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…
Enjoy a virtual tour of the iconic Frederick C. Robie House, the consummate expression of Wright’s Prairie style.
Learn about the Prairie Style and the Midwestern architects who contributed to its development.
Explore the expansive living space at the heart of the Robie House on this Virtual Tour.
Take a Virtual Tour of Wright's Oak Park Studio, the birthplace of American architecture.
Take a Virtual Tour of the Children’s Playroom at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home and Studio in Oak Park.
Trust curator David Bagnall discusses the…
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Date: 1905
Address: 850 Sheridan Rd., Glencoe, Illinois
City: Glencoe, Illinois
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
Restoration status: restoration by Vinci-Hamp Architects, completed 2011. Work included structural stabilization, reversal of unsympathetic modifications, refreshing the existing leaded glass windows, returning the landscape to its original descent into the ravine, and integration of new mechanical systems including geothermal heat pumps.
The William A. Glasner house is a one-…
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Date: 1903
City: Hinsdale, Illinois
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residentia
The nature of Wright’s involvement in the design of the W. H. Freeman house is uncertain. The drawings in the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives at the Avery Library reflect the nineteenth century taste for compact, restricted interior spaces; a square plan; steeply pitched roofs; and double hung windows—design elements Wright had emphatically abandoned by 1903. It is possible that they show the proposed remodeling of a preexisting structure, one that was…
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Date: 1892
Address: 211 S La Grange Road, La Grange, Illinois 60525
City: La Grange, Illinois
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
Restoration Status: Restored in the late 1980s
The W. Irving Clark house has been attributed to both Wright and E. Hill Turnock, another draftsman employed by Adler and Sullivan. The inclusion of the building plans in the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives at the Avery Library, Columbia University, suggests a possible collaboration between the two. The house features an inglenook with a tiled…
Date: 1891
City: Chicago, IL
Accessibility: Demolished 1926
Category: Residential
The William Storrs MacHarg house was another of Adler and Sullivan’s residential commissions, which were typically assigned to Wright. Like Wright’s own home in Oak Park, it was built in the Shingle style. The design featured rounded arches, a steep roof, and dormers. In place of traditional double-hung sash windows, Wright used out-swinging casement windows, which became a defining feature of his later Prairie houses. The MacHarg house was demolished in 1926.
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Date: 1893
Address: 1031 Chicago Avenue, Oak Park, IL
City: Oak Park, IL
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
Restoration Status: 1977 – restoration to the porch
The Walter Gale house is among the first houses Wright designed after his departure from the firm of Adler and Sullivan in 1893. The façade is dominated by a large circular turret. The rounded turret on the right of the house is balanced on the left by a narrow, angular dormer that extends two stories from the building’s second floor to its attic. The second…
Date: 1902
Address: 5292 South Shore Drive, Whitehall MI
City: Whitehall, Michigan
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
Restoration status: Partially demolished
Like the cottage designed for Mary Gerts, the Walter Gerts summer home was finished in board and batten siding and exhibits a simple plan. In his early writings on architecture, Wright argued that residences required only a single “broad” and “generous” chimney, with a fireplace that justifies its great size. Accordingly, a wide, shallow chimney projected out from the gently pitched roof of the cottage, and a large brick-…
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Date: 1908
Address: 57 Tillinghast Place, Buffalo, New York
City: Buffalo, New York
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
Walter Davidson was a manager at the Larkin Company in Buffalo, New York. Davidson commissioned Wright to design a modest home in the city’s Parkside East Historic District, a neighborhood planned by Frederick Law Olmsted, in 1908. The exterior, comprising flat, tiered roofs, and linear bands of wood stripping and leaded glass windows appears to be composed of a…
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Date: 1902
Address: 1445 Sheridan Road, Highland Park, Illinois
City: Highland Park, Illinois
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
The Ward Willits house is widely considered the first of Wright’s mature Prairie style designs. The design closely relates to Wright’s article “A Home in a Prairie Town,” published in the Ladies Home Journal in 1901. The plan, Wright wrote, “was arranged to offer the least resistance to a simple mode of living, in keeping with the high ideal of family life together,” while the low, horizontal…
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Date: 1900
Address: 687 S. Harrison Ave., Kankakee, Illinois
City: Kankakee, Illinois
Category: Residential
Accessibility: Private
The Warren Hickox house stands next door to the Bradley house in Kankakee. The building shares much in common with its larger neighbor. Finished in plaster and dark wood trim, the house features flared roof ridges evocative of Japanese architecture. Despite the relatively small scale of the residence, Wright created a sense of both interior and exterior expansiveness through…
Date: 1900
Address: 4852 Kenwood Avenue, Chicago, IL
City: Chicago, Illinois
Category: Residential
Accessibility: Private
Eight years after completing the Warren MacArthur house, Wright was commissioned to design a garage for the property. The first floor “Automobile Room,” as Wright labeled it in his drawings, featured a turntable intended to rotate the parked car within. The second story served as an apartment with a living room, kitchen, bathroom, and two bedrooms.
Back to The Buildings of Wright's Chicago Years
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Date: 1892
Address: 4852 Kenwood Avenue
City: Chicago, IL
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
Located in the Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago, the McArthur house was designed as a “bootleg” project for Wright’s friend, Warren McArthur, and his family. Its dormered gambrel roof and octagonal bays are reminiscent of the Queen Anne style, as well as the architecture of Joseph Lyman Silsbee, Wright’s former employer. The simplicity of the interior, which was neither painted nor wallpapered, demonstrates Wright’s appreciation…
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