Mark and I continue to enjoy exploring all of the wonderful treasures of the Chicago area, and we visited two recently…

On Fri. Aug 18^th, we headed to the North side of the city, to Lincoln Park (which is both a neighborhood and a park). Our first stop was the Lincoln Park Conservatory which is absolutely gorgeous (and free, which is a wonderful thing!). We enjoyed the huge variety of plants and flowers…so much lush greenery with so many unique leaf shapes and textures, and so many amazing colors on the flowers!

From there, it’s a short walk through the park and gardens to the Lincoln Park Zoo, which is also free. It’s not a huge zoo, given its urban location, but it’s really nicely done and more than we were expecting. Chicago also has a much larger zoo, Brookfield, in the suburbs – about 6x the acreage. The real benefit here is that you are much closer to the animals because the habitats aren’t as large. It’s probably not the best thing for the animals, but it’s certainly nice for the humans who visit them!

We chose this particular day for this trip because it was rehearsal day for the annual Chicago Air & Water Show which was being held over the next two days…we figured we could enjoy Lincoln Park and see some of the rehearsal since the primary location at North Avenue Beach is adjacent to Lincoln Park. While we were at the zoo, we could hear plenty of the ‘air’ portion of the show, and occasionally caught a glimpse of the planes. We took a detour from the zoo and found an open area closer to Lake Michigan where we had a decent view of the sky over the lake, and from there, we watched several minutes of “aerobatic” maneuvers. So glad I had my telephoto lens with me!

We finished up at the zoo and found our way to the Lily Pond at Lincoln Park, only to find it closed because of the Air & Water Show. We didn’t quite understand why the show would require the lily pond to close, but now we have an excuse to go back so we can see that, plus there’s lots more to enjoy at the 1,200-acre Lincoln Park – it’s actually 25% larger than Central Park in NYC! So we’ll definitely be back!

A week later, on August 25^th, we drove to the suburb of Oak Park. It’s about 10 miles West of Chicago and home to the largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright-designed buildings and houses, with 25 of them. So, you can probably guess why we went! We toured the two public Wright buildings there, Unity Temple and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home and Studio.

Unity Temple is one of the eight Wright buildings on the UNESCO World Heritage List (and we’ve now been to five of the eight!), and is the greatest of his public buildings from his years in Chicago. It was completed in 1909 and is built entirely of concrete due to the limited budget. It is recognized for the unprecedented use of reinforced concrete, and is thought of as the first “modern building” in the world!

It feels massive from the outside, and other than a little bit of ornamentation, seems pretty simple given that it’s all just gray concrete. But the inside is incredible! There are two distinct sections: Unity House which includes a meeting hall and classroom space, and Unity Temple where the main sanctuary or “auditorium” is located. It seats about 300 people in a square and on three levels. The building doesn’t resemble any of the traditional churches in Oak Park, which is why they named it “Unity Temple”. The windows, the clean, simple lines, and the beautiful light fixtures create a warm and welcoming space. It was a unique tour, in that it’s a functioning church, so we could sit, touch, wander, etc…things we can’t do when touring the ‘museum’ homes!

Our next stop was a few blocks away at the home and studio where Frank Lloyd Wright lived and worked for 20 years; it’s where he pioneered his Prairie style and produced more than a third of his life’s work. We had visited there once before in 2019, but our tour guide wasn’t great, so we decided to tour again…and we honestly had the best tour guide we’ve ever had at any FLW site – she was wonderful – we’re so glad we went back! The home itself, built in 1889, was largely influenced by his employer, Louis Sullivan. Wright was just starting to develop his prairie style, so the home doesn’t resemble his later works. It’s officially considered “shingle style”…but it includes many of the key elements of prairie, like geometric shapes. The studio was added in 1898, and is considered the birthplace of prairie-style architecture given all the design work that was done there. It’s much smaller, but much nicer than the studio we saw at Taliesen in Wisconsin.

The home has some amazing elements, like the children’s playroom with a massive barrel-vault ceiling and some beautiful ceiling panels…but the studio is the most impressive part of the property. Wright clearly wanted to ensure that his visiting clients would be impressed!

This past May, we visited Oak Park for the annual “Wright Plus Architectural Housewalk” where homeowners allow guests to tour their private homes. During that event, Mark and I toured three of the Wright-designed homes in Oak Park, plus several other that were designed by Wright’s contemporaries. Interior photos weren’t allowed, so here are the exteriors of the Wright houses we toured…it’s a beautiful suburb filled with amazing architecture all around!