Image
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…
Image
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…
Image
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
Image
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…
Sorry, you couldn't find your page. We apologize for any inconvenience in finding old website content.
For information on the many tours we offer, see the Tours section.
Check out the Events calendar for adult, youth, family, and school programs.
Want to learn more about Frank Lloyd Wright? Head to the Explore section.
Interested in becoming a member, donating or volunteering? The Support section has all the info you'll need.
Information about the Trust and career oppportunities can be found under About.
Image
Date: 1900
Address: 9326 South Pleasant Avenue, Chicago, IL
City: Chicago, Illinois
Category: Residential
Accessibility: Private
The William and Jesse Adams house features a square plan, double hung windows, and an ample third story attic. These elements seem incongruous with the type of residences Wright was designing by 1900, which eschewed attics and made use of polygonal architectural volumes. Scholars speculate that William Adams, who served as the contractor for Wright’s Heller and Husser houses, may have designed the house…
Image
Date: 1903
Address: 636 North East Avenue
City: Oak Park, Illinois
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
President of the Martin and Martin Stove Polish Company in Chicago, and brother to Darwin Martin, it was William Martin’s search for a suitable suburban location to build a home, that sparked Wright’s relationship with the Martin family.
In his design for William Martin’s Oak Park home, Wright responded to the compact size of the lot by including a subterranean basement and building vertically. The three-story house is…
Image
Date: 1901
Address: 540 Fair Oaks Avenue, Oak Park, IL
City: Oak Park, Illinois
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
Commissioned in 1901, the Fricke house was designed during Wright’s brief partnership with the architect Webster Tomlinson. The client, William G. Fricke, was a partner in the school-supply firm of Weber, Costello, Fricke. The house exhibits many key elements of Wright's mature Prairie style, including its stone water table, horizontal banding, overhanging roof eaves, shallow hipped roof, and stucco…
Image
Date: 1903
Address: 76 Soldiers Place, Buffalo, New York
City: Buffalo, New York
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
William Heath, a former resident of Chicago and attorney at the Larkin Company, contracted Wright to design his home around the same time that Darwin Martin commissioned the George and Delta Barton house, Larkin Administration building, and his own residence. Although smaller in scale, the Heath house is similar in design to the Martin House. Both structures are faced with Roman brick, and…
Image
Date: 1893
Address: 515 Auvergne Place. River Forest, IL 60305
City: River Forest, IL
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
A landmark building in Wright’s career, the Winslow house was his first major commission as an independent architect. While the design owes a tremendous debt to the earlier Charnley house, Wright always considered the Winslow house extremely important to his career. Looking back on it in 1936, he described it as "the first 'prairie house’.”
Defined by an overriding sense of simplicity and a mastery…
Of the great cities of the nineteenth century, none embodied the spirit of the modern age like Chicago. Its rise from a frontier village in 1827 to the world’s sixth-largest city in 1893 was unparalleled. From the soaring multi-storied steel frame office buildings of Chicago’s business district, the Loop, to the highly industrialized production lines of the city’s stockyards, Chicago offered indisputable proof of the forces shaping modern American life.
Image
Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural principles were forged in the pioneering…
Image
Pervasive and revolutionary, the Arts and Crafts movement originated in England in the 1880s. Evolving from the theories and practices of the English Aesthetic movement and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, it would become one of the most influential design movements of the modern age. Its impact was felt across Europe and America. Promoted by key figures including the artist-designer William Morris, and the great Victorian critic and writer, John Ruskin, it offered an artistic and philosophical reaction to the ostentatious,…
“Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city in the world...”
- Frank Lloyd Wright
Let us introduce you to Wright’s sites in and around Chicago on an exclusive small group tour, traveling in the comfort of a chauffeur-driven, air-conditioned, small-scale bus with expert commentary by a Trust interpreter.
Your day begins in the magnificent Rookery Light Court, originally designed by Burnham and Root and redesigned by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1905. One of the earliest skyscrapers in Chicago, The Rookery is a nominated World Heritage site.
Your next…
Our most comprehensive tour of Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park is an all-inclusive tour limited to ten persons.
Begin your Oak Park experience with an expanded tour of Wright’s Home and Studio, the birthplace of Wright’s vision for a new American architecture. Step ahead of the crowd and trace Wright’s early years, from his Studio where the Prairie style was conceived, to Oak Park’s beautifully preserved private Prairie homes. Witness the evolution of Wright’s architectural design philosophy in the neighborhood where the architect lived and worked.
Wright Around Oak Park includes:…
The Trust’s Education Department offers both on-site and virtual tours, during which students experience Wright’s designs firsthand and are encouraged to ask questions and share their observations.
Each tour can be tailored to classroom themes and partnered with activities and lessons from teachingbydesign.org.
At this time, tours are intended for groups of 45 students (grades K-12) or fewer and are available at the Frederick C. Robie House, the Home and Studio and its surrounding historic neighborhood. Please check our booking form for our availability. Please note, field trips are…
Travel in the architect’s footsteps and into the heart of Japanese culture, discovering what Wright loved about Japan and the ideas from “that great East” which proved influential throughout his career. Fall in love with Japan, as Wright did, on this 11-day, 10-night journey.