Photo of the Day: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple, Oak Park, IL

It’s one of the astonishing facts of American creativity that in the first decade of the 20^th century, Oak Park, Ill.—a community of only 10,000 at the time—would house two geniuses who, by making a virtue of simplicity, transformed the world’s culture. One was Nobel Literature laureate Ernest Hemingway, then only a child. The other was the adult architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Visitors to the town can still see a number of homes that Wright designed when he started his practice. But a structure of a different kind is Unity Temple, which I visited—and photographed—while vacationing in the Chicago area in October 2004.

This building was brought to my attention by Jim Stewart’s “10 Sacred Sites in America Worth Seeing” post on “The Discoverer” blog. I have my issues with his list (not a single Catholic church on it?), and he lists Unity as being in Chicago rather than Oak Park, a suburb of the city. But he did remind me of what a worthwhile building this is.

Readers of this blog know that I frequently include pictures of religious institutions. Many, I found in researching their history, were created by architects who specialized in such structures. But, out of the approximately 1,000 buildings designed by Wright in his nearly 70-year career, only 10 fit this description.

Wright, a member of this Unitarian congregation, offered to design this church after its predecessor burned to the ground following a lightning strike. Wright being Wright, his building costs doubled the original projection of $45,000. But Wright being Wright, he also revolutionized how people would experience such spaces.

What Wright had in mind to replace the traditional Gothic revival church building that had stood here was a structure with no steeple or front entrance, to be built entirely of poured-in-place, exposed concrete—a forerunner of 20^th-century design. 

Minus traditional religious iconography, the sanctuary emphasizes light and space. It gives rise to introspection and meditation, in keeping with the commission’s request for a building that would embody the principles of “unity, truth, beauty, simplicity, freedom and reason.”

When I visited, I understood perfectly how Paul Hendrickson, in his 2019 biography of the architect, Plagued by Fire, felt sitting in a pew in the church, “with all its light and silence and seeming saving grace pouring down.”

When the temple was formally dedicated in 1909, Wright was not on hand for the ceremony, having departed Oak Park in scandal because of an affair with the wife of a client. But, if so much of his life was profane with its ego, arrogance and deceptions, Unity Temple represented his belief in the sacred.

Photo of the Day: A Frank Lloyd Wright Commission, Oak Park IL

Sixteen years ago, while visiting the Chicago area, I stayed in a bed-and-breakfast in suburban Oak Park, which for a decade at the start of the 20^th century was home to two authentic American geniuses: the child Ernest Hemingway and the middle-aged Frank Lloyd Wright.

When he started his own architectural practice, Wright did so in this town where he was raising his family. The Frank Lloyd Wright House and Museum remains a magnet to architectural aficionados worldwide, but the added benefit of coming here to this suburb is that a visitor can still see examples of the early work of this visionary.

In fact, Oak Park has the world’s largest collection of Wright-designed buildings and houses—25 of them constructed from 1889 to 1913, in the “Prairie Style” that he pioneered.

The Moore-Dugal Residence, on Forest Avenue, is one of these, designed in 1895 for Wright’s friend and neighbor, Nathan Moore, in the English Tudor style. I photographed it while I was in the neighborhood.

On Christmas 27 years later, the house caught fire, leading Moore to request that Wright design plans for its reconstruction. The new commission surely dredged up painful memories for the architect, as he had left town in a storm of scandal over his affair with the wife of another client. But Wright agreed to take up the work again.

But nothing ever really stays the same, and that proved true in this case, too, as Wright kept the original brick walls but made the roofs taller and more pointed than they had been before—and added elements from homes where he had been inspired since, by sojourns in California and Japan.

This Day in Midwestern History (Birth of Frank Lloyd Wright, Architectural Fountainhead)

June 8, 1867—Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect who left his imprint on American and world landscapes with more than 500 buildings he designed in his seven-decade career, was born in Richland Center, Wisc.

You can read biographies of Wright, see his buildings, even read fiction based on his life (Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead). But perhaps the best way to appreciate him is to visit the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Ill.

Here Wright, after a stint working with famed Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, set up his own independent practice. Here he designed local 25 buildings and houses that set the standard for “prairie-style architecture,” characterized by interior light, open spaces, integration with the surrounding landscape, with a boxy, horizontal orientation. (The largest collection of Wright-designed houses in the world, the community attracts thousands of students and tourists from around the globe.)

And here he met the wife of one client, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, with whom he embarked on an affair that scandalized this straitlaced town, destroyed their marriages, alienated several of his children, and forced them even to leave the country to get away from it all. (The tragic denouement of the affair—a fire set deliberately by an aggrieved servant that ended up taking the life of Mameh, two of her children, and four other people— was detailed in this blog post of mine from eight years ago.)

When I visited Oak Park in October 2004, I was especially struck by Unity Temple, which made a virtue of a distinct limitation: lack of funds that restricted the materials to concrete. Wright’s insistence that the concrete not be covered by plaster, brick, or stone drew from the advice he offered in In the Cause of Architecture:

“Bring out the nature of the materials, let their nature intimately into your scheme. Reveal the nature of wood, plaster, brick, or stone in your designs, they are all by nature friendly and beautiful. No treatment can be really a matter of fine art when those natural characteristics are, or their nature is, outraged or neglected.”

In an article three years ago in The New Republic, Sarah Williams Goldhagen summed up Wright’s enormous influence:

“[I]n addition to being a flat-out great architect, [Frank Lloyd] Wright, in his person and in his work, concretized a powerful strain of American romantic idealism that lives on even today, to our benefit and our detriment. But Wright’s architectural vision lives on for another reason. Writers such as E. O. Wilson, Stephen Kellert, Esther Sternberg, and others have established today what Wright intuited: that people respond to buildings that allude to or offer experiences also found in nature. Wood is different from steel. Texture, ornamental or material, helps to maintain a human scale. Jay Appleton proposed that people respond best to landscapes that offer both prospect and refuge, which some analysts have found embedded in Wright’s interiors. As contemporary architects struggle with density in our rapidly climate-changing, ever-exploding world, they would do well to learn at least this lesson from Wright’s vision.”

This Day in Architectural History (Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mistress Slain in Their Dream House by Insane Servant)

August 15, 1914—Urgent business on a project called Frank Lloyd Wright to Chicago—miles away from Taliesin, the Wisconsin home he had designed as a haven from disapproving eyes for himself and mistress Mamah Borthwick Cheney. While the architect—not as famous for his scandals as for his genius--was gone, a recently hired cook locked the dining room and set it ablaze, then stood by a door with an ax to ensure that nobody could get out.

Borthwick, her two children, and four other people perished in the blaze.

One can only imagine the mixture of embarrassment and shock among Wright and his two companions on the railroad back to the rambling house: his son from his estranged wife Catherine, John, and Edwin Cheney, a former client cuckolded by Wright.

For all his distress, Wright vowed to rebuild. He had reason to do so: one of the survivors of the blaze, Taliesen’s carpenter, Will Weston, could not save the residential wing, but the drafting studio and agricultural wing could be salvaged.

Little did Wright know that faulty wing would, more than 10 years later, lead to a second fire—and yet another rebuilding attempt.

In a way, the catastrophes serve as an apt symbol for an architect who managed to survive as a working architect all the way into his early nineties (the Guggenheim Museum, his last significant institutional creation, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year). Time after time over the years, he was written off as a has-been, only to come back with another unusual design.

Wright had lived for more than 20 years in Oak Park, Ill. (Ernest Hemingway's birthplace) for more than 20 years before he and his lover made the momentous decision to run away from their conventional lives.

This Day in Literary History (Hemingway Welcomed Into World By Young Man With a Horn)

July 21, 1899—Several hundred miles west of Garrettsville, Ohio, where Hart Crane, another future literary genius afflicted with alcoholism and an instinct for self-destruction, was being born, Ernest Hemingway made his entrance into the world in a manner that startled most of the good citizens of the leafy Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Ill.

At 8 AM, the town of 10,000 awoke to a blast from a cornet being played by the local obstetrician, 27-year-old Clarence Hemingway, welcoming the latest addition to his family.

With his future concern for appearances, the future novelist and short story writer, one suspects, would have enjoyed the direct, emphatic manner in which his father announced his birth, as well as the town doctor’s vivid demonstration of his own masculine prowess in siring more offspring.

On the other hand, with his aversion to flowery prose, he probably would have been appalled by what his mother, Grace Hemingway,  wrote: “The robins sang their sweetest song to welcome the little stranger into this beautiful world.”

In prior posts, I discussed Hemingway’s tendency to stretch the truth (particularly concerning his World War I service) as well as the thread of depression that infected his genetic line. 

Far more can be said, however, about the Nobel Prize laureate’s life, and especially about the formative cultural influences of his family and hometown.

Not a word about Oak Park ever made it into Hemingway’s published work, but his experiences growing up in the town—at his birthplace on North Oak Park Avenue and another one on North Kenilworth Avenue—affected him for life.

Nearly five years ago, when I visited Oak Park, I was struck by the fact that it was home not only to Hemingway but to architect Frank Lloyd Wright. 

In fact, Grace Hemingway belonged to Oak Park’s Nineteenth Century Women’s Club, along with two-thirds of what would become the town’s notorious scandalous triangle—Catherine Wright, wife of the architect, and the latter’s mistress, Mamah Barthwick Cheney.

“I had a wonderful novel about Oak Park,” Hemingway informed an academic, Charles Fenton, in 1952, “and would never do it because I did not want to hurt living (sic) people….Nobody in Oak Park likes me I suppose. The people that were my good friends are dead or gone. I gave Oak Park a pass and never used it as a target.”

What irked Hemingway so much in later years about the place? Much of his ill-will was bound up inextricably with his feelings about his mother, who reflected the town’s moral conservatism.

Oak Park’s temperance bill, passed in 1872, lasted for a hundred years—even after the death of its most important native son—and Grace Hemingway lashed out at Ernest because of his drinking when he returned from World War I.

Hemingway blamed his mother for his father’s suicide in 1928. But her original sin, in his eyes, might have been the sexual ambivalence she instilled in him from an early age.

During my visit, I noticed a photo showing Hemingway in a blouse and his sister Marcelline in a pantsuit. Both had the same haircut. 

Until they were five or six, Grace—who had wanted a daughter when Hemingway was born--had the two siblings sleep in the same bedroom in two separate beds, play with identical dolls and with small china tea sets, and fish and hike together. For all intents and purposes, she treated them as twins.

In high school, Ernest took Marcelline to the prom as a date—a choice that might have been dictated by his mother.

In his posthumously published novel, The Garden of Eden, Hemingway’s protagonist is part of a bisexual ménage a trois, in a story that, biographers such as Kenneth Lynn now speculate, evince his longstanding fears of gender confusion.

Is it any wonder, as novelist John Dos Passos noted, that Hemingway was the only man he knew who really hated his mother?

But we can’t let the story end there.

Hemingway’s frequent subject matter—fishing, bullfighting, war, and other male rituals—led critics to regard him as a kind of glorified American primitive. But that is a stereotype at odds with his upbringing.

Hemingway came by his interest in these matters primarily through his father, who taught him the importance of ritual --i.e., doing everything correctly and in the proper order, including catching and cooking fish. 

(Dr. Hemingway, in wooing his future wife, took note of her lack of traditional feminine domestic skills by promising that she would never have to cook, and he was as good as his word for as long as he lived.)

But in his own way, Hemingway, though not as exposed to culture as much as, say, Henry James, probably grew up with as much acculturation in the arts as Willa Cather, whose work is permeated with it.

Grace Hemingway might have been something that her son loathed—a church lady—but she was a church lady with a decided artistic inclination that he inherited.

Before her marriage, she had hoped for a singing career. But as a victim of scarlet fever, she was sensitive to bright lights, rendering her debut a disaster.

(To console herself, she went on a cruise and bought 35 pairs of opera gloves, stopping at that point only because another glove would incur a tax.)

After marriage, Grace taught voice and served as a choirmaster. Her services were frequently employed in a number of the 40 churches in town at that point, meaning that she ended up making 10 times more than her husband, who often had to accept payment in whatever form his not-very-affluent patients could afford, including crops or chickens.

Hemingway’s birthplace actually belonged to Grace’s father rather than her husband. Upon her father's death a few years later, she used some of the proceeds from his estate to have a larger house built to her specifications (even though Clarence Hemingway was not sure the family could afford it). 

The new home featured a music studio and recital hall thirty feet square with a vaulted ceiling and a narrow balcony.

The Hemingway home featured an “imagination room”. Each of the children was taught an instrument and encouraged to tell stories, and several of Ernest's siblings became writers or artists in their own right.

A couple of other items in the Hemingway Birthplace and the nearby museum in his honor highlight other fascinating aspects of his childhood and youth:

* In the birthplace, a room for older children contains a series of pictures by famed magazine illustrator Maud Bogart, who used her son as a model for Little Jack Horner. That son, Humphrey Bogart, was the same age as Ernest Hemingway, and starred in the film version of the novel To Have and Have Not.

* At the age of two, Hemingway drew, on his father’s stationery, the following items: a giraffe, a sailor, two guns, Noah’s ark, a tree, a pipe, and a man on the moon—all testifying to his future love of adventure.

* As a little boy, Hemingway particularly loved his nicknames “Pecos Bob” and “Billy the Squirrel.”

* In high school, Hemingway’s writing was already drawing notice, with his compositions frequently read aloud in class as models. But he was widely regarded by classmates as “conceit(ed),” “carefree,” “unkempt,” and not especially popular with girls. The latter two traits were probably related, because right before starting classes, he would sometimes skin fish, and he might still reek of it by the time the school day began.