Oak Park, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home and Studio, and All the Sights of Chicago at ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2024 by Kailyn Slater

Article originally published in the March/April 2024 issue of Archival Outlook.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in Oak Park, Illinois. Courtesy of Oak Park Public LIbrary Special Collections.

This summer marks the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark restoration of the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, located at 951 W. Chicago Avenue in Oak Park, IL. Wright is best known for founding the Prairie School style of North American architecture and designing homes for wealthy businessmen and institutions throughout the United States. The most concentrated grouping of such homes exists in Oak Park.

Promoting and maintaining Wright’s legacy is hugely important to the history and infrastructure of Oak Park, a village known for its vibrant arts community and proximity to Chicago. The 1977 plan for restoration of Wright’s home and studio, particularly for use by the public, demonstrates a storied history of engagement by the community of Oak Park through public programming, access to research, and stewardship of history.

Wright purchased the land in 1889 to raise his family and build a studio for himself and fellow Prairie School associates. In 1911, Wright converted the studio into a residence for his wife and younger children, who lived there until 1918. Throughout the twenty years of its active use, Wright and Prairie School architects designed more than 150 projects, including the Unity Temple and the Cheney Mansion.

Wright’s home and studio had various owners from 1918 to 1972 and fell into disrepair in the 1960s. After much community discussion concerning the property’s restoration and continued conservation, the buildings were purchased in 1974 by the Oak Park Development Corporation. The Village of Oak Park, in partnership with the newly-formed Frank Lloyd Wright Home & Studio Foundation, subsequently secured its designation as a National Historic Landmark in 1975. The Foundation was formed with the expressed purpose of restoring and conserving the home and studio, describing the property as a “compilation of Wright’s evolving design attitudes,” and the twenty-year tenure in which he worked there as a “period of continuing functional adjustment and aesthetic refinement . . . from the experimental efforts of the 1890s through the mature Prairie style of the early 1900s” in their Restoration Committee’s 1977 Plan for Restoration and Adaptive Use of the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio.

Photographs and research materials by local artists Gilman Lane and Grant Manson were utilized to compile this formal plan for restoration. These collections have been maintained by Special Collections at the Oak Park Public Library since the early 1970s. Special Collections also retains some of Wright’s manuscripts and the Wasmuth Portfolio, the first publication of Wright’s work internationally—a dynamic collection of plans and linepoint perspectives of Prairie School architectural projects dated 1893 to 1909. These buildings are now located across the United States in Illinois, Wisconsin, New York, Iowa, Ohio, and Montana. Marion Mahony Griffin, one of the first licensed female architects and an original member of the Prairie School, rendered approximately half of the Wasmuth Portfolio plans.

A handwritten note card detailing a list of different photos and illustrations from the Office of Frank Lloyd Wright. Courtesy of Oak Park Public Library Special Collections.

Oak Park is a great place to be creative, curious, and connected with many public institutions, like the Oak Park Public Library, Oak Park Art League, Park District of Oak Park, and the Oak Park-River Forest Museum. Modern American author Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park in 1899. The Hemingway Foundation maintains the home where he was born and gives regular tours of the property. Special Collections at the Oak Park Public Library houses various Hemingway ephemera and rare books for the Foundation, including essays Hemingway wrote while he lived in Oak Park and childhood photographs.

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Home and Studio’s restoration, the ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2024 Host Committee is inviting annual meeting attendees to embark on limited-capacity repository tours of Special Collections at the Oak Park Public Library and Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in August. Conference attendees are also invited to go on self-guided tours of the eight Frank Lloyd Wright homes situated throughout Oak Park, and are encouraged to visit for more information. There are plenty of cultural sites, restaurants, and shops to explore around downtown Oak Park before or after the tours:

Cultural attractions

• Ernest Hemingway’s Birthplace Museum — 339 N. Oak Park Avenue
• Oak Park Conservatory — 615 Garfield Street
• Oak Park Public Library— 834 Lake Street (Main branch), 845 Gunderson Avenue (Maze branch), 255 Augusta Street (Dole branch) https://oppl.org/
• Lake Theatre—1022 Lake Street
• Pleasant Home—217 Home Avenue

Dining

• Hecho en Oak Park—1053 Lake Street
• Khyber Pass—1031 Lake Street
• Kribi Coffee—149 Forest Avenue (downtown), 905 S. Lombard Avenue (arts district)
• Little Gem Cafe—189 N. Marion Street
• New Pot Rice & Noodles—727 Lake Street #1406
• Wise Cup—1018 Lake Street