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Date: 1900
City: Chicago, Illinois
Category: Residential
Accessibility: Private
Designed in the same year as Wright’s seminal Bradley and Hickox houses, the Foster Cottage is less audacious in concept, and is more closely aligned with Wright’s buildings of the early 1890s. In place of the dynamic floor plans of its contemporaries, the Foster Cottage utilizes a square plan and wood siding similar to Wright’s earlier “bootleg” houses. The dramatic, outward flare of the ridges on the roof and dormers evokes…
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Date: 1907
Address: 345 S 7th Avenue, La Grange, IL
City: La Grange, Illinois
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
In contrast to Wright’s lavish design for the Avery Coonley house of the same year, the Stephen M. B. Hunt house is exceedingly modest in scale. Its square-shaped plan closely replicates that of Wright’s “A Fireproof House for $5,000,” which was published in the Ladies Home Journal in 1907. Wright wrote that the “Fireproof House” was “trimmed to the last ounce of the superfluous” and emphasized its practical…
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Date: 1902
Address: 301 E. Lawrence Ave., Springfield, IL 62703
City: Springfield, Illinois
Links: www.dana-thomas.org
Accessibility: Public
Category: Residential
Unified and harmonious, the Dana house stands as one of the most opulent expressions of Wright’s visionary design philosophy. Designed and constructed between 1902 and 1904, the house was Wright’s most elaborate residential commission to date. In contrast to Wright’s typical clients, who were middle class business men, Dana was an independently wealthy, progressive…
Date: 1901
City: Elmhurst, Illinois
Category: Utilitarian
Accessibility: Private
Restoration status: Demolished
Very little documentation of the Wilder Stable survives. Original drawings indicate that, on its first floor, the building featured a chicken coop, stables for horses and cows, tool storage, and a garage for carriages. The second floor served as a two-bedroom apartment. It has been suggested that Walter Burley Griffin, an architect and landscape designer who played an important role in Wright’s Oak Park Studio, designed the T. E. Wilder Stables. The structure’s gabled roofs, which…
Thank you to all our educators who participated in Teaching by Design this school year! We brought content to over 75 teachers and an estimated 7,683 students during the 2024-2025 school year. While this year’s programming is finished, check back here and on our social media for new dates in Fall of 2025.
In the meantime, enjoy some photos from last year’s programming!
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Date: 1909
City: Stevensville, Montana
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
Restoration status: Destroyed by fire in 1924
In addition to commissioning the Como Orchards Summer Colony (1909), the Bitter Root Valley Irrigation Company asked Wright to plan a town along the Great Northern railway in Stevensville, Montana. The comprehensive plan included civic buildings such as a church, hotel, railroad station, opera house, and library, as well as private residential structures. However, only the Bitter Root Inn was…
Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural principles were forged in the pioneering environment of late-nineteenth-century Chicago. Arriving in 1887, Wright would spend the first twenty years of his career working in the city and its suburbs. Chicago offered Wright an immersive environment of creativity and inspiration that shaped his architectural philosophies and laid the foundation for his future career. Listed here are the projects designed and built by Wright during his Chicago years. The buildings appear chronologically, dated by their original drawings. To learn more about each building click…
In 1893, Frank Lloyd Wright resigned his position as draftsman for Adler & Sullivan and entered private practice, establishing an office in the Schiller Building in downtown Chicago. At the time Wright founded his practice, the American architectural profession was coming into maturity. The independent builders and contractors that traditionally had served as architects in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were replaced in the post-Civil War period by professional architecture firms that arose as the United States established itself as an urban nation.
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In 1893, Frank Lloyd Wright founded his architectural practice in Oak Park, a quiet, semi-rural village on the Western edge of Chicago. It was at his Oak Park Studio during the first decade of the twentieth century that Wright pioneered a bold new approach to domestic architecture, the Prairie style. Inspired by the broad, flat landscape of America’s Midwest, the Prairie style was the first uniquely American architectural style of what has been called “the American Century.”
During his early years in Chicago, Wright did not operate in a vacuum. His work was supported and often enhanced by a…
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The Rookery Building in the heart of Chicago’s financial district stands testimony to the resilience and creative spirit of late-nineteenth century Chicago. The rebirth of the city in the wake of the Great Fire of 1871 gave rise to the multi-storied office building that would transform the landscape of America’s cities. Amidst the atmosphere of experimentation and innovation that defined post-fire Chicago, the architectural firm of Burnham and Root rose to prominence. Daniel H. Burnham (1846-1912) and John Wellborn Root (1850-1891…
The Rookery Building in the heart of Chicago’s financial district stands testimony to the resilience and creative spirit of late-nineteenth century Chicago. The rebirth of the city in the wake of the Great Fire of 1871 gave rise to the multi-storied office building that would transform the landscape of America’s cities.
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Date: 1905
Address: 209 South LaSalle Street, Chicago, Il 60604
City: Chicago, Illinois
Links: www.flwright.org
Accessibility: Public
Category: Commercial
Completed in 1888, Burnham and Root’s eleven-story Rookery was one of the tallest buildings in the world at the time of its completion. In 1905, seeking to modernize the interior public spaces of The Rookery, Edward C. Waller, the building’s manager, hired Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright was familiar with the building before he was commissioned to update it. The architect…
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Date: 1892
Address: 1027 Chicago Avenue, Oak Park, IL
City: Oak Park, Illinois
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
The Thomas and Laura Gale House closely resembles both the Robert Emmond and Robert Parker houses, all among the “bootleg” designs Wright produced independently while working for Adler and Sullivan. The high-pitched roof, octagonal dormers and bay, form a complexity of shapes that is evocative of the Queen Anne style, an architectural mode popularized by British architect Richard Norman Shaw. Despite its…
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Date: 1905
Address: 1319 S. Main St., Racine, Wisconsin
City: Racine, Wisconsin
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
Restoration status: restored 2013
Perched on a steep promontory above Lake Michigan, the Hardy house exhibits a complex and thoughtfully considered relationship with its surroundings. Wright fortified the structure’s western, street-side elevation, its most public façade, by surrounding it with a substantial stucco wall. Two entrances punctuate the wall and lead to…
Unity Temple (1905-08) is Frank Lloyd Wright’s only surviving public building from his Prairie period. Limited by a modest budget and an urban site, Wright created an innovative design and used unconventional materials to produce one of the most sophisticated accomplishments of his early career. The oldest Wright building still in use for the same purpose for which it was built, Unity Temple stands today as a masterpiece of modern architecture and design.
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Commissioned by the congregation of Oak Park Unity Church in 1905, Wright’s Unity Temple is the greatest public building of the architect’s Chicago years. Wright’s family on his mother’s side were Welsh Unitarians, and his uncle Jenkin Lloyd Jones was a distinguished Unitarian preacher with a parish on Chicago’s south side where Wright and his wife Catherine were married. Wright identified with the rational humanism of Unitarianism, particularly as influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendentalism, uniting all beings as one…
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Date: 1905-08
Address: 875 Lake Street, Oak Park, IL, 60302
City: Oak Park, Illinois
Links: www.flwright.org
Accessibility: Public
Category: Religious
Commissioned by the congregation of Oak Park Unity Church in 1905, Wright’s Unity Temple is the greatest public building of the architect’s Chicago years.
Approached from Lake Street, Unity Temple is a massive and monolithic cube of concrete, sheltered beneath an expansive flat roof. Wright’s bold concept for the church enabled a series of concrete forms to be…