Frank Lloyd Wright's Oak Park, Where the Prairie School Began

Frank Lloyd Wright moved into a house on Chicago Avenue in Oak Park in eighteen eighty-nine. He was twenty-two years old. He built a studio attached to it in eighteen ninety-eight and worked from that studio for the next eleven years, the period that produced more than twenty-five buildings within a few miles of where he was sitting. No neighborhood in the world has a higher concentration of Prairie School architecture than the streets around this corner of Oak Park.

The buildings Wright designed here were an argument, made in wood and stucco and art glass, against everything Victorian domestic architecture stood for. Victorian houses were vertical, ornate, compartmentalized into sealed rooms with specific designated functions. Wright's houses were horizontal, with rooflines that ran parallel to the flat prairie ground, overhanging eaves that brought the exterior inward, living spaces that flowed into each other without walls announcing where one room ended and another began. He was integrating buildings into their landscapes at a time when architecture was still primarily about imposing ornament onto space.

The ideas he was developing in Oak Park were the same ideas he would carry into his most influential buildings: the Robie House in Hyde Park, the Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Oak Park is where he worked them out, revised them, argued with them in built form. Unity Temple, completed in nineteen oh eight, is the clearest single statement of the Prairie School principle: reinforced concrete used not as industrial material but as monumental surface, horizontal mass over vertical pretension.

Wright left Oak Park in nineteen oh nine to travel to Europe with a client's wife, setting off a personal scandal that drove him from the city and ended his marriage. By then the studio had produced the architectural language that would be called the Prairie School, taught in universities, exhibited internationally, and recognized in Oak Park's own streets as a UNESCO World Heritage Site over a century later.