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. Wright’s 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. Wrights’s 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
Cheney House - 1906

 

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
The pool table is original and was in the room directly below
The doors open onto the front raised balcony

Cheney House Front Balcony
The chairs are replicas from the Midway Garden Project

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 Wright’s 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
March 26, 2000
Oak Park, Illinois


Posted: March 26, 2000

Revised: March 26, 2000
• 20000319.171054.mt • 20000401.74627.mt •

Copyright® Matt Taylor 2000

update to Matt’s Notebook

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