by David Burn | Jan 4, 2004 | Architecture
We spent some time today in Frank Lloyd Wright’s “great space.” Unity Temple, home to a Unitarian Universalist congregation still active in Oak Park today, allows for self-guided tours of their world famous modernist gem on weekdays and guided/narrated tours on Saturday and Sunday.
Wright lived and worked only blocks from this location, a corner lot on Lake Street in downtown Oak Park. At the time, 1905 when construction began to 1908 when the church was finished, very few reinforced concrete buildings had ever been built, and none built as an artistic masterpiece in service to an active public use.
Wright was shockingly bold/great in his time and place. Post-Victorian Oak Park was a proper and conventional place at the turn of the century while Wright’s work, though grounded in nature, was provoking, new, and scandalous–an interesting parallel to developments about to erupt in the architect’s personal life, events which eventually led him to Europe and the construction of Taliesen in south central Wisconsin.
by David Burn | Dec 29, 2003 | Architecture
Darby gave me a stunning coffee table book on Frank Lloyd Wright for Christmas. It’s from German publisher, Taschen , and features trilingual text–English, French, and German–from Brooks Pfieffer along with amazing photographs and reproductions of Wright’s original sketches and architectural drawings.
by David Burn | Dec 5, 2003 | Architecture, Chicago
I’m fascinated by Frank Lloyd Wright. He was a radical artist who dared to be great at all times. But like any genius, he was also but a man, sometimes susceptible to the lower impulses. After attaining much success in his architecture practice, marrying well, and raising six children, Wright grew restless. He looked to a client’s wife and neighbor in Oak Park, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Mamah held a Masters degree from Ann Arbor and was an outspoken suffragist, feminist, and free-love advocate. She also translated foreign texts on these subjects. Mamah was also said to be quite beautiful. For certain, she deeply enchanted Wright, as he dropped everything–family, reputation, and career–to flee to Europe with her.
Upon returning to the states, Wright built Taliesin on his maternal ancestor’s land in south central Wisconsin. In part, as a defense against Chicago and the conventional values held universally therein. Taliesen also was a natural refuge, a place in the sun where Wright and Mamah could live life their way, masters of their rural, but progressive kingdom. All was well until one day in 1914 when Wright was away in Chicago working on Midway Gardens, a household servant went mad and burned the place down, waiting at the one available door with an axe, where he murdered each escaping person, including Mamah and her two children, plus four others.
As Truman Capote knows, this kind of stuff really happens. Here again we see, no inventor of fiction can easily compete with sad reality.
