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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
