“The most we can do is to write — intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively — about what it is like living in the world at this time.” Oliver Sacks
Each September, many public buildings in Great Britain open their doors to the public. It is fun to snoop around places which are normally off limits to the plebs, like me. I went to Northampton to see the Guildhall and a house designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Derngate. First the townhall:
The Guildhall in Northampton where the mayor and council hold meetings.
Victorian Gothic architecture, with a few doors.
Door to a boardroom
Doors to the council chamber
More doors in the depths of the Guildhall
Moving on to Derngate, a slim Georgian townhouse built in 1815. Charles Rennie Mackintosh (CRM) remodelled the interior in 1916 in Art Deco style for a local businessman. This was the only house designed by CRM in England. After the First World War, he moved to France and died in London in 1928.
Number 78 – classic typeface. The triangles are a recurring theme inside. This door leads directly into the living room
The other side of the front door, protected by glass, hence the reflection
Living Room
Bedroom. George Bernard Shaw spent a night in this room. His hostess asked him if the decor interfered with his sleep. He replied, “Madam, I sleep with my eyes closed.”
Helen C. Peirce School of International Studies has some interesting mosaicsA door designed in 1750 by Giavanni Battista TIEPOLO in Italy, on show in the Art Institute. Gilt wood with yellow lacquer japanningBest fried shrimp in ChicagoDoors at the Chicago Cultural Centre, but look up to see the beautiful stained glass domeWrigley Building, above the door
Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned to design a house for Frederick C Robie on a plot of land close to the University of Chicago in 1908. Robie was keen to have an innovative architect to design a modern-style house for a family home. The resulting house sticks out like a sore thumb in Hyde Park – Prairie-style amidst the early Collegiate Gothic buildings of the university.
This model of the house can be seen in FLW’s Oak Park office.
FLW had some bizarre ideas about the placement of a house’s front door. It is not visible in this photograph – but it is beneath the chimney pots on the far side of the property. There is a long path from the street on the left of the shot. The doors on the right side of the building are for a triple garage (now this is the ticket office and shop). There is a back door and tradesman’s entrance just to the left of the garages.
The upper floor has a wall of glass doors, on the right of the photograph. Despite the open fireplace (it looked as though it would fill the house with smoke!), the Robie family needed to wear extra clothing indoors in winter.
The bathroom shower has nozzles spraying water from the sides. The chairs look funky but must have been very uncomfortable to sit on. The dining room has lights above each of the four legs and an electric buzzer to summon the housekeeper at the head of the table. The southern part of the house has windows shaped like the prow of a ship. All the metal light fixtures are reproduction, designed with painstaking care so that they create the same shadows on the wall as the original fittings.
FLW closed his Oak Park office in 1909 to go travelling in Europe, so he did not oversee the building of the Robie House. Unfortunately, the Robie family only lived there for 14 months (financial difficulties following the death of his father and marital discord). After two other owners, the house was bought by the Chicago Theological Seminary in 1926 and used as a dormitory. Mies van der Rohe rescued the house from demolition just before World War Two. It was bought by the University of Chicago and in 2002, the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust started work on restoring the house and contents. The work was completed in 2019 and it is wonderful. I urge you all to go and see it if you are interested in architecture and FLW in particular.
FLW is one of my favourite architects. He was a real maverick, not just in his innovative designs but also in his private life. At the end of the 19th century, he worked from his office in Oak Park in the western suburbs of Chicago. Sadly, FLW wasn’t a big door man; he often placed the main entrance in unobtrusive places, often on the side of the house, not the front.
Strange place to site the front door
Tourists enter the office via the portico shown in the centre of the photograph below.
FLW lived next door to the office. These interior shots are rather dull, but give an impression of the place.
You can do a walking tour around a dozen of the houses he designed in the “prairie style”. One house was modified by FLW after it had burned down, so it kept the church style windows (333).
Other houses in the area have incorporated elements of FLW design.
