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The body of a grand piano hangs over my head as I descend the stairs from the first to the ground floor in Frank Lloyd Wright’s former home in Oak Park, Illinois, just outside Chicago. In order to save space in the children’s playroom, the architect cut a hole in the wall, allowing the piano to jut out into the stairwell, with only the keyboard remaining in the room.
The spectacular playroom also features a barrel-vaulted ceiling with a skylight and, above the fireplace, painter Charles Corwin’s mural of the story of “The Fisherman and the Genie” from The Arabian Nights.
This two-storey house was the first building over which Wright (1867-1959) had entire artistic control. On completion in 1889, it broke the Victorian box format with its open flow between ground-floor rooms, and served as a laboratory for his ideas, Sarah Holian, curator at the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust, tells me. Wright set up his own practice in 1893.
He renovated the home to accommodate his growing family, adding the playroom above a new kitchen and pantry, and dividing his upstairs work studio into two children’s bedrooms. He and Catherine, the first of his three wives, had six children together in total.
The former kitchen was expanded to create a dining room and here a recessed ceiling light set behind an intricate, carved wooden panel with an oak leaf pattern catches my eye. The light illuminates the dining table, enclosed by high-back chairs, below it. Wright moved windows higher to create an “intimate space” around the table, says Holian, adding that dining tables became “almost a room within a room” in some of his designs.
In 1898, Wright used money earned designing glass tiles for Luxfer Prism Company to build a new studio connected to the house. It was here, in a two-storey octagonal drafting room, with a balcony supported by chains from above, that he pioneered his Prairie style. Its characteristics include horizontal lines, open-plan spaces and a connection to exterior surroundings, tying into Wright’s philosophy of organic architecture.
The style is exemplified in Frederick C Robie House (1908-10) in Chicago — which, along with New York’s spiral-shaped Guggenheim museum, is among eight Wright designs in the US that now form a Unesco World Heritage Site.
Wright left his home — and Catherine — in 1909 to travel to Europe with his then-married mistress, the translator Martha “Mamah” Borthwick. In 1911, he completed a new home for himself and Borthwick, Taliesin in Wisconsin, where they hoped to escape the censure of conventional society and the press, who branded it the “Love Cottage” and “Castle of Love”.
One day in 1914, while Wright was away, a worker, Julian Carlton, set fire to Taliesin and murdered Borthwick, her two children and four other people with an axe. A motive was never discovered.
Wright sold the Oak Park property in 1925. The Frank Lloyd Wright Trust acquired it in 1974 and spent 13 years restoring it to its 1909 appearance.
The neighbourhood is home to other Wright-designed homes and his Unity Temple. “You can really get a sense of the impact that Wright had on American architecture as a whole from the smaller community of Oak Park, how some of these ideas about open floor plans and organic design emerged. And today we can find them all over the world,” says Holian.
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