Frank Lloyd Wright - and the Chicago School

Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959), his own greatest admirer, said he had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. Frustratingly, visiting his work makes this seem fair: in an extraordinarily long career Wright created a modern organic architecture infused with the artistic freedom and reverence for nature of his nineteenth-century American inheritance.

Wright embraced the Arts and Crafts, Japanese art and architecture, as well as the material advances of steel and concrete cantilevers to ‘break the box’. Interiors merge inside and out, with their fluid plans reverently anchored by their great hearths. Exteriors stress continuity with nature, and brilliantly amplify their location; be it the Wisconsin hills of Taliesin, or the Pennsylvanian gorge of Fallingwater. 

That Chicago was the centre of Wright’s sphere is no coincidence. Carl Sandburg’s ‘City of Big Shoulders’ is still the continent’s most enjoyably assertive and distinctly ‘American’ city. Following the fire of 1871, it reinvented itself as the first modern metropolis, with the ‘Chicago School’ developing the technical means for, and artistic expression of, a new kind of city, and of course, the skyscraper. Little wonder that it became so natural a home to the New Bauhaus and Mies van der Rohe, through whose elegantly sparse work Chicago’s influence extends to this day.

As well as building, Chicago’s citizens collected; and the Chicago Art Institute quickly established itself as one of the great galleries of America; a status shared by the Carnegie collection in Pittsburgh where the tour begins. Beautifully sited on the confluence of two rivers, Pittsburgh epitomises American self-belief and its capacity for self-regeneration, and is unrecognisable from its former ‘rust-belt’ image. Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee art museum, spreading out over Lake Michigan, bears equal testament to that city’s revival.

In contrast to these urban scenes, the tour meanders through the gently prosperous mid-western countryside of three states, staying in the leafy university town of Madison sited on the isthmus between two lakes, and finishing at Mies’s sublime Farnsworth House on the banks of the Fox river.

A number of the buildings detailed in the Itinerary are not usually open to the public and it is possible we will not be able to include everything listed.