Susan Lawrence Dana's Prairie House

In nineteen-oh-two, a wealthy Springfield widow named Susan Lawrence Dana hired a thirty-five-year-old Chicago architect named Frank Lloyd Wright and told him to design her a house. She had inherited silver-mine money. She wanted something remarkable.

Wright spent two years on the project. When it was completed in nineteen-oh-four, the Dana house at Three-Oh-One East Lawrence Avenue was the largest commission he had ever undertaken. It remains one of the most intact Prairie-style interiors anywhere in the country.

The numbers alone are staggering. Approximately two hundred and fifty art glass windows and doors, plus more than one hundred art glass light fixtures, the vast majority of which still survive. Over a hundred pieces of custom white oak furniture, designed by Wright and built for the specific rooms they inhabit.

A dining room mural by artist George Niedecken featuring sumac motifs that echo the botanical patterns in the windows. The whole structure is designed around Wright's concept of expanding space, with walls and levels arranged to draw your eye outward, so that standing inside the house you are always aware of the landscape beyond. Susan Lawrence Dana was an unusual client.

She was a progressive, a spiritualist, a patron of causes. She hosted fundraisers and intellectual gatherings in the house. Wright shared her interest in Japanese aesthetics, and the house shows it, in the horizontal lines and the careful relationship between the interior spaces and the ground outside.

Dana lived in the house for decades. Later years were hard on her financially and mentally, and the house fell into disrepair. The state of Illinois acquired it in nineteen eighty-one and spent years in restoration.

It reopened as a state historic site in nineteen ninety. Come see it. There is nothing else quite like it in Illinois.