Frank Lloyd Wright is the gift that keeps on giving. The architect has been dead for 67 years, though you’d hardly know it based on the ubiquity of his work. Since late year, the University of Minnesota Press and Yale University Press have published new books about individual houses by this master.
Wright remains relevant because his work was really that good. The best of his designs are timeless, touching on architecture’s rich history while pointing to future possibilities.
Despite the unfortunate loss of some Wright-designed structures, there remain more than 400 extant buildings across 35 states (and several sites in Japan). While the majority are privately owned and not available for public visits, most are on public streets that enable discrete viewing. And many of the more significant works can be toured.
In fact, there’s a Wright-focused industry that is larger than any other surrounding an American architect. And Chicago is its epicenter. According to Thomas A. Heinz’s 2005 book, “Frank Lloyd Wright Field Guide,” there are more than three dozen of these sites in just Oak Park and River Forest.
Unity Temple in Oak Park, completed in 1908, remains a revelation. Wright’s articulation of concrete, plaster and wood trim that define this sublime space prefigures the Dutch de Stijl movement by more than a decade. I recently revisited the complex, and the main space remains one of the most stunning rooms in the world. I first encountered the space in person in 1983 while an undergraduate architecture student. We had been shown the building in architectural history class and knew something of its spatial drama, but there was still no proper introduction for the power of the space itself.
More than four decades on, it’s actually more powerful — and subtle — due to a masterful renovation completed almost a decade ago by preservation architect Gunny Harboe. And Unity Temple remains home to an active Unitarian congregation — one that shares the property daily through guided and self-guided tours — while maintaining the structure in a manner appropriate to its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
There are at least two dozen nonprofit organizations involved in the Wright industry, with many of them supporting one or more structures that are available for public visits. But some still privately held properties can be seen as well. Organized by the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust each May, the annual Wright Plus tour in Oak Park grants access to a few of these private homes. The homes vary each year, and the cost is not insignificant. This year’s event had several different price points for admission, with the standard tour running $135 and more premium packages available for $600, $1,375 or $2,675.
To the north, the Wright-designed S.C. Johnson Administrative Complex in Racine, Wisconsin, still serves as the company’s headquarters. Tours are regularly available — for free — although some portions of the complex can be seen only on weekends. Reservations are required to see the low-slung windowless red brick headquarters building completed in 1939 and the 15-story Research Tower of 1950.
A notable project from the last decade of Wright’s career is the Unitarian Meeting House in Madison, Wisconsin. The congregation is celebrating the building’s 75th anniversary June 5 to 7 with special tours that weekend.
Wright might have been the ultimate reality TV star if he had been born a century or so later. The early phase of his career ended in 1909 when he fled Oak Park and his family with his mistress, a client named Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Tragedy was added to scandal in 1914 when Borthwick was murdered, along with six others, by a domestic servant who locked the windows and doors at Wisconsin’s Taliesin, set the structure on fire and axed the occupants as they tried to escape.
And Wright was not a model employer. Wright’s earliest studios in Chicago and Oak Park produced a number of significant architects, including Marion Mahony, William Drummond, Barry Byrne and Walter Burley Griffin. But in the last three decades of his life, Wright created a modern feudal society around himself, in which his tuition-paying “apprentices” provided all sorts of personal tasks for Wright and his wife under the guise of instruction. This arrangement was at odds with the architect’s frequent espousals of “democracy,” which seemed to be awfully malleable to whatever was most personally convenient.
There are hundreds of books devoted to Wright and his work — almost certainly more than about any other architect. Two new ones continue this remarkable legacy.
The Robie House has always been seen as the crowning achievement of Wright’s Prairie period, which concluded when the architect scandalously decamped for Europe with Borthwick in 1909. “Robie House: A Frank Lloyd Wright Masterpiece” by writer Patrick F. Cannon, with photographs by James Caulfield, is a modestly scaled coffee table book, but its concise text covers many aspects of the house from design to construction to the preservation efforts necessary to save the building from destruction several times to its most recent restoration.
“Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bogk House: A Bold Experiment” is unusual in that it documents a Milwaukee home that is still in private hands and seldom, if ever, available for visits. Built from 1916 to 1917, it’s decidedly post-Prairie and was designed not long after the catastrophic fire and murders at Taliesin in 1914. Architectural historians Anthony Alofsin and Richard L. Cleary situate the house within this previously somewhat underexplored period in Wright’s career. One interesting strand that ties these two houses — and books — together is the involvement of George Mann Niedecken, a Milwaukee interior designer who collaborated with Wright on both projects.
Surprisingly, the unique spatial qualities that originally made Wright’s work well known have seldom been explored by other architects. Sure, the open plan with a central fireplace as a spatial anchor can be found in countless homes built over the past century, but the complex laying of spaces with a literal or implied extension into the landscape remains less ubiquitous.
But Wright’s continued relevance demonstrates the power of good architecture. These are not buildings that are completely understandable on a single tour. Repeated visits will yield new observations and interpretations. And in Chicago, its suburbs and southern Wisconsin, we have so many of these structures readily available to us.
Edward Keegan writes, broadcasts and teaches on architectural subjects. Keegan’s biweekly architecture column is supported by a grant from former Tribune critic Blair Kamin, as administered by the not-for-profit Journalism Funding Partners. The Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content.
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