The demoted architect

It never fails – when I think I have demonstrated to the world that my passion for architecture is deep and noteworthy – I do something to show just how average I am.

Today, for instance, I arrived at The Rookery building for my 7-hour Wright Around Chicago bus tour.

This is the lobby of the Rookery, from 1888. It’s the oldest standing high rise in Chicago at 12 floors. The building was designed by architects Burham and Root but the lobby was remodeled by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1905.

Touring with me was one couple who was driving around the entire freaking United States, looking at Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. (Try and imagine me getting Ron to agree to this).

Another tour member shared a moving story about growing up near Fallingwater outside of Pittsburgh and realizing at a young age that she wanted to devote herself to sharing the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Everyone there had been to Pennsylvania’s Fallingwater (below) except for me and it’s a wonder I was even allowed to board the bus after the group introductions/revelations of architectural shortcomings:

And our tour guide Patty? She does these bus tours twice a week – 8 hours of talking FLW – as a VOLUNTEER! And at some point today – talking about Ferdinand Peck – a philanthropically-charged Chicago architectural trailblazer – Patty’s voice broke and she got teary over his unappreciated service to the city skyline.

So hopefully you get the idea – what I needed here was someone even more “average” about architecture. I needed Ron and I didn’t have him.

Everyone on this tour was offering up badges of knowledge and so, when I got Patty to myself, over in Oak Park, street after street of Frank Lloyd Wright houses – I pointed out a cool house and asked if it’s a FLW house and apparently it is and apparently it’s quite famous – so famous that only a moron wouldn’t know it etc. etc. etc.

And Patty burst out laughing at my architecture “joke” – really. If I was a bigger person, I would have confessed my ignorance but…

Here is the house I was not able to identify, which is super special because it’s the precursor to Fallingwater and an initial exploration into cantilevering:

I was fairly confident that this house below was a FLW house, but I wasn’t taking any chances and stayed silent as we walked by:

Here’s FLW’s own Oak Park house and studio:

Wait, and this one is in Detroit, but I’ve never seen it before and wanted to share it:

I did learn a lot today, even if I can’t identify elementary architecture.

Frank Lloyd Wright built 530 buildings. Eight of them are designated UNESCO sites. The first UNESCO one is the Unity Temple in Oak Park.

Oak Park has the world’s largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings – 25 structures.

This is Unity Temple. It’s apparently FLW’s favorite of all of his buildings. It’s not my favorite but I’ll defer to FLW. It’s considered by many architects to be the first modern building in the world, which just serves as further evidence that I am a traffic ticket attorney and not an architect. (If you are an architect and understand how a 1905 structure can be the first modern building, please reach out to me.)

The budget for Unity Temple was $40,000 in 1905. That’s like 1.5 million today for a 12,000 square foot church. The limited budget is part of the reason that Unity Temple is made of poured reinforced concrete.

Our guide Patty had two dominant themes for us and I think I understand them well enough to share them with you. The first one is FLW’s devotion to compression and expansion. When FLW wanted you to notice a part of his building – to really take stock of it and be impressed – he made the entryway to that room almost claustrophobic. He wanted you to feel compressed and uncomfortable so that when you entered the “grand” room, you felt a release and a sense of awe.

Here’s an example of compression, from Robie House, on the University of Chicago campus.

First here’s Robie House, from 1910:

And here’s the dark and low-ceilinged entry room:

And then you go up those stairs to rooms filled with stained glass and light:

Here are a couple of additional examples of expansion spaces – but not from houses we got to see today:

The other dominant theme of FLW is that he favored unified composition in his structures. He picked out a color theme, a theme for the wood and that is what he wanted you to keep, by God.

In his early career era, typical grand houses tended to have varied rooms – sitting rooms, music rooms, dining rooms. They had different wall paper, different paint – different furniture themes. FLW did not want you to do that. His houses had a single interior color and the woodwork was consistent. He even built furniture right into the houses – couches and dressers – so you didn’t have to cloud his “vision” with your own stuff. He especially felt that you didn’t need to put pictures on his carefully painted walls.

Look at these 3 examples of built-in furniture:

Tour over, I headed back to my Hyatt. Everyone else stayed back at the Rookery, drinking Prosecco and probably designing a building together. I made sure to route myself by the downtown Macy’s. Patty had stressed that we all really needed to see the mosaic dome in there, from 1907. It’s 1.6 million pieces of Tiffany glass spread out over 6000 square feet- it took 1.5 years to install.

That’s it from here. I’m due at a lecture at the Chicago Architecture Center soon and I need to go prepare. Having signed up for any event whatsoever occurring during my week in Chicago, I now notice that the evening lecture New Architecture in a New World, which is sold out and in some demand, is being hosted by a panel of extremely learned and PhD’d architects.

They’re hosting us lesser-trained architects for appetizers and refreshments beforehand and I’ll need to both practice some architectural-ish talking points and practice eating appetizers in front of people (disclosure: the last “important people” mixer I attended was back in 1993, when my attorney boss took me to a cocktail party with the Washington governor and I attempted to cut myself a piece of cheese, lost hold of the knife, dropped my plate, and ruined the cheese. The ever-professional serving staff suggested that I stick to the “softer” cheeses in the future.)