When Henry Ford introduced the Model T automobile in 1908, it was an immediate hit – so much so, that within a few months, he was unable keep up with demand at his original plant. In 1909, he told his dealers to stop taking orders until he could catch up.
Oak Park, Illinois (15 miles from the Robie House)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in Oak Park, Illinois was Wright’s personal residence and office from 1889-1909. While the home’s peaked rooflines predate the horizontal planes of Wright’s famous prairie style, it was here that he began to germinate his big ideas about a new American architecture.
Oak Park also has the world’s largest collection of buildings designed by Wright, many of which you can view on guided or self-guided tours.
Throughout the 19th century, home design in America took its cues from our European ancestors: Gothic revival cottages, Victorian mansions, Italianate villas. Pointy, gabled roofs were the rule, and interior space was chopped into small, boxy rooms.
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705 Olive (Union Trust) Building
In addition to the Wainwright, Louis Sullivan designed two other buildings in St. Louis, one of which still remains. To see it, walk two blocks north of the Wainwright Building to the 705 Olive Street Building (formerly known as the Union Trust Building), which was completed in 1893, two years after the Wainwright.
When financier Ellis Wainwright asked Louis Sullivan to design a new, tall office building in St. Louis, it wasn’t the very first skyscraper ever built. That distinction had already been achieved just a few years earlier in New York and Chicago, as new skeleton frame building methods had made taller buildings possible.
After the Civil War, America was ready to rebuild, put down roots, and establish a more solid and permanent built environment. But from an architectural perspective, the American landscape had so far been composed for the most part of copies of Old World forms: colonial Georgian churches, neoclassical public buildings, and Victorian homes.
As a founding father of the United States, Thomas Jefferson was passionate about America’s independence from Britain. He was no fan of the king of England and, by extension, no fan of the Georgian architecture that bore the kings’ name.
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From the state capitol building that first declared our architectural independence from Great Britain to an iconic Prairie-style home by Frank Lloyd Wright, from the factory that housed Henry Ford’s first Model T moving assembly line to the original indoor regional shopping mall, from H. H.
