Frank Lloyd Wright and Midway Gardens

Abstract

Built in Chicago in 1914, Frank Lloyd Wright's Midway Gardens was a concert garden that included an indoor restaurant and dance hall, a five-tiered, outdoor summer garden with band shell, a tavern, and a private club -- a work of art on the grandest scale uniting all the arts in an architecture of pleasure.In this lavishly illustrated volume, the first to focus solely on Midway Gardens, Paul Kruty traces the project's history and argues that its complex design and extensive use of decoration were the first unmistakable examples of a change in style and approach that was to characterize Wright's work for the next fifteen years. He shows here that the Gardens required three separate schemes and that Wright himself created its furnishings, china, and graphic designs and embellished its walls with patterned ornament, sculpture, and murals.Demolished in 1929, Midway Gardens is at the heart of a quintessential American tale, a great hybrid of Old and New World sensibilities, a monument to the cultural use of buildings and, in its own way, to the culture that allowed its destruction.