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Date: 1894
Address: 3213 - 3219 Calumet Ave., Chicago, Illinois
City: Chicago, IL
Accessibility: private
Category: Residential
Restoration Status: interior gutted by fire in 1981
Robert Roloson commissioned Wright to remodel a group of four preexisting row houses in 1894. Concerned with ventilation, Wright devised a plan that incorporated a succession of courts and wells in order to allow light and air into the buildings’ interior rooms. A series of four high-pitched gables dominates the front facade of the row houses. Wright…
Date: 1907
Address: n/a
City: Geneva, Illinois
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
Restoration status: Destroyed by fire in 1910
Colonel George Fabyan commissioned Wright to remodel an Italianate house on his estate as a private country club around the same time that he commissioned the renovation of his own home. The structure included fourteen guest rooms, and visitors could divert themselves with recreational activities like canoeing, swimming, croquet, bowling, cards, and pool. A large dance hall featured exposed wooden beams and stringcourses, and a long porch shaded by…
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Date: 1895
City: Chicago, IL
Category: Apartment complex
Links: Ornamental fragments in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago
Restoration Status: Demolished 1971
The four-story Francis Apartments building, which was constructed for the Terre Haute Trust Company, comprised one, two, and three bedroom residential units on its upper floors, and commercial storefronts on its first floor. Thick limestone served as the building’s foundation and bands of cast stone ran horizontally around the ground floor periphery of the…
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Date: 1893
Address: 1030 Superior Street Oak Park, IL
City: Oak Park, IL
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
Restoration Status: Covered with vinyl clapboard siding in 1987
Located in Oak Park, the Francis J. Woolley house abuts the Robert Parker residence. On the building’s exterior, Wright carried thin clapboard siding from the first floor to the sill of the second. From there, wood shingles extend to the soffit line. This bipartite division of the façade subtly distorts the scale of each story. Wright employed a…
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Date: 1903
Address: 1505 W. Moss Avenue, Peoria, IL.
City: Peoria, Illinois
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
With its ribbon windows, low-pitched roofs, projecting eaves, and walled terraces, the Francis Little house is typical of Wright’s mature Prairie style designs. The Little house windows are similar in design to those found at the E. Arthur Davenport, William Fricke, F.B. Henderson, and Edwin H. Cheney houses. The glass designs found on the interior of the house, which include a variety of skylights and built-in…
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Date: 1895
Address: 253 North Francisco Street, Chicago, IL
City: Chicago, IL
Category: Residential, multi-family apartment complex
Restoration Status: Demolished 1974. In 1977, the original entrance arch was reinstalled in apartment complex on Lake Street at Euclid Place in Oak Park.
Francisco Terrace was among several Wright designs commissioned by Edward C. Waller, a wealthy real estate speculator and close friend of William Winslow, another of Wright’s early patrons. Located on Chicago’s near West Side, the two-story…
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Date: 1901
Address: 301 S Kenilworth, Elmhurst, IL 60126
City: Elmhurst, Illinois
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
In his architecture, Wright sought to integrate his buildings with the natural landscape on which they stood. He wrote of his desire to emphasize the building’s horizontal planes in an effort to “grip the whole to earth.” The Frank Henderson house is among Wright’s early Prairie designs that rely on the accentuation of horizontal elements to achieve a visual harmony between the built and natural…
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Date: 1909
Address: 507 Lake Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois
City: Wilmette, Illinois
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
The Baker house utilizes many of the same design devices found in Wright’s Isabel Roberts house of the previous year. A dramatic cantilevered roof projects over a two-story living room with a bay of tall windows that create a screen-like effect. Long porches extend from the sides of the house, creating an emphatic horizontality that makes the structure appear to hug the ground. The shallow, hipped roofs of…
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Date: 1889
Address: 333 Forest Ave. Oak Park, IL
City: Oak Park, IL
Accessibility: Public
Category: Residential
Links: www.flwright.org
Restoration Status: Restored to its 1909 appearance by the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust, 1974 - 1987
With a loan from Adler and Sullivan, Wright purchased a plot of land in the semi-rural village of Oak Park, on the western edges of Chicago. It was here he constructed a home for his first wife, Catherine Tobin, and himself. Built in the Shingle style, the structure draws on conventions Wright adopted…
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In 1889 Wright completed the construction of a small two-story residence in Oak Park on the Western edge of Chicago. The building was the first over which Wright exerted complete artistic control. Designed as a home for his family, the Oak Park residence was a site of experimentation for the young architect during the twenty-year period he lived there. Wright revised the design of the building multiple times, continually refining ideas that would shape his work for decades to come.
The semi-rural village of Oak Park, where Wright…
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Date: 1911
City: Spring Green, Wisconsin
Accessibility: Public
Category: Residential
Links: http://www.taliesinpreservation.org/
After their extended tryst in Europe, Wright and Mamah Borthwick returned to Chicago where Wright had plans to build a townhouse in the city’s Gold Coast neighborhood. The project proved too costly, so the couple relocated to Wright’s family lands in Spring Green, Wisconsin. In the spirit of Wright’s Oak Park Home and Studio, Wright would again create a complex of buildings that…
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Oak Park is best known for its unsurpassed concentration of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and for the place where they were created – the Architect’s Studio.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Trust’s Learning Center expansion will focus on creating a comprehensive environment for lifelong learning that welcomes local and area residents into the site for expanded educational programs.
The Learning Center project comprises a 25,000 sq. ft. campus site, east and adjacent of the Home and Studio, which includes:
- 925 Chicago Avenue Arts…
No other architect or designer of the modern era transformed the use of leaded glass in architecture as Frank Lloyd Wright. Creating ribbons of uninterrupted glass casement windows and doors in his Prairie style buildings, Wright conceived his windows as an integral part of his organic design. Known for their extensive use of clear glass with touches of color, the glass designs are all geometric abstractions unique to each building for which they were created. Wright called them “light screens.”
The sources for Wright’s glass designs range from the Froebel gifts of his childhood to Louis…
Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Works brings Wright’s demolished and unrealized structures to life through immersive digital animations reconstructed from Wright’s original plans and drawings, along with archival photographs.
Two years in the making and based on a Japanese publication of original plans and historical photos, Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Works - The Imperial Hotel is a comprehensive digitally-animated recreation of the exterior and interior of this masterpiece.
Designed for the Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, and built from 1904 to 1906, the…
The Trust’s collection includes furnishings, decorative arts and architectural designs. In the Wasmuth Portfolio (Berlin, 1910), Wright described his goal as such: "To thus make of a dwelling place a complete work of art… this is the modern American opportunity.” Bold, innovative and architectural, Wright’s furniture and decorative works were conceived as an integral element of his architectural interiors, designed in harmony with each specific commission.
Much of the Trust’s collection is on permanent display in its original context at Wright’s Oak Park Home and Studio. Signature works in…
World Heritage is a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) designation of worldwide historic sites recognized for their outstanding universal value. These sites are worthy of perpetual conservation for their important place in cultural heritage. Adopted by UNESCO in 1972, 192 countries are parties to the World Heritage Convention, which enhances worldwide understanding and appreciation of sites and encourages international cooperation for heritage conservation. The World Heritage designation establishes Wright’s place on the international stage of…
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Date: 1901
Address: 210 Forest Ave., Oak Park, Illinois
City: Oak Park, Illinois
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential
The Frank W. Thomas house was the first of Wright’s mature prairie-style residences constructed in Oak Park. In his description of the house, Wright evoked the organic unity of a blossoming flower to suggest the complexity with which the structural components were integrated as a cohesive whole. Nature served as a continual source of inspiration, and Wright stated that the Thomas house, “flare[s] outward,…
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Date: 1900
City: Delavan Lake, Delavan, Wisconsin
Category: Recreational
Restoration status: Burned to ground in 1978, rebuilt from original plans ca.2005
Wright designed the Fred B. Jones boathouse in in harmony with the Jones’ summerhouse. Located on the edge of Delavan Lake, it was constructed of fieldstone and had a gabled roof with outward flaring ridges. A wide arch supported by columns made of chunky boulders framed the area designated for boat storage and a squat chimney poked out from the pavilion on the structure’s…