It’s been a strange visit with my friend Robb, as he’s been
extra busy with his classes and class prep (he warned me this would be the
case), leaving me for the most part on my own during the days, other than the
company of his large-eyed cat Squid, who finally seems to be letting me walk
around the apartment without hissing at me.
My first several days in Chicago were grey, cold, and either threatening
or pouring rain, keeping me within range of some roof and coffee cup
(fortunately there are several such in the neighborhood), but at length on
Monday the tenement bricks glowed yellow in the sunshine, and I set out to do something
I’d never done when I lived here: walk the Frank Lloyd Wright region of Oak Park.
It was a long drive straight West in the Miata, through
Chicago and more Chicago, each urban ring outward from the city center growing
more impoverished, until pop! I was
in Oak Park, a separate town, and immediately surrounded by quiet, tree-shaded
lanes and immaculate, magnificent homes.
In addition to his home and studio—a black, forbidding
structure mingling witchy peaked roofs, weathered shingles, octagon bays and cement
pediments—which was the architect’s headquarters in his early career and which
has been restored and opened for tours, the Oak Park neighborhood boasts over a
dozen of Wright's houses, a sort of collected 3D portfolio showing his growing
mastery of the “Prairie Style.” You can
pay for audio-guided tours, but I was equipped with an online guide (https://chicago.curbed.com/maps/oak-park-frank-lloyd-wright-walking-tour),
which displayed a little buggily on my smartphone, and I decided to guide
myself. It was a clear, very cold
October morning, the sun low, the autumn trees still full and alight like colored
stained glass, the quiet streets almost deserted, and after parking my Miata
for free at the curb I strolled happily around a roughly 20-square-block area,
hunting out the Wright houses. It was a pleasure just to be out in the Fall air.
I did try to take photos of the houses, more or less discreetly (they're private homes, but surely the occupants are used to living in a kind of photographic
zoo); unfortunately I was forever pointing my iPad camera into the low sun, and
really the website linked above contains better images than any I was able to get. Still, here’s a sampling of some I encountered
that came out okay:
The William E. Martin House
The Edward R. Hills House
The Nathan G. Moore House
The Arthur B. Heurtley House
The Frank W. Thomas House
When I was last in Chicago, in my mid-20s, I was wont to
roll Frank Lloyd Wright into an ideological whole with Ayn Rand, of whose fictional
philosophy I was then enamored, and attach an invisible quality to his work
that was something like a battle cry. A
vague sort of connection lingers in real life, mostly due to The Fountainhead, but it was interesting
to revisit his architecture 27 years on and see it stripped bare, as it were, of
those discredited politics, and evaluated for its own sake. I took the $18 tour of his home and studio,
in which the guide made several references to Wright’s legendary “arrogance,”
and I felt the script fumbling still for the Howard Roark button in the audience’s
heads, but I just smiled, for the truth I now see in his houses is a profound
humility, at least alone in the privacy of his workroom, the humility of the
artist before geometry, proportion, and rules of harmony and balance. His homes still broadcast a decisive
individuality that commands the eye, but the only battle I see them fighting
now is the age-old battle of the artist to touch the human spirit.
On the theme of arrogant artists who produced delicate work,
I discovered to my surprise that the Oak Park neighborhood also featured the
birthplace of Ernest Hemingway, a simple Queen Anne cottage that has been
preserved as a museum. Unfortunately it
was closed, but I was able to peek inside--for what that's worth.
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