Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings in Oak Park

Map of 5 locations in Oak Park, Illinois

Oak Park holds the densest concentration of Frank Lloyd Wright's early work anywhere, and most of it is still lived in. This gathering follows the arc from the 1892 houses he took on privately while drawing for Adler & Sullivan, through the first fully worked-out Prairie plan, to the reinforced concrete church he built after his congregation's wooden one burned. Only two of these can be entered; the rest are read from the sidewalk, so each entry says what is visible from outside and what the record proves about it.

Places in this collection

  • Charles E. Roberts Stable — Wright's 1896 work here was alteration rather than new build, reworking an existing stable for a client whose house he also remodelled that…
  • Thomas H. Gale House — One of the 1892 "bootleg" houses Wright designed on his own account while still employed by Adler & Sullivan, work he was contractually not…
  • Oscar B. Balch House — Wright had left his family and Oak Park for Europe in 1909; the Balch House, 1911, was the first commission he took after coming back. The…
  • Frank W. Thomas House — Built in 1901, this is generally read as the first house in Oak Park where Wright assembled the whole Prairie vocabulary at once rather tha…
  • Unity Temple — Wright's Unitarian Universalist congregation lost its wooden church to a lightning fire, and he answered with poured reinforced concrete, e…

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