Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
VISITOR INFORMATION
The
Oak Park Visitor Center,
158 Forest Ave. (
&
708/848-1500;
www.visit
oakpark.com), is open daily from 10am to 5pm April through October, and
from 10am to 4pm November through March. Stop here for orientation, maps,
and guidebooks. There's a city-operated parking lot next door. From the center,
the heart of the historic district and the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio
is only a few blocks away.
WRIGHT HOME AND STUDIO
Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio
For the first 20 years of
Wright's career, this remarkable complex served first and foremost as the sanctu-
ary from which Wright was to design and execute more than 130 of an extraor-
dinary output of 430 completed buildings. The home began as a simple shingled
cottage that Wright built for his bride in 1889 at the age of 22, but it became a
work in progress, as Wright remodeled it constantly until 1911 (he left there in
1909). During this highly fertile period, the house was Wright's showcase and
laboratory, but it also embraces many idiosyncratic features molded to his own
needs rather than those of a client. With many add-ons—including a barrel-
vaulted children's playroom and a studio with an octagonal balcony suspended by
Wright's Oak Park
Oak Park has the highest concentration of houses or buildings any-
where designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright, probably the most
influential American architect. People come here to marvel at the
work of a man who saw his life as a twofold mission: to wage a single-
handed battle against excessively ornamental architecture (Victorian,
in particular), and to create in its place a new form that would be at
the same time functional, appropriate to its natural setting, and stim-
ulating to the imagination.
Not everyone who comes to Oak Park shares Wright's architectural
philosophy. But scholars and enthusiasts admire Wright for being con-
sistently true to his own vision, out of which emerged a unique and
genuinely American architectural statement. The reason for Wright's
success could stem from the fact that he himself was a living exemplar
of a quintessential American type. In a deep sense, he embodied the
ideal of the self-made and self-sufficient individual who had survived,
even thrived, in the frontier society—qualities that he expressed in his
almost-puritanical insistence that each spatial or structural form in his
buildings serve some useful purpose. But he was also an aesthete in
Emersonian fashion, deriving his idea of beauty from natural environ-
ments, where apparent simplicity often belies a subtle complexity.
The three principal ingredients of a tour of Wright-designed struc-
tures in Oak Park are the
Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Tour,
the Unity Temple Tour,
and a
walking tour
—guided or self-guided—to
view the exteriors of homes throughout the neighborhood that were
built by the architect. Oak Park has, in all, 25 homes and buildings by
Wright, constructed between the years 1892 and 1913, which consti-
tute the core output of his Prairie School period.
