Frank Lloyd Wright - and the Chicago School

Flights from London are not included. The tour begins at the Kimpton Hotel Monaco in Pittsburgh and your room is available from 4.00pm on day 1. The tour leaders fly from London on a British Airways flight departing Heathrow at c. 5.00pm on this day should you wish to join them. There is an airport transfer to meet this flight. See ‘Practicalities’.

Set between the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers, Pittsburgh is modern, dynamic, sleek, the smoke and steel of the past having been replaced by glass and aluminium. Carnegie, Frick and Mellon, great patrons of the arts, all made their money here before moving to the East Coast. First of three nights in Pittsburgh.

Drive out to Fallingwater, quintessential Frank Lloyd Wright (1936). In a spectacular setting amongst the woodland of Bear Run nature reserve, the house seems to grow from, and float above, the water and rocks. You will see not only the waterfall but experience it from inside the house; ‘the most sublime integration of man and nature’ (New York Times). Kentuck Knob (Wright 1953), a hexagonal building with panoramic views of the Pennsylvanian countryside, now owned by Lord Palumbo.

Begin with a walk around Pittsburgh passing H.H. Richardson’s Allegheny Courthouse, the Mellon bank building and Philip Johnson’s PPG Place. The Carnegie Museum of Art has an extensive and varied collection including the Heinz Architectural department, European and contemporary art. End with a cable car ride up the Duquesne Incline.

Morning flight to Chicago and from there continue by coach to Madison. Stop en route in Rockford to visit the Laurent House, commissioned in 1951 by Kenneth and Phyllis Laurent and their home until 2012. The Unitarian Meeting House (1946) is distinguished by its soaring copper roof and glass-prowed sanctuary. First of two nights in Madison.

Set in the beautiful Wisconsin countryside just outside Spring Green lies Wright’s former home and studio, Taliesin. Here he established the Taliesin Foundation to train architects; Hillside School (1932) exemplifies Wright’s break away from the ‘Victorian box’. The Romeo and Juliet Windmill and several homes and farms designed for members of Wright’s family are also seen from the exterior.

Walk to the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center, a monumental civic building set on the shores of Lake Monona (based on Wright’s 1938 design, it was completed in 1997). Drive to Milwaukee and stop in Wauwatosa to visit the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church (1956). Continue to excellent Milwaukee Art Museum to see the Prairie School Archives, with free time for the collection of European and 20th-cent. American art. End the day with a visit to one of Wright’s American System-Built homes (1916). Overnight Milwaukee.

At Wind Point visit Wingspread: the expansive low-lying building designed for the head of the Johnson Wax Corporation. Continue south to Racine on the shores of Lake Michigan and the Johnson Wax Building built in 1936 with its half acre Great Workroom, unique mushroom columns and innovative use of glass. Drive further south still to Chicago; our hotel is in Burnham & Root’s restored Reliance Building, the first ‘skyscraper’ built in the 1890s. First of four nights in Chicago.

The morning walk looks at the outstanding monuments of ‘The Loop’ to which Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Sullivan and Frank Gehry have all contributed. Afternoon at the Chicago Art Institute, extended by Renzo Piano; the architectural courtyard contains several interesting pieces of sculpture and art glass from former Wright and Sullivan buildings. See also a reconstruction of Sullivan’s stock exchange trading room. Free time to enjoy one of the world’s great art galleries.

Drive to the South Side to the Mies van der Rohe-designed Illinois Institute of Technology (1940–56), with additions by Rem Koolhaas. Continue to the Robie House (FLW 1910); epitome of the Prairie Style. The afternoon is free; we suggest an architectural cruise along the Chicago River, or a walk along the Magnificent Mile.

In Oak Park visit Wright’s Chicago home and studio (1889) for 20 years and the birthplace of the Prairie School of architecture: ‘I loved the prairie by instinct as a great simplicity… I had an idea that the horizontal planes in buildings, those planes parallel to earth, identify themselves with the ground, make the building belong to the ground’. The surrounding residential streets are home to a number of Wright designs and his Unity Temple (1905).

Drive at midday into the Illinois countryside to Plano. Here, built beside the Fox River, is one of Mies van der Rohe’s most significant works, the Farnsworth House (1951). Continue to Chicago O’Hare airport, arriving by 5.45pm, in time for the suggested direct flight to London, departing c. 9.15pm.