Unity Temple Research Articles

Frank Lloyd Wright’s World Heritage throughout Time. The complex compromise between use and conservation in the American approach to architectural restoration

This essay aims to provide a brief summary of the most controversial restoration realized on four cases out of the eight Frank Lloyd Wright’s works listed as Unesco World Heritage (the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Unity Temple, the Robie House, Taliesin West), in a comparative view between the recurrent methods of the American approach to architectural restoration and the shared values of the Italian theory of conservation. In this way, the principles laid down by Unesco to list this valuable heritage (Integrity, Authenticity, Protection) are looked under a critical perspective, showing how liable they are in within the selected cases. Furthermore, the text will focus on the complex implications deriving from the design intent, the authorship, the architectural history and the use of photography in the restoration process, opposed to the principle of time and authenticity deriving from the Venice Charter and the Nara Document.

Review: Rise of the Modern Hospital: An Architectural History of Health and Healing, 1870–1940

Review: <i>Rise of the Modern Hospital: An Architectural History of Health and Healing, 1870–1940</i>

At Home in the World — the Architecture and Life of Frank Lloyd Wright

This article shows how the enduring admiration people have for the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) is explained by this principle of Aesthetic Realism, stated by the founder of this philosophy, the great American poet and critic, Eli Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Scholars have written of Wright’s contradictions: his charm and his arrogance, the warmth of his interior designs and his coldness to persons near to him. The authors show that like people everywhere, Wright was trying in his life to put together opposites in himself, including the same opposites he was able to compose magnificently in his best architectural work: most particularly, the opposites of inside and outside, “the snug and exterior.” Two early examples discussed are his 1893 Gale House and the Heurtley House of 1902. Wright’s love of nature led to his concept of organic architecture: buildings inspired by, and at one with, their environment. A masterful example discussed in detail is his 1935 house design Fallingwater, built dramatically above a waterfall. The authors also show how two works from very different points in Wrightʼs long career — the 1904 Unity Temple, and the Guggenheim Museum, completed in 1960 — are opportunities for people to know ourselves better now. The explanation lies in the beautiful way each structure puts opposites together.

¿A qué jugamos los arquitectos?

&lt;p&gt;Esta investigación presenta el aprendizaje infantil como punto de partida de la investigación que los arquitectos realizan al comenzar un proyecto. A partir de este aprendizaje se sientan las bases para la elaboración de mapas, la construcción de significados y la vivencia de experiencias en la construcción de&lt;br /&gt;conceptos y variables que utilizan los arquitectos, como psicólogos experimentales de la percepción. Los grandes arquitectos parecen haber descubierto este aspecto cada vez que sentían el placer lúdico del ejercicio profesional y lo comparaban con los sentimientos que despertaba en ellos algún recuerdo infantil. La infancia de Frank Lloyd Wright se considera como implícita en el Templo Unitario de Oak&lt;br /&gt;Park, así que tomaremos esta obra como caso de estudio.&lt;/p&gt;

フランク・ロイド・ライトのユニティ・テンプル(一九〇六-一九〇八) : 「空間」表現の意識的な出発点としての(第六十六回美学会全国大会発表要旨)

フランク・ロイド・ライトのユニティ・テンプル(一九〇六-一九〇八) : 「空間」表現の意識的な出発点としての(第六十六回美学会全国大会発表要旨)

The Architecture of Barry Byrne: Taking the Prairie School to Europe by Vincent L. Michael

Reviewed by: The Architecture of Barry Byrne: Taking the Prairie School to Europe by Vincent L. Michael Patrick Allan Pospisek Vincent L. Michael, The Architecture of Barry Byrne: Taking the Prairie School to Europe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 248 pp. $60.00. Ask the average midwesterner about the region’s exports and you can expect a variety of answers: corn and soybeans, automobiles, musicians as varied as Prince and John Mellencamp, or—only somewhat sarcastically—jobs. In The Architecture of Barry Byrne, Vincent L. Michael offers the modern built environment itself to that conversation. Michael moves beyond architectural exports like Louis Sullivan’s skyscrapers and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel to focus on the work of Francis Barry Byrne, an early apprentice of Wright’s who would go on to make a name for himself in modern architecture via radically new church designs. As a devoted Catholic, Byrne’s dramatically reinterpreted churches both incorporated Wright’s ideas of organic architecture and foreshadowed the later reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Byrne’s work itself became an export, as noted in the subtitle, as he was the only member of the Prairie School to design and build a structure in Europe. More than just a student of Wright’s, Byrne emerged as an important contributor to the rise of modernist design, only to be overshadowed by the likes of Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Active professionally from 1902, when he joined Wright’s Oak Park studio, to his death in 1967, Byrne’s story highlights the lasting influence of the late nineteenth century “Chicago School” of architecture as well as the midwestern contributions to the mid-twentieth century dominance of the International Style. At its core, The Architecture of Barry Byrne recounts the architect’s growth and contributions through a narrative catalog of his most significant works. Although Michael devotes considerable attention to Byrne’s biography, [End Page 128] the focus is undoubtedly on his buildings and architectural thought. Despite receiving his share of residential and commercial commissions, Byrne’s greatest works came in the form of churches, schools, and other religious structures, largely for the Catholic Church. As Wright’s apprentice, Byrne drew working drawings for and supervised the construction of Oak Park’s landmark Unity Temple (1908). Byrne left Wright’s studio in 1908 and, after a period on the West Coast, established his own Chicago practice. In 1922 he received a commission, with relatively few design constraints, for St. Thomas the Apostle church in Chicago. Although Byrne would turn the Prairie Style’s horizontal lines vertically, he took from Wright and Unity Temple an open floor plan as well as an altar pulled out into the church itself. In doing so, Byrne radically broke with centuries of Gothic tradition in which columns broke up the worship space and the sanctuary was pushed back, separate from the pews. The changes fit into evolving liturgical practices that welcomed more parishioners to the sacrament of communion and placed the ritual work of clergy within the sight of the congregation. Byrne would go on to develop landmark Catholic churches elsewhere over the course of his career, among the most significant being his 1928 Christ the King Church in Cork, Ireland. While Byrne’s Irish church is the European allusion in Michael’s subtitle, it is worth noting that, by the time Byrne received the commission, he had long since grown into a thoroughly modernist architect, complete with visits to Mies van der Rohe and Germany’s Bauhaus in 1924. Christ the King bears a greater resemblance to an angular Art Deco building than one of Wright’s Prairie Style homes and thus emphasizes Byrne’s European-styled modernism. Byrne’s later works, like the fish-shaped St. Francis Xavier Church (1949) in Kansas City, Missouri, clearly show his mastery of modern architecture without a formal commitment to any particular style. While Byrne maintained a correspondence and friendship with leading modern architects, his contributions to the school of thought have largely been overshadowed by Europeans like Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius. Michael offers a number of reasons for this omission. For one, Byrne was infinitely more humble...

From Novel Practice to Consecrated Exemplar: Unity Temple as a Case of Institutional Evangelizing

Institutional theorists focus on practices that spread because they conform with and build on established cultural assumptions and resources. Novel practices, however, not only fail to conform to, but also challenge the dominant institutional order. We seek to understand the process by which novel practices move from entrepreneurial anomaly to consecrated exemplar within a field. We contrast Unity Temple by Frank Lloyd Wright—a building that challenged the accepted practices of ecclesiastical design in the architectural profession—with the most prominent churches during the same period. We find two distinct legitimation processes—institutional evangelism where creators express their identity and generate novel practices versus adaptive emulation where adopters focus on prestigious others and emulate their established practices. We reveal that actors engaged in institutional evangelism and adaptive emulation, employing institutional work and leveraging ideas, materials and identities to effect, transform, and maintain institutions. Our comparative cases show the key role of materiality, particularly collective identity markers, in institutional work and institutional processes.

Your Chicago Dilemma May Be Too Many Great Choices

Your Chicago Dilemma May Be Too Many Great Choices

The use of computerized energy simulations in assessing thermal comfort and energy performance of historic buildings

The balance between preservation objectives and the thermal needs of an historic structure is addressed in different publications that integrate the general recommendations of 'design with climate' with specific guidelines set forth by the US Secretary of Interior's Standards and Guidelines for Rehabilitation of Historic Buildings. These accepted recommendations serve as the basis for morphological qualitative analyses of thermal comfort of historic buildings. To augment these analyses, this paper introduces a systematic quantitative approach to determine the energy needs of these buildings and to develop energy conservation strategies in their retrofitting. Using a computerized energy simulation program the study proceeds in three major steps: (a) evaluation of the thermal comfort and energy performance of the target building in its original historic and its current conditions; (b) development of energy strategies to improve thermal conditions in the historic building, while maintaining the building's historic integrity; and (c) evaluation of these strategies. This paper demonstrates the utility of ENER-WIN - an hour by hour energy simulation program in testing thermal comfort and energy performance of three historic buildings: the 1868 St. Louis Catholic Church in Castroville, Texas, USA; Frank Lloyd Wright's 1905 Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, USA; and a 1936 Bauhaus Apartment Building in Tel Aviv, Israel.

At Work in the Oak Park Studio

At Work in the Oak Park Studio Paul Kruty T he architecture created between 1898 and 1909 at Frank Lloyd Wright's Oak Park Studio, most of us agree, was simply astounding (fig. 1). In 1908 in Architectural Record, Wright first offered an explanation of how his ideas were turned into buildings during these years.' He began by staking his claim to all aspects of the work produced under his name. I believe that only when one individual forms the concept of the various projects and also determines the character of every detail in the sum total, even to the size and shape of the pieces ofglass in the windows, the arrangement and profile of the most insignificant of the architectural members, will that unity be secured which is the soul of the individual work of art. Next, he argued that his Oak Park helpers were of a special kind. The few draughtsmen so far associated with this work have been taken into the draughting room, in every case almost wholly unformed, many of them with no particular previous training, and patiently nursed for years in the atmosphere of the work itself Wright trained these beginners personally, he expanded, "until saturated by intimate association , at an impressionable age, with its motifs and phases, they have become helpful." Molding such unspoiled youngsters into a useful lot required stamina on both their parts. "To develop the sympathetic grasp of detail that is necessary before this point is reached has proved usually a matter of years, with little advantage on the side of the college-trained understudy." Wright further described the relationship between his workers, thus trained, and the buildings illustrated in the article by more than fifty pages of plates. I assign to each a project that has been carefully conceived in my own mind, which he accepts as a specific work. He follows its subsequent development through all its phases Fig. r. Frank Lloyd Wright. Architect's studio, Oak Park, Illinois, 1897-98. Interior view, ca. 19o6-o9, photographer unknown. (Collection ofFrank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust) ARRIS 17 PAUL KRUTY in drawing-room and field, meeting with the client himself on occasion, gaining an allround development impossible otherwise. This description of novices carefully trained to do the master's bidding sounds remarkably like the well-documented practice implemented at Wright's Taliesin Fellowship a quarter-century later and maintained thereafter. As such, it has been accepted both as an early description of Wright's preferred office procedure and design method, and as an account of actual office practice in Oak Park.2 But how much does it accurately reflect the Studio situation between 1898 and 1909, when the office produced the Willits, Coonley and Robie houses, the Larkin building a~d Unity Temple? The answer is that Wright's early practice was nothing like his later practice, either in fact or theory. In the early years, he was assisted by experienced professionals, most of them with architectural and/or engineering training at universities and several with architecture licenses. Wright clearly sought out such individuals and valued their contributions to his practice. His article of1908 appears to be wishful thinking that was rarely reflected in Studio practice. Rather, it reveals an important change in Wright's point of view that occurred shortly before he penned his account, in which he saw the unschooled novice as the solution to the problems he had encountered with several studio employees, including Walter Burley Griffin. That Wright presented this new ideal as an accurate description of his ideas and their implementation throughout the entire Oak Park period has masked the actual situation . But let us examine the evidence. Introduction Attempting to reconstruct Studio practice by studying the progress of a particular design is difficult. Other than the drawings themselves, very little contemporary material survives. The office records apparently perished in the Taliesin fire of 1914. No set of letters written by Wright describing the Studio has appeared to supplement his published account of 1908. Contemporary evidence is limited to documents that remained with descendants oforiginal clients and associates. Two important caches of letters have survived: the set written between 1903 and 1907 by Charles E. White...

Emersonian Transcendentalism in Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple

Journal Article Emersonian Transcendentalism in Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple Get access Naomi Uechi Naomi Uechi Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Volume 7, Issue 2, Summer 2000, Pages 95–113, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/7.2.95 Published: 01 July 2000

Frank Lloyd Wright's living space: architecture's fourth dimension

-- The space within the building is the reality of that building. So says Frank Lloyd Wright in The Destruction of the Box, an address in which he recalls for his audience the origins of hib break with previous architectural thought. According to Satler, Wright's approach, organic architecture, reveals space as a lived and living entity, one that achieves its full meaning only when it becomes inscribed with the actual practices of those who inhabit it.This sociological analysis of Wright's architecture examines the interaction between people and the spaces they create. Satler shows how Wright explored a new architectural dimension, the space in which we live.Focusing on the Larkin Building (1904) and Unity Temple (1907), works that Wright considered important but that have received little attention, Satler delineates the social nature of space. She provides an analytic framework through which to understand Wright's building and his writings, revealing how the history of such works and cultural landscapes offers a basis for making social, political, and spatial choices about the future.Wright's specific architectural works provide a framework for constructing social histories of places and people because his design represent a natural way to build and to live within a larger social landscape. This original study will appeal to sociologists, architects, urban and architectural historians, urban planners and anthropologists, and those interested in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Concrete Slab and Column

This paper traces the development of Frank Lloyd Wright's ideas on the place of the concrete column and slab in architecture. It deals with his first employment of the slab at Unity Temple (Oak Park, 1904) and his use of the form in residential projects during the next few years. It surveys American literature on concrete construction and briefly analyses the contribution of Claude A.P. Turner and the employment of the Turner system in two Chicago buildings that Wright would have known. It discusses his project for the San Francisco Call (1912) and the use of the Barton system in the Richland Center warehouse for A.D. German (1915). It further discusses his first probable knowledge of themore sophisticated concrete slabs of Maillart, published in 1926, and of Maillart's invention of a proto lily-pad capital. This capital is also to be seen in Wright's champagne glass designed for Leerdam (1930) and in his project for the Salem Capitol Journal of 1931. Finally it is argued that the much admired lily-pad columns at the Johnson Wax office building (Racine, 1937-39) are really a series of three-hinged bents rather than shell construction.

Review: Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Architecture for Liberal Religion by Joseph M. Siry; Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright by Robert McCarter; Frank Lloyd Wright's Dana House by Donald Hoffmann, Frank Lloyd Wright

Review: Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Architecture for Liberal Religion by Joseph M. Siry; Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright by Robert McCarter; Frank Lloyd Wright's Dana House by Donald Hoffmann, Frank Lloyd Wright

Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright and architecture for liberal religion

1. Religious and institutional architecture of the Lloyd Jones family 2. Unity Church in Oak Park to 1905 3. Wright's design for Unity Temple 4. Construction of Unity Temple 5. Religious and architectural interpretations of Unity Temple Conclusion: Unity Temple and later modern architecture.

The Abraham Lincoln Center in Chicago

The Abraham Lincoln Center was Frank Lloyd Wright9s first large public commission. Wright was chief designer of the project from 1898 until 1903. The client was his uncle, the Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones, with other members of Jones9s All Souls Church-the leading center of liberal Unitarian religious and civic life in Chicago at the turn of the century. All Souls was a prominent example of a new kind of urban ministry known as an institutional church because of its emphasis on social and educational programs. Jones wished to create a unique building as an expression of his church9s nonsectarian values. He sought a design that would depart from conventional church architecture in terms of both program and symbolism. From 1898 until 1903, Wright collaborated on the project with architect Dwight H. Perkins. Designs for the building in those years recall the tall office buildings of Adler and Sullivan. Yet Jones9s letters reveal that he was an assiduous critic of his nephew9s ideas, which he wanted simplified for economic and ideological reasons. When he and Wright failed to agree on the center9s exterior form, he turned to Perkins, who revised the design according to Jones9s wishes and saw the project through to completion in 1905. The Abraham Lincoln Center reveals formal and spatial ideas that Wright explored in his subsequent Larkin Building and Unity Temple. The center was thus a pivotal project in Wright9s emergence as an architect of public buildings.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple and Architecture for Liberal Religion in Chicago, 1885-1909

Long recognized as a major early work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Unity Temple may be understood as the culmination of a series of experiments in a new architecture for liberal religion near Chicago around 1900. Its precursors included All Souls Church, Unity Chapel, and Abraham Lincoln Center, which embodied ideas for church design advocated by Wright's uncle, Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones. Unity Temple also signified the theological ideals of Rev. Rodney F. Johonnot, the minister of Unity Church in Oak Park, who helped to select Wright as architect and who articulated the religious symbolism of Unity Temple in terms of Unitarian and Universalist thought.

Unity Temple and the A&amp;A

Unity Temple and the A&amp;A

Drawings and Photographs of Unity Temple

Drawings and Photographs of Unity Temple

Letters, 1903–1906, by Charles E. White, Jr. from the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright

Charles E. White, Jr., a young and ambitious architect, left Burlington, Vermont, to work in Wright's Studio in 1903. He worked there for three years, perhaps the most fruitful years of what has been called Wright's “First Golden Age.”1 Unity Temple, the Larkin Building, and several Prairie Houses were under consideration while he was there. Charles White was well aware of the importance of where he was and what he was doing. Fortunately, he recorded his enthusiasm in long letters to his friend and former employer, W. R. B. Willcox, an architect then practicing in Burlington.2 Aside from their intrinsic antiquarian interest, the letters provide an insight into the character of Wright's Studio. Interesting, too, are White's regional assumptions and his analysis of Wright's work. In general White's spelling and punctuation are retained; however, his penmanship posed some difficulties.