Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Architecture for Liberal Religion

Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Architecture for Liberal Religion. By Joseph M. Siry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xvi + 365 pp. n.p.

The landscape of American religion is full of architectural malapropisms. Consider the neo-Gothic style of Riverside Church and Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, liberal institutions employing a highly conservative (not to mention derivative) form. The Southern Baptists have adopted neoGeorgian architecture as their semi-official style, thereby seeking to appropriate a history they cannot, in truth, claim. In American religious architecture, moreover, form more often than not follows function-and sometimes at a considerable distance.

During the early morning hours of Sunday, 4 June 1905, Unity Church in Oak Park, Illinois, caught fire and was quickly destroyed. The congregation of Unity Church, which had been founded "to provide a center for liberal religious life in a community dominated by more theologically and socially conservative churches" (50), met five days after the conflagration and decided to rebuild. The names of four architects surfaced in the ensuing weeks, but the plans committee settled on a young aspiring architect who...