A trip to Oak Park Frank Lloyd Wright Oak Park Studio A Spring Visit to My Architectural Roots
After the March 2000 7 Domains Work Shop at Borgess and brief visit to Steelcase, Lisa and I went on to Oak Park to revisit the starting place of Frank Lloyd Wright. We stayed in a Suite of rooms at the Cheney House a few blocks from Mr. Wrights Home and Studio. In between weekend and Monday meetings, in the Chicago area, we visited Wright buildings - this is what we found. The experience of revisiting - I have been here twice: once in 1958 when I was at Taliesin and again in 1997 when doing the EY transfer - Mr. Wrightss Studio was particularly interesting as I am in the process of designing my own. The two works are separated by over a 100 years and have few circumstances in common yet the Pattern Language principles employed are very much the same. The feedback of ideas and perceptions over this wide a time and distance is an interesting exercise in recursion and iteration. When I started in architecture and first saw the Cheney House it had existed a little more than half of its present age. Saturday afternoon, we took some pictures of the Cheney House and the Home and Studio. They form a vivid mosaic of the early Wright and provide a strong sense of the time and place from which the Prairie School architecture was birthed.
Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio - 1888 to 1908
Sunday morning, we took the tour of the Wright Home and Studio. This is extremely well done and I recommend it to everyone. It is the best way I know to get introduced to the essential Wright. The guides are passionate, well informed and caring - it is a volunteer organization and it is their community that they are talking about. We spent Sunday after noon with xxxx. Monday morning was a fast 6:30 to 9:00 am photo tour of Oak Park and River Forrest. Some of these photos are below. We spent the afternoon at the design school of IIT. They are focuing on Human Centered design and run a Masters and PhD program for about a 150 students.
a suite of Frank Lloyd Wright environments
In the morning we were also able to get more details of the Cheney House - the owner gave us a tour Sunday evening and left the house open for us in the morning so we could photograph it. Cheney House balcony from the outside Cheney House Dining Room Cheney House Living Room Cheney House Front Balcony It was then on to Detroit to do a DesignShop event at the new DTE NavCenter: The Learning Zone. This three day period - Friday afternoon to Monday evening - was an interesting decompression/compression experience after coming out of a week-long 7 Domains Work Shop which focused on our core work. Steelcase (including seeing their restored FLlW house in Grad Rapids) to Oak Park (the birth of Organic Architecture) time with a colleague (in a 1950s contemporary home), visiting a modern school of design (the descendent of the Bahaus tradition), and back to one of our own latest creations. For me, it was like compressing 44 years into a few days. I was mentally exhausted by the experience. It will take some time to process all of it. Rand talks about reaching at the end the vision with which one started. This is hardly the end for me but is is a punctuation - a transition point - to have an integrated, compressed, experience of the beginning and end created a strong effect and with it the necessity for reflection.
Isabel Roberts House - 1908 The Isabel Roberts house has always been on of my favorite Wright houses. We visited it twice, once Sunday afternoon and again early Monday morning. Sunday, there was a small gathering in the room on the right which has glass on three sides of it. It creates a jewel-like setting for a late afternoon gathering. You can see through the room to the yard behind. In the morning the owners were leaving for work. They seemed used to their house being photographed. Isabel Roberts was Wrights secretary. This is a mature example of Prairie school architecture and you can see clearly the precursor grammar of the Wiley House and the Usonian Houses that followed a generation later. The Roberts house is in very good shape as it approaches its first Century. It must be a pleasure to live in this house. It illustrates great Pattern Language and the Wrightian principle of building as an expression of a way-of-living. This is a masterpiece work that would be fresh if built today. I look at works like this and think of the vast amount of domestic architecture that is going up today. Wright is a major industry. Millions come to Oak Park to see his work. And, today it is like it never happened. Why do they come? and what is it they fail to take home with them?
Matt Taylor Posted: March 26, 2000 Revised: March 26, 2000 Copyright® Matt Taylor 2000 update to Matts Notebook |