Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) was perhaps America's best-known architect. Considered a genius by many, a crank by some, he brought a style to commercial and especially residential architecture unlike anything the world had yet seen. There is no question that he was bold and innovative. Who else could have designed a building that was to stand literally a mile high?
Wright's fingerprints can be found all over the United States, from Fallingwater, the home protruding starkly over Bear Run which he built for department store magnate Edgar J. Kaufmann in western Pennsylvania, to a number of unusually-styled homes in downtown Los Angeles to the striking round Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Wauwautosa, Wisconsin to the Guggenheim Museum in New York. During his life he designed nearly a thousand buildings of which about 500 were completed.
His first architectural job after graduating from the University of Wisconsin was with J. Lyman Silsbee in Chicago, but a year later he went to work for the prestigious firm of Adler and Sullivan, eventually working his way up to chief draftsman. He and his boss, architect Louis Sullivan, had their disagreements, chief among them being the work Wright was doing for other people on the side. Sullivan eventually fired him, and Wright set up shop in the wealthy suburb of Oak Park in 1889, constructing a home and eventually a separate studio.
Over the next twenty years, Wright became extremely busy. In Oak Park alone there are more than two dozen examples of the Prairie School architecture which he founded, including the Gale and Heurtley Houses. During this period, Wright also designed the Unity Temple and the Robie House. (The latter, perhaps Wright's most famous Prairie School house, is not in Oak Park. It lies several miles to the southeast, on the grounds of the University of Chicago.)
The Wright Home and Studio are open for tours, which are given every twenty minutes on the weekends and three times a day during the week. Tours last between forty-five minutes and an hour and include views of the Wrights' living quarters as well as the studio with its innovative drafting and presentation rooms. You'll also want to wander around Forest and Chicago Avenues where you will see some of Wright's Prairie Style homes.
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