Content area
Full Text
OAK PARK, ILL. - In 1889, a gifted young architect named Frank Lloyd Wright bought a plot of land at the southeast corner of Chicago and Forest avenues and built a little shingle-sided house for his new bride, Kitty. Frequently rethought, enlarged and reworked, that house - and, later, an attached studio - served as a constantly changing laboratory for Wright's ideas. Today, it's a museum (and a shrine) for both casual visitors and Wright's devotees. Wright worked for the firm of Adler & Sullivan, in charge of their residential designs, until he was caught "bootlegging" house plans on the side and was fired for violating his contract. He set up shop on his own and became famed for "Prairie Style" buildings that seemed to grow naturally from the flat terrain of northern Illinois, with shallow roofs, overhangs, privacy-enhanced entrances and earthy colors. Inside them are low-ceilinged rooms that flow from space to space, with intimate spaces including "inglenooks," fireplaces with seats on either side of the hearth mixed with dramatic surprises, and the use throughout of features such as leaded art glass, organic materials and geometric shapes. Wright, dictatorial and egomaniacal, embraced nature - on his own terms - and rebelled against Victorian gingerbread. Along the way, he changed the face of architecture. In 1909, he abandoned his wife and six children and ran off to Europe in a cloud of scandal with Martha "Mamah" Cheney, the wife of a client. Quasi-dutiful, he returned in 1911 to convert the studio into a residence for Kitty and the kiddies, and the house into apartments, to provide rental income for their support. Wright moved away from the Prairie Style and went on to acclaim in Europe and Japan, to design the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the...