archie
Sign in Get the app

Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio

Architect
Frank Lloyd Wright
City
Chicago, IL
Collection
wright’s chicago
Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio
Photo: John Delano, Attribution
See it on the map

Frank Lloyd Wright bought this Oak Park lot in 1889, shortly after marrying Catherine "Kitty" Tobin, and built a shingled house where the couple raised six children. Over the next two decades he kept altering it: adding rooms in 1895, then in 1898 attaching a separate studio to the north where he and his associates worked out the designs for dozens of buildings. The combined house and studio served as Wright's home and design laboratory through the years he developed the Prairie style, until he moved out in 1909.

the building

House versus studio. The two sections read as different buildings because they largely are: the house to the south, begun in 1889, follows the Shingle or Queen Anne style typical of the period, while the 1898 studio addition to the north is worked in Wright's emerging Prairie idiom. Walking from one to the other traces Wright's own stylistic development in real time.

The 1898 studio annex. Wright built the north studio as a working design office, and it was here that he and his associates produced dozens of building designs during the two decades he lived on the property.

the style

The property spans two styles because Wright built it in pieces as his own architecture changed. The 1889 house is Shingle style or Queen Anne, the conventional residential vocabulary of the era; the 1898 studio is Prairie style, the horizontal, ornament-stripped idiom Wright was inventing at the time. Few buildings anywhere show that transition under one roof.

the architect

Wright designed and lived in this house and studio during the two decades that took him from a young architect to the developer of the Prairie style, using the 1898 studio to produce dozens of building designs with his associates before leaving the property in 1909.

More on Frank Lloyd Wright

significance

The building is a National Historic Landmark and is individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and it is also a contributing property to the Frank Lloyd Wright–Prairie School of Architecture Historic District. The Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust restored it to its 1909 appearance, the year Wright moved out, and now operates it as a house museum.

more by Frank Lloyd Wright

nearby

All 382 buildings in Chicago