Chapter 19: ), his apprentice years as a builder of houses provide a very

significant episode that is closely related to the earlier story of the nineteenth-century house in England and America. By the late eighties a full-dress Colonial Revival was under way in the East. But it was the particular combination of freedom and order that had been achieved by Richardson in his latest houses, by McKim, Mead & White in their Low house, and by Price in his Tuxedo houses which was the immediate tradition from which Wright’s domestic architecture grew far more than the work of Sullivan.

Figure 28. Bruce Price: Tuxedo Park, N.Y., Tower House, 1885-6
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Born in 1867, Wright had had some two years in the Engineering School—there was no architectural school—at the University of Wisconsin when he came to Chicago at the age of twenty in 1887. He first found work in the office of Silsbee whom Wright’s uncle Jenkin Lloyd Jones had brought to Chicago a year or two earlier to design All Souls’ Unitarian Church, of which he was minister. The young architect’s first work, nominally a Silsbee commission, was the Hillside Home School built in 1887 for his aunts near Spring Green, Wisconsin. This was a rather provincial specimen of a Shingle Style house and was later demolished by Wright himself.

Shifting over the following year to the Adler & Sullivan office, Wright by 1889 was married and ready to build a house for himself on the strength of a five-year contract with his new employers. This house, at 428 Forest Avenue in Oak Park, Ill., still extant but much pulled about, derives almost entirely from Price’s cottages at Tuxedo except that the plan is much less formal. In the interior, the wide openings between the rooms are not framed by architraves but seem to have been produced by pulling back the walls beneath the continuous frieze. In this treatment, rather Japanese in concept, Wright would seem to have been influenced by White’s handling of the hall of the Newcomb house, even though that is rather Japanese also in some of the detailing and Wright’s is not.

Wright’s next important work is the James Charnley house at 1365 Astor Street in Chicago, built in 1891-2. This was actually a commission of the Adler & Sullivan firm, but one of which he had entire charge. A city house built of tawny Roman brick like that used for the court of the Boston Public Library, this is as formal[343] as anything McKim, Mead & White had yet designed. But there is no High Renaissance or Colonial reminiscence whatever in the external detailing. The Charnley house is rather a conscientious attempt to emulate in a modest three-storey residence the highly original design of Sullivan’s newly completed Wainwright Building in Saint Louis.

Wright was also accepting various private commissions on the side, mostly very small ones, by this time. The George Blossom house of 1892 at 4858 Kenwood Avenue on the south side of Chicago, however, is of more consequence. Externally, this follows rather closely McKim, Mead & White’s Taylor house in the curved Ionic entrance porch and the recurrent Palladian windows, not to speak of the use of yellow-painted clapboards and white-painted trim of simplified academic character. Even the plan is for the most part symmetrically ordered. But behind the formal range of entrance lobby and two small corner rooms at the front the whole centre of the house opens up as a single great living-hall. In this living-hall a wide ingle-nook is lined up on axis with the entrance, the elaborate staircase rises in several flights across one end, and wide openings connect with the library and the dining room. The dining room, which ends in a curved bay with a continuous window-band, is almost a copy of the original library of Richardson’s Sherman house. In another Wright house of 1892, that for A. W. Harlan, also on the south side of Chicago, at 4414 Greenwood Avenue, which Sullivan happened to see, he recognized his assistant’s hand and this brought about the break between the two before Wright’s contract ran out.

When Wright set up for himself in 1893 there were two paths open to him. That he actually considered following the path of Academic Reaction, so heavily publicized by the success of the World’s Fair, is evident from his project of this year for a Library and Museum in Milwaukee (see