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Joseph M. Siry, Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Architecture for Liberal Religion (New York: Cambridge UP, 1996), xv+ 250 pp., $75.00 (cloth).
Architectural historian Joseph M. Siry has produced an impressive case study of Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple. Designed for a Unitarian-Universalist congregation in Oak Park, Illinois, this concrete building was completed in 1909 to great critical acclaim and is still considered a masterpiece of modern architecture. Siry sets out to examine Unity Temple both as an important work by Wright and "as a symbol of the liberal religious culture that the structure was to serve and signify" (1).
Unity Temple meets Siry's first goal very successfully. The author carefully traces the liberal religious tradition of Wright's family, including the careers of both his father and his maternal uncle Jenkin Lloyd Jones as ministers, the latter an early...