Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple

When we visited Graycliff, the summer home Frank Lloyd Wright designed for the Martin family, south of Buffalo, I bought a book called “Wright Sites.” Chicago area has several sites that are open to the public so we put a couple of addresses in Stanley and took off. We ended up at Unity Temple, designed by FLW in 1905 to replace a Unitarian Universalist Church destroyed by fire. The constraints were a small budget, a narrow lot on a busy street, and the need for a building to serve a variety of functions. He solved the budget issue by using reinforced concrete. The total cost was $40,000. The sanctuary seats 400 and no one is more than 45 feet from the pulpit because of the way the seats are tiered. The church has been in continuous use since 1908. The woman who gave the tour was an architecture devotee. She asked everyone where they were from and gave information on the architecture and architects in each place. She did a treatise on Irving Gill when we said we were from San Diego.

It was starting to rain so we just drove by the FLW house and studio in Oak Park, then drove back downtown to find a couple of Lutheran Churches and the Lutheran School of Theology. The latter is across the street from the University of Chicago so we drove around that campus, too.