Frank Lloyd Wright: The Chicago Years with Professor Stephen Siek

In 1887, a 20-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright arrived in Chicago from his native Wisconsin to pursue his dream of architecture, and within three years he had become Louis Sullivan’s head draftsman. By the time Wright established his own firm, he was specializing in domestic architecture, an area often neglected by the leading architects of the day, and he was now determined to bring a new architecture to the American prairie—an architecture rooted in his philosophic beliefs concerning human nature. His first masterpiece, the Winslow House in River Forest, appeared in 1893, and scholar Grant Carpenter Manson once described it as an “amazing leap into the future.” This course—which presumes no prior knowledge—surveys Wright’s Chicago-area homes before 1910 (many of which have been beautifully restored) and examines some of the underlying philosophic premises that guided his architectural choices.