think a lot of people who are aware of the Día de los Muertos but aren't really cognizant of the history and the details of the celebration think that the Day of the Dead celebration is sort of an extended or glorified halloween. Not so. It goes way deeper than that. It's a blending together of indigenous Central American rituals that date from before the time of Christ and Spanish colonial celebrations centered around All Saints Day and All Souls Day.

The Nahua peoples in Central America (for simplicity's sake think Aztecs here, although that's really dumbing down the situation to a sort of unacceptable level) celebrated their dead each August (although they clearly wouldn't call the time of year by that Roman-named month) as part of their belief in a life cycle which included both life on this planet and an afterlife that included a final resting place called Mictlán. To honor their dead each year, the Nahua offered food and other supplies for the dead to reach Mictlán.

When the Spanish conquered present day Mexico (and many other places in the New World), they brought with them a celebration on November 1 and 2 which was a mixture of Roman Catholic and pagan rituals. These early November celebrations (All Saints' Day / All Souls' Day) included families leaving bread and wine along with flowers and candles on the graves of their ancestors 

Today's celebration centers around a belief that at the stroke of midnight on the October 31 / November 1 transition, the gates of heaven open and allow deceased children to re-join their families for 24 hours. A day later, the same thing happens for adults who have passed on. The celebration permeates life in many ways during celebration. We wanted to take in as much as possible to understand this ritual and holiday a little deeper.

Pan de Muerto. Traditional seasonal bread pastry, typically orange flavored. Yum!!!!

Three last things before I get to what we did while in Mexico City.

First, if all this sounds very much like the Pixar animated movie Coco, it should. That movie is about this celebration.

Second, I'm not sure why it's called DAY of the Dead. I mean it's clearly at least two days in length and you could even make a case for the start of the festivities happening late in the day on October 31 and the city gearing up for the two days honoring the deceased in the week or so before then. Maybe it's a translation thing. Or maybe it's just grown over time from All Souls Day originally into something bigger.

Third, we heard this celebration referred to as both Día de los Muertos and Día de Muertos while we were in Mexico. I'm going with the longer one.

Alebrijes. Not really part of Día de los Muertos ancient history, but they are today.

I am sure that once upon a time, the celebration of Día de los Muertos was a lot simpler than it is today. Like most holidays, bits and pieces of things have been added to this event that were absent a long, long time ago. Some of this might be cynically chalked up to commercialism. As holidays develop, corporations need to sell more stuff to consumers to decorate their homes or places of work or whatever. 

But similar evolutions have happened with other holidays, right? For those of us living in a Christianity-focused society, I am sure you know that Santa Claus as a man in a red suit only dates to the 19th century and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was invented in 1939 by the Montgomery Ward department store. Or maybe you didn't know that. But I am sure most of us can remember a time when there was no Elf on the Shelf. Traditions are added to holidays in the most random ways.

For the first-time Día de los Muertos visitor to Mexico's capital city, there's a lot to take in and understand. Some of the images associated with the celebration date back centuries and some are pretty much brand new. I'll try to unpack what we saw over the six days we were in town. And I'll try to keep it brief. Try being the operative word.

What is there to take in for Día de los Muertos?

So first of all, you are going to see a ton of skulls. In stores, on signs, in parades or even as part of a giant public art project featuring identically-sized skulls (let's say four feet or maybe a bit more high) painted differently by various different artists and scattered around the entire city. Other than a mural or two on some of the tunnel walls near the airport, large painted skulls were the first thing that got us excited for Día de los Muertos. They were the first tangible things that screamed Day of the Dead on our trip to our hotel that first day.  We had read ahead of time that sugar skulls were also a thing; we didn't see a single one. 

We also managed to see a ton of orange flowers when we were being driven into town from the airport and elsewhere around town all week. They are marigolds and they have a very specific role in Día de los Muertos. These flowers with their bright colors and strong scent are supposed to show the way for the dead returning to their families during the two day celebration. I don't know how big the marigold industry's business is around this time of year but I have to believe both the supply and demand for these flowers is significant. They were everywhere.

One of the other ancient Day of the Dead traditions you will see all over town is bakeries and restaurants selling pan de muerte, a simple mounded bread typically flavored with orange (although there are plenty of other options) and decorated with abstract bone shapes. These treats originated in Europe before the Spaniards landed in the new world. They were traditionally prepared for All Saints' and All Souls' Day and left on the graves of deceased loved ones. 

The world's largest (105 feet high) Catrina in the Zocolo, Mexico City.

Let's get back to skulls, shall we? You might, in fact, see many, many entire skeletons during the Day of the Dead festivities but for sure you are going to see one or two (or many more) whole skeletons outfitted in long, flowing dresses and maybe with long hair or a hat. These are the Catrinas, a creation born of political satire cartoons in the early 20th century which were then popularized and transformed into something different in part by famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. 

Along with Catrina statues all over Mexico City (and elsewhere in the country, I'm sure), you might also find papier mache sculptures of fantastic imaginary beasts. These sculptures are called alibrijes and are sometimes (including in the movie Coco) misrepresented as spirit guides helping the deceased navigate the afterlife. While there are spirit guides in Día de los Muertos mythology, these guides are typically dogs or monarch butterflies. Alibrijes? Folk art creations from the early 20th century popularized in part by Diego Rivera (again) and his (sometimes) wife, the famous Frida Kahlo.

Finally before we get closer to what this post is really about, you might see brightly-colored paper cutouts depicting pictures or words hanging overhead in various places during the Day of the Dead week. These creations are called papel picardo and have origins in pre-Columbian times when Nahua shamans used to carve symbols and deities into paper made from the bark of trees or the fibers of plants. When the Spanish arrived in what is now Mexico, they brought paper from China with them which proved to be a whole lot easier to carve and cut than tree bark and plant fibers.

Papel picado hanging in the church in Mixquic.

So...papel picado, pan de muerte and marigolds are more legit than Catrinas, alibrijes and (maybe) sugar skulls. Got all that? It's a lot, I know.

And then there's the Day of the Dead Parade, which is probably the biggest single public event of the holiday. This ancient tradition dates all the way back to 2016. Surprised at that? Me too. This seems like a decades old event a la the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (since 1924 in case you wondered). The origin is even weirder: it was invented in the James Bond Spectre movie.

Seriously. There is a Día de los Muertos parade in a scene in the movie and Mexico City just copied it. The movie was released in 2015. The next year, a parade was added to the official celebration in Mexico City.

The parade was the single largest Día de los Muertos event in downtown Mexico City that we planned our time around. We placed a huge priority on this event, devoting pretty much an entire day to getting to the parade route early; getting our faces painted in event-appropriate fashion; checking out the floats and participants in their respective staging areas; and then staking out a spot a couple of hours early and refusing to eat or drink so we wouldn't need a bathroom break and be forced to abandon our spot. The stools we bought for a whole $8 USD each helped a lot with the two hour wait.

I'm not a huge parades guy but admittedly, over the past few years, I've spent a good amount time being on the side of the route at three of the most famous parades in North America. But this parade was probably the best. It was mostly absent of civic and public organizations like the Shriners and endless fire department and police union groups (I'm looking at you, New York and Calgary) and more populated with groups representing Mexico's past and present through everything from indigenous peoples groups to taco stands. 

It was also way more colorful and focused than the other two parades I've attended recently. The color comes from the Mexican culture I think and the focus was on the event at hand. While not everything was Day of the Dead focused, if a group had a theme other than themselves, it was Día de los Muertos-based. I'm going to close this section of this post (because I really need to get to the point of the post) with a few parade pics and just a note that the woman who painted our faces did (in our opinion) the best job of any of the face painters we saw. We were shocked that it cost us the insanely low price of about $15 US for both faces and she was about equally shocked that we opted to tip beyond that amount.

So now let's get to the point. Of this post and of Día de los Muertos.

The point of this whole thing is for families to remember their dead and honor their ancestors. Some people do this by setting up temporary altars in their homes with images of their loved ones and objects dear to their relatives who have passed on and maybe some of their favorite foods. These altars, called ofrendas, are set up and torn down much like folks in the United States put up and remove their Christmas trees. And the way the timing was explained to us sounds EXACTLY like Christmas tree traditions here at home. Some put them up way early and leave them up for some time after the holiday and some just do it last minute and make it gone right after the holiday is over.

But some people in Mexico don't do this at home. They do this at the very place where their ancestors' Earthly remains are now, meaning at the cemetery. So to make our Día de los Muertos pilgrimage as authentic and comprehensive as possible, we went to a cemetery. I mean it's not like we can knock on someone's door and enter their home right? What other option did we have?

I'm totally serious here. On the night of November 1, we boarded a bus at about 7 p.m. in downtown Mexico City and after what seemed like an interminable wait (but which was really probably about 45 minutes), we set off on a bus ride to the Panteón Xilotepec cemetery, which is apparently the second largest cemetery in Mexico City. Our agenda for the night? Spend a bit more than an hour wandering around the cemetery seeing how families had decorated the graves of their loved ones and if they were actually at the cemetery, open a little window into how people celebrate the Day of the Dead.

Remembrance of mom and dad. Panteón Xilotepec cemetery.

This seems voyeuristic, right? Intrusive? Believe me, we had those thoughts. Should we really be doing this? Should we be effectively trespassing on a emotional and intimate and above all private event in a family's (or many, many families') life? Whether it was mourning or celebrating or both or something entirely different, what right did a bunch of tourists from whatever spot of the globe they happened to have traveled from have to stand around and gawk at a private moment in the lives of complete strangers? It's a good question and the answers might not be the same for all of us.

We had guidelines. Stay together. No splitting up or wandering off alone. Follow the guide and we are going to stay on the main path of the cemetery. Be respectful at all times. And despite the fact that it was November 1 which is the date when the souls of children return to their families, we would not be entering the children's section of the cemetery. 

That whole stick to the main path rule was important. The Panteón Xilotepec cemetery has a wide main path fronted by many, many gravesites and crypts. But there are far more which do not border the main path, which require stepping between the maze of resting places to get to. Sticking to the path would prevent our group of gawking tourists to some extent from intruding on the privacy of most of the people who had chosen to spend time with their ancestors that night. Would we be able to see candles or lights taken to the cemetery and hear music and maybe singing and talking? Sure, we would. But we we wouldn't be right there with the families. Just the ones on the main path.

And that rule worked great until it didn't have to.

Gravesites at Panteón Xilotepec. Simple and maybe a bit more deluxe decorations.

There ended up being a lot about this experience that I didn't expect. 

I didn't expect the cemetery to be full of crypts the way it was. I expected a field of gravestones densely packed next to one another and I guess at some point when you stray far enough from the main walkway (and we DID stray from the main walkway), the cemetery becomes what I expected but I was a little taken aback by the number of very large enclosed and covered crypts standing next to each other along the main route through the cemetery. There is some serious money invested in building structures to house the dead's remains. 

Why I am surprised by this fact is a little hard for me to even understand. I mean we visited a country specifically to see how they celebrate their ancestors in one of the biggest holidays of the entire year and I'm surprised that people are prioritizing spending money on the very thing that drives the entire holiday? I should really have thought more about this issue. Nonetheless, whether I expected it or not, the architecture of the cemetery was pretty impressive.

And while this was not true of every grave in the cemetery, some serious effort was expended to make some of the crypts and gravesites as dressed up as possible. Candles. Lights. Music. Skulls (not actually real human skulls). Photographs. Papel picado garlands. Tons and tons and tons of marigolds or marigold petals (the petals were seriously impressive because someone somewhere separated those petals meticulously from the plants). This is completely serious business. If I was impressed with the architecture in the cemetery, I was equally struck by the amount of effort made by those still alive to make the graves of their dead look as dressed for the occasion as possible.

One of the things that struck me while I was walking through the cemetery was the very fact that it would be about impossible for me to do what the folks at various gravesites inside Panteón Xilotepec were doing. Notwithstanding the fact that this celebration is not part of my heritage as a person of English descent who emigrated to the United States as a child, if I wanted to celebrate my ancestors in quite this way (meaning in the spot where they were buried), it would not be easy for me to do this because I don't have any ancestors buried in the country where I currently live. 

In a sense, I envied the people in the cemetery. I do value my ancestors and while it may seem strange to some for me to believe in this, I do believe there is an afterlife and that the souls of my past family are somewhere out there. Jealousy isn't the right word but as I walked past others remembering their dead in a way I never have, I definitely feel like I was missing something. Being with the mortal remains of your ancestors one or two days a year for the whole day or night seems like an incredible way to honor their lives and their spirits. It was humbling to be in their presence and despite the already identified potentially voyeuristic nature of our night at Panteón Xilotepec, I'm glad I did this. There is real meaning in this ritual for me. 

To be clear, not all Mexicans celebrate in the way we saw people doing in the cemetery. As I've already stated, some celebrate in the privacy of their own homes. But some don't do this on Día de los Muertos at all. I asked one of the employees at our hotel if he would mind telling me if he celebrated the Day of the Dead and he said his family didn't. They had a different way of honoring their ancestors at a different time of year. Día de los Muertos is a national holiday in Mexico but not everyone participates, which is cool too.

Then we did something we didn't expect to do. We strayed off the main path.

So before you get sinister ideas about a busload of tourists of various nationalities running riot through a Mexico City cemetery on one of the most sacred nights of the year, it wasn't anything like that. 

About 40 minutes into our walk around Panteón Xilotepec, a woman approached our guide and asked if she could escort our group to a grave where a local family was remembering what amounted to the patriarch of the family still on this Earth. She thought it would help our understanding of the night to hear from a family celebrating on that very day.

Do we want to do that? You bet we do.

She took us off the main path, showed us the crypt where her own parents were buried (she was there alone that night and her parents' grave is the first photograph from the cemetery above) and went two plots or so further into the cemetery and introduced us to a whole family of maybe 10 or so celebrating the life of their father, grandfather or great-grandfather. 

One of the grandchildren of Evelio Espinosa Vidal (survived by eight children, 23 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren and counting, I suppose maybe) talked to us about how important it was for the family to be there to honor their ancestor on that night who had been gone these past three years. They had been there since the early morning and (along with maybe a bottle of tequila or two) planned to be there late that night just talking about their grandfather and remembering him. They planned to do the exact same thing the very next day.

It is easy to use the word intimate to describe an experience walking through a Mexican cemetery at night during this celebration and be spot on to a certain extent without ever engaging anyone there to remember their dead. But to actually meet and talk with and spend a few minutes with a family fully invested and engaged in this night was just incredible and over the top on the intimacy scale. The connection we felt by one stranger's act just made this night for us. 

We've had special interactions with random people not connected with the tourism industry all over this planet of ours. November 1, 2026 ranks up there with the best of those encounters. What a gesture by this family to invite us into their personal celebration for just five minutes. So special and incredibly generous. This was a stunning development in our night in absolutely the best way.

Our Día de los Muertos experience didn't stop that night of November 1. We'd have one more night to go. But this post stops here because it never got better on this trip. This act and those five minutes with the family of Evelio Espinosa Vidal are the point of the Day of the Dead. There is no way this experience could have been better. Muchos gracias to the Vidal family for letting us in. We'll never forget. 

That story is the point of this post.

The grave of Evelio Espinosa Vidal. 

Safe Travels

One of the travel decisions we made late last year was that 2026 was probably the right time for us to go down to Mexico in late October and early November to spend a few days in Mexico City experiencing the famous Día de los Muertos (or Day of the Dead) festivities. We'd made recent trips to Singapore for Lunar New Year and Japan for cherry blossom season and Austria to visit Christmas markets so Mexico's Day of the Dead seemed like a logical extension of our recent experiences at world famous seasonal events. 

Plus, it has been about 10 years since we were last in Mexico and that's just probably too long for us to be absent from that country.

We booked early, figuring the city would be packed with people for the celebration, and I think that was the right call, particularly because unbeknownst to us, the Mexican Grand Prix was scheduled for the same exact same time as Día de los Muertos and in 2026 they were both scheduled for a weekend. We got the hotel and then the flight and then started getting excited. So we told people. Friends. Family. Co-workers.

The reaction? Lots of negativity. Or was it fear?

Ballooning near the old city of Teotihuacan. Dangerous? Mmm...not really.

"Is it safe?" 

Mexico City? Like the biggest city in North America? Why would it not be safe? 

"What about the drug cartels?" 

In Mexico City? Really? Why would there be a large scale drug cartel presence all over a city drawing masses of international visitors to two world-famous events in the same weekend? The same city that hosted part of the FIFA World Cup this past summer. 

We heard concerns from one of our co-workers who had just returned from a trip in Cancun (or somewhere around there) about personal safety in Mexico City even though she felt comfortable in Cancun(ish) and even though she had never been to Mexico City. A friend of mine told me "I would never go there" and my own mother (and please be clear, I'm not picking on my mom here) said "I wish you wouldn't go." 

That’s fine. I don’t need you guys to come with me. Heck, I wasn't even asking. But what’s the big fuss? It’s mostly a stereotype, right? All Mexican cities are dangerous? Is it the skeletons on Día de los Muertos that scare people? Surely not. I mean skeletons don't sell drugs or carry guns, right?

Maybe I am benefitting a bit from the fact that I travel a lot to places that are not in the United States or Western Europe (that’s sort of the point of this blog…) but Mexico City is far from the most dangerous place we’ve visited. We thought it would be pretty much non-dangerous.

The Aztec Stone of the Sun, Museo Nacional de Antropologia. Dangerous? Yes, for those sacrificed on it.

So, we are back. We survived Mexico City!

We walked the streets and the parks of Mexico City pretty much every day. We walked in the daylight but we also stayed out late beyond dark five of the six nights we were in the city, including two nights after midnight. And yes, we were in a park after sunset. Scandalous!!!

We attended a parade packed with people in downtown Mexico City and watched a Lucha Libre match in a large arena (also packed with people) in a different part of the city. The crowd at the Lucha Libre match emptied out of the arena all together after the show and filled the sidewalks around the arena after the lights inside the arena went up. How did we manage to escape???

We took two day trips to cemeteries on the outskirts of the city. One at night, but also one during the day where we stayed until after sunset and had to walk about a mile on the side of the road to get back to our bus. That walk to the bus followed a visit to a cemetery so filled with people that it could have very easily have been the most packed into a crowd I've been since I used to hang out in dive bars on weekends in graduate school. Craziness!!!

Cigarettes sold by the single cigarette on the streets of Mexico City. Dangerous? Yeah, definitely.

Do you know how much danger we found or saw or heard about in Mexico City? 

None. That's how much. 

No drug cartels. No shootings. No stabbings. No pickpocketing. No scamming. Not on the streets. Not in the parks. Not in the cemeteries. Not during the day. Not at night. Not with crowds. Not in stores. Nowhere. Nothing. Nada. No crime. No danger. Zero.

Our entire experience in Mexico City was incredible. The culture is so rich and the people are so engaged and welcoming. The food is just awesome for very, very little money whether it's sold on the street and eaten standing up or on plastic stools or in actual buildings with permanent or close to it tables and chairs or stools. And the stuff we put on our agenda (blog posts to follow) was worth spending six nights in the city and had us regretting that we didn't stay longer.

Why do we warn people about heading to places we've never been to? And by "we" here, I really mean other people. There was legitimately a good amount of concern in conversations with co-workers and friends and family about this trip to Mexico. And it wasn't concern from us, the people who were actually going to visit. It was from people who had never been there. Who had read something or heard something or invented some opinion about the place without ever setting foot there.

Why? How? They can't possibly know what it's like in Mexico City because they have never been there and they won't likely ever go. So why tell us it's dangerous?

Mezcal tasting. Dangerous? Depends on how much you drink, I guess. The large glass is water.

Based on our experience this year, Mexico City is likely a top five North American City for me. And maybe top three. I mean it's not New York City and Los Angeles likely nudges it out for second but I think third place is likely Mexico City. Maybe it's the fact that I just arrived home from there talking as I write this paragraph but what's the competition here? Chicago? San Jose, Costa Rica? Rapid City, South Dakota? Santa Fe? I love Santa Fe but it's more of a big town than a city. 

And OK, to be completely forthcoming here about Mexico City, there was one danger we needed to pay attention to when we were walking around the city: the sidewalks.

I'm serious. The sidewalks in that city are a complete hazard. Almost every old tree has cracked and uplifted the concrete with their roots leaving the walking surface uneven at best and with large crevices and broken pieces of concrete representing significant tripping hazards at worst. Check out the picture below. This is not an unusual condition in the center of Mexico City. The cracking is so severe on that piece of sidewalk that it has even cracked a planter in two.

But that's not all with the sidewalks. You can easily find loose gratings and metal hatches and there should be no surprise if you happen to need to step down six inches or so into an intentional or unintentional depressed area in your walking path. Pay attention. Because that need to step down might just be the start of a fall if you are not watching where you are going. We saw some people rolling rollaboard suitcases down a sidewalk in some part of the city and what they were doing with those wheels over the sidewalk didn't make any sense. Just pick it up!

So I guess maybe I'm wrong after all that. Maybe Mexico City is dangerous. Maybe all those people that warned us to be safe while traveling were right. Maybe they were just talking about the sidewalks. Can't wait for the return trip. We won't get tripped up next time.

And just for the record, the only places we have come close to being victims of crime in all the places we have been were Rome, where I almost got pickpocketed, and Paris, where some dude tried to scam us into buying a train ticket for him. Mexico City? Dangerous? Hah! Well, other than the sidewalks.

The Wright Stuff

There was a time not too long ago when pretty much my entire travel mission in life was centered around visiting famous works of architecture. And by architecture, of course, I mostly mean modern architecture (with and without a capital M). Let's say 1870s and later, shall we? Not everything I visited was from that period but it was heavy 1870s to 21st century. Heavy. 

And admittedly, there may have been a little (or a lot) of beer travel in there too but pretty much it was all architecture. I was a bit obsessed, in love with the profession I chose way back when I was a child without any concept of what being an architect might actually mean. I chose well.

I know I've detailed this story in at least one other post on this blog but the first architecture-focused trip I ever took was during my spring break in my last year of graduate school. And it was not really intended to be that way. I had the opportunity to travel on a free plane ticket gifted to me by my parents and decided to go to Los Angeles to spend a week seeing whatever LA had to offer with my unemployed friend as my personal tour guide.

But then disaster struck (for me). Between the time I booked the ticket and the time I boarded the plane headed to LAX, she got a job and could no longer spend time with me. So I pivoted, bought a book about Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture in California and decided to be an architecture tourist. It was one of the best solo trips I've ever taken in my life.

Ginkgo tree leaves. Wright's favorite tree was the ginkgo.

Maybe a couple of words about Frank Lloyd Wright are in order.

For most architects in the United States, Wright is probably the greatest American architect in the history of this country. He moved architecture in our country forward from traditional space to modern space and he brought architecture to more people in the USA through the number of his works and the stature of just himself. If anyone out there who's an architect disputes that greatest American architect claim, they are either lying to themselves or they are confusing "greatest" with "favorite". There is a difference. 

In a complete non sequitur comment, if you need any more proof of Wright's greatness, how many architects out there have songs written about them by any artist that's really any good? Wright does. "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" closed side one on Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water album.

For the record, my favorite Amercian architect of all time is Ray Hood. But in terms of importance, Wright blows Hood away. It's not even close. In fact, for me, there's no other American architect that can hold a candle to Wright. 

Also for the record, Bridge Over Troubled Water is an incredible album. Not S&G's best in my opinion (I still prefer Bookends) but "Cecilia", "Baby Driver", "The Boxer" and the supremely awsome "The Only Living Boy In New York"...come on. And that's not even mentioning the title song. But I digress. This is about Wright.

Looking up at the laylight and lighting fixtures in the main space at Unity Temple.

My personal adoration of Frank Lloyd Wright started on that 1993 California trip. The very first Wright building I ever visited was the Freeman House in Hollywood and when I walked into the main room of that house with the missing corners, I was blown away. Everything they had taught us in school about how Wright contained and released space through his designs hit home all at once. It was absolutely incredible.

Over the next few years after that first encounter, I visited a lot of Wright buildings. Iowa, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, Virginia, Arizona, Wisconsin again. I went everywhere I could to see Wright buildings that were and were not open to the public. It helps that there are hundreds of buildings by Wright out there.

One of the best places to see Wright buildings is in the town of Oak Park, just a few miles west of Chicago. It's where Wright opened his first office and secured many of his early commissions, whether they be residential projects through social connections or commissions just a bit or a lot larger. Walk around town and you can see evidence of Wright's work right on the streets of the town. 

I visited Oak Park in 1995 on an architectural pilgrimage through the upper midwest that was Wright heavy. I've been to Chicago a number of time since 1995 but have never gone back to Oak Park. I figured a Labor Day weekend trip to see the brand new Obama Presidential Center might be an opportunity for a day in Oak Park to see if I was still as impressed with Wright's early work as I was 31 years ago.

Stork panels outside the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio.

My memories of that 1995 Oak Park trip have for the most part faded away completely. I have a few photos from the five Wright buildings I visited that day either in Oak Park or in nearby River Forest and I remember being absolutely stunned by the children's playroom in Wright's own home. But I don't remember much about visiting Wright's major public commission in Oak Park, the Unity Temple. I figured a refresher visit to the Wright Home and Studio and Unity Temple would (hopefully) prove out my love for Wright and keep me going for a few more years before I needed another Wright pilgrimage. 

We booked a tour of the Home and Studio (there's no other way to visit the interior) and signed up for the "in depth" tour of Unity Temple. I figured if we are going all that way and don't have anything else filling our Saturday morning, we may as well do Unity Temple right, particularly because I don't remember anything about the last time I was there. For what it's worth, visiting Unity Temple can be done on your own for free.

We started at Unity Temple, but I'm saving that for last. Let's start with Wright's house.

Wright moved into his home right after he got married in 1889. The original house (he added pieces and parts, including his entire studio in 1898, later on) was not a Wright design and it looks like it's not a Wright design. He used the home and later his studio as a base of operations in Oak Park until 1909. During that period, 125 of his designs were built. That's an astonishing number, even for a 20 year period. Wright was prolific. 

Wright was also a professional exaggerator (particularly of his own deeds) and a philanderer and overall just not a quality person when it came to interpersonal relationships. The reason why he left the Home and Studio was that he had an affair with a client's wife while touring Europe. Quality, right? Oh and exaggerator might just be simpler said as liar.

After Wright left his wife, the home was divided into apartments. Today, it is restored to the 1909 appearance. 

Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio. Oak Park, IL.

If the exterior of Wright's home is traditional, he set about changing the interior of the home to a decidedly non-traditional appearance immediately. He dispensed with the traditional Victorian approach to interior design which often created a different room experience in each space and made the palette of materials and colors identical from room to room. This may not seem like a big deal today but in the late 1800s, this would have been pretty revolutionary, particularly for an architect who was making a living doing this exact same thing in residences for people of means who might expect him to match the current prevailing trend.

Today, the interior of the Wright Home and Studio looks anything but avant garde or modern. There's a classical frieze in the entrance hall; the ceiling perimeters in the entrance and adjacent room are dentiled (those are the small blocks in a row in the first and second pictures below); and there is a swirling leafy pattern in the corners of the ceilings in the first living space that look very much like something Louis Sullivan would use in one of his buildings (Wright worked for Sullivan before establishing his own practice).

I can't remember any of these sorts of details being used in any Wright-designed building I have ever visited or seen in a book. And that's sort of the point. Over the years, Wright used his own house (and studio) as a sort of test lab of sorts, developing and trying out ideas that may or may not have been used in independent commissions he designed for others. So whether that experimentation was about details or expanding rooms or adding whole new chunks of spaces as addition, there are failed and successful efforts all over the building. I love the development of laylights as a lighting strategy and the shades as an alternative to curtains in the kids' bedroom that would never see the light of day in a Wright building ever again. Not everything worked; ain't that always the case? 

The highlight of our time this late summer in Wright's Home and Studio for me was still the children's playroom. It's a fairly simple space. If you ignore the sort of theater style theater seating at the entrance end of the room, it's a barrel vaulted space which is rectangular in plan with the vault springing from a point below adult head height. But it's perforated all over the place to admit an amazing quantity of light and the spatial quality is defined enough by the geometry while simultaneously disappearing as a solid mass to be something way more than just a barrel vault on a rectangular prism.

The side walls of the room are there but they are not there. They are defined by the walls adjacent the fireplace and the strong beam that serves as the spring point of the vault. But the wall below the beam is gone. It's just pushed out a few feet to make a bench or bay window space and the quantity and quality of light is just enormous in a very good way. More light enters the space from the laylight above (it looks like a standard skylight but what's on the other side of the curved, translucent panel is an above ceiling space that is illuminated by an actual skylight to the exterior) and through punched openings in the vault itself. 

How Wright does this is astonishing and simple at the same time. But back in the day when this room was first constructed, there may have been no other space like this ever built. It still blows me away 30 plus years later. 

The space is so small and it's difficult to photograph without going completely wide angle and distorting the geometry of the room but there are a couple of the best photographs below.

As impressive as the children's playroom was and is, this year Unity Temple was better. I can't remember the last time I just sat for a while and marveled at how complex a space was or is. I did that in Unity Temple on Labor Day weekend. This Wright guy was pretty amazing.

Unity Temple is a Unitarian meeting house on a tiny lot in Oak Park. The whole project was built on a shoestring budget on land which was heavily discounted by a member of the congregation. The building is packed onto the block and consists of two main volumes: a larger, streetside block containing the main space for church services on Sundays (the Temple) and a smaller volume at the rear for church functions (complete with serving kitchen) and administrative offices called the Unity House. The whole thing is made out of concrete, which apparently is a reflection of the budget (we were told Wright would have preferred brick).

The "in depth" tour of the building took us pretty much everywhere people can go on a regular basis inside the Temple, including into service and mechanical spaces but not (regrettably) into the laylight levels. There are signature Wright touches everywhere in the building, from the leaded glass that he was using in his residential designs at that point in his career to the stylized plants used as columns on the exterior of the building to entry into low-ceiling spaces before releasing you into the two main spaces in the Unity House and the Temple space itself to laylights used to distribute uniform diffuse light into spaces in the building that he was experimenting with in his own house at the time. There are also Wright-designed light fixtures and seating throughout the building. Again, not unusual for Wright. 

The stylized plants on the building, by the way, look suspiciously like the hollyhock decorations that Wright claimed to have invented especially for Aline Barnsdall in her Hollyhock House in Los Angeles which was designed and built about 20 years AFTER Unity Temple. Wright often stuck to his own version of the truth when it came to...well, just the truth in general.

And apparently, Wright's design for the pews in the building were rejected and the congregation used someone else's design. So ALL the seating is not Wright-designed. Can't imagine how that would have sat with Wright's ego.

The third photograph above shows the Unity House, with a signature Wright fireplace.

Frank Lloyd Wright fundamentally changed how architects in the United States (and the rest of world, I suppose) conceived of and contained space. Wright's architecture was about just that...space. Not rooms. Space. And space was not a thing to always be contained or defined in a singular way. Before Wright, buildings had rooms with walls and doors. With Wright, space was rarely contained or constrained or defined with six planes or something slightly more complicated. With Wright, the possibilities were greater. Unity Temple is fascinating this way.

Now, to be fair, there were some folks over in Europe messing about with this whole space vs. rooms thing at the same time Wright was starting to do his thing over in America so it's not like he was the only one with these ideas. And to be super fair to Wright, some of the folks in Europe were thinking about this idea because of Wright.

We were told on our tour that Unity Temple is more or less a perfect cube. I asked where the cube was. Not to be a smart aleck architect or anything. I genuinely wanted to know because exactly where the space starts and stops in the Temple is a matter of perspective that can constantly be changing. Is the edge of the space the edge of the balconies? Or the corner of the "columns" in the corners of the space? Surely, it's not the outside walls of the space (it wasn't)?

In the end, for me, it doesn't really matter where the almost cube is, although my bet is on the front of the balconies. The Temple space at Unity Temple is a rectangle in plan, maybe even a square. But it's really not, it's really a cross in plan. But then that cross also has a square (or almost square) within it. The space can be read on so many levels. More, in fact, that is articulated in this paragraph. But that's just an architect's perspective.

I am sure the first congregation of Unity Temple that walked into the space one Sunday to worship would not be thinking about space the way I've written about it above. But they must have been astonished by the character of the space. What Wright did in that space must have been mind-blowing. 

Basically, he designed a traditional space with four walls, a floor and a ceiling (bear with me here, I know I just wrote something that really contradicts this idea...) like a traditional box. Admittedly the ceiling is a grid of crossed beams with glazing to diffuse exterior light into the Temple but it can read as flat. Then he effectively tore off the roof, raised it up a few feet and filled the space between where the ceiling might have been and where he decided it should be. Effectively, he's supporting the ceiling / roof on nothing at all and allowing light to pour into the space from what seems like a continuous ribbon of glass around the entire building.

That's not what's actually going on (the structure is in the corners) but spatially, that's exactly what's going on. Who on Earth in that congregation would have ever seen anything like this before? The answer is probably "nobody" because it was absolutely brand new.

There's more to the Temple space than just space itself, of course. The design is super functional. The acoustics are near perfect, requiring no amplification for the speaker at the focus of the space and we were told there is no seat further than 45 feet from the podium. Honestly, if it didn't function well despite all the light and debate about where the corners or edges of the space are (by architects), it wouldn't be very successful at all. Wright was better than that. 

This trip for sure recharged my love for Frank Lloyd Wright. Other than the Guggenheim Museum in New York, I can't remember that last time I was in a Wright building. We stopped by a church he designed in Redding, California in 2018 but couldn't get into the building. How long before that? Maybe 10 years? More? Too long.

A couple of last notes. 

OK, so actually three last notes. The first one will make me sound old.

The last time I was inside and outside Unity Temple, I took 21 photographs. Back then, I was using slide film. I am sure I was super methodical about taking pictures to (1) make sure I didn't use all my film on pictures I didn't like; (2) minimize swapping out rolls of film; and (3) make sure I didn't run out of film. In the Home and Studio, I came away with just 8 pictures. This time? At least 100 pictures in each building. And all with something that fits in my pocket. I definitely appreciate the advances in photography technology over the years. I never would have wasted a slide on the shot immediately above. The sun is really in the wrong spot. But I love that picture.

Second, the cover photograph of this post is a concrete sprite from Wright's now demolished Midway Gardens project. Sprites pop up every now and then in Wright properties. This one is outside the Home and Studio.

Finally, over the fireplace in Wright's Home, there is an inscription reading "Truth Is Life". Look immediately above that inscription and you'll see that there is space above the fireplace where the chimney might ordinarily be. The space flows out of the fireplace nook, over the fireplace and into the corridor behind the fireplace. Except it doesn't. There's a mirror that makes it seem like it's that way. Whether the actual chimney flue splits and traverses upwards like it appears from the fireplace front I have no idea but the space above the fireplace is a trick. It's not truth. But then again, the truth was often a negotiable subject with Frank Lloyd Wright.