Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright is one of America's most famous architects. While in the Chicago area, we made a trip to Oak Park, Illinois, the hub of all things relating to Frank Lloyd Wright, including his primary home and studio. Wright designed over 300 buildings across the USA (and a few overseas, I think). His most famous work is the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.



Wright also had quite an interesting personal life, having married three times and having some scandalous affairs along the way. In 1914, one of Wright's servants set fire to Wright's home in Wisconsin and axed 7 people, including Wright's mistress, to death while the fire burned.

Chicago is probably America's premier city for architecture, so if you visit Chicago, be sure to take an architecture tour (there are many available). And if architecture is your thing, you should definitely spend half a day making a side trip to Oak Park (also the birthplace and boyhood home of Ernest Hemingway), which is only about 10 miles from downtown Chicago.

In Oak Park, you can take a tour of Wright's home and studio (no pictures inside, so I don't have any to show you). A lot of fascinating stuff to see. He also designed many of the houses in the immediate neighborhood, so you can take an audio guide tour around a few of the blocks and see some of his designs executed. Wright hated the prevailing Victorian style of architecture that favored tall, vertically oriented houses. He was one of the leading proponents of the Prairie School of architecture which promotes a wide, flat style, which you can see in some of the pictures below.

Here are pictures from our walking tour of the neighborhood. Please note that most, but not all, of these houses are designed by Wright. I can't remember which ones are which, but you can see that the neighborhood has a lot of beautifully designed houses, whether they were Wright designed or not.