Frank Lloyd Wright's home and draughting office.
The Shingle Style home he designed and had built in his late teenage years when he first began work with Louis Sullivan (Wright's first employer Lyman Silsbee was a Shingle Style designer); the attached draughting office built nine years later was where Wright set up office with Marion Mahoney and Walter Burley Griffin once he left Sullivan -- and where they invented the Prairie Style.
More photos here and here.
2 comments:
When I lived in Chicago and took the Wright walk around his houses in Oak Park, saving this beauty for the finale. There are so many wonderful features but these are the ones that first spring to mind:
The foyer has a lead light roof, a deco design of mottled greens that came as a vision to Wright as he lay on a forrest floor looking up into the dappled light in the trees.
The corridor into his studio (seen on the left side of the house) is one person wide, a dark little conduit that opens spectacularly as you enter the two-storied octagonal atrium. He was a visual trickster, manipulating his house guests all the way.
You have to duck when you enter the special room for the children built upstairs, where the scale of everything is downsized for the little ones. He wanted to make it magical, achieved with art glass windows filtering an ethereal light.
In the dining room his purpose-built, six-foot high tall-back chairs were designed to create an intimate space for the guests at the table. I sat at the head and indeed it was a room within the room. Typical of Wright's distaste for anything ugly, he bricked up the windows because he couldn't bear to look at the monstrosity that was erected next door.
The tour is something you need to put on your "Must do before I die" list. :-)
P.S. Thanks for the trip down memory lane, Pete. :-)
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