![]() End the day with a visit to one of Wright’s American System-Built homes (1916). Drive to the excellent Milwaukee Art Museum to see the Prairie School Archives, with free time for the collection of European and 20th-cent. The Unitarian Meeting House (1946) is distinguished by its soaring copper roof and glass-prowed sanctuary. 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). The Romeo and Juliet Windmill and several homes and farms designed for members of Wright’s family are also seen from the exterior. Here he established the Taliesin Foundation to train architects Hillside School (1932) exemplifies Wright’s break away from the ‘Victorian box’. ![]() Set in the beautiful Wisconsin countryside just outside Spring Green lies Wright’s former home and studio, Taliesin. Stop en route in Rockford to visit the Laurent House, commissioned in 1951 by Kenneth and Phyllis Laurent and their home until 2012. Morning flight to Chicago and from there continue by coach to Madison. Kentuck Knob (Wright 1953), a hexagonal building with panoramic views of the Pennsylvanian countryside, now owned by Lord Palumbo. 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). 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. Drive out to Fallingwater, quintessential Frank Lloyd Wright (1936). End with a cable car ride up the Duquesne Incline.įallingwater, Kentuck Knob. ![]() The Carnegie Museum of Art has an extensive and varied collection including the Heinz Architectural department, European and contemporary art. Richardson’s Allegheny Courthouse, the Mellon bank building and Philip Johnson’s PPG Place. Begin with a walk around Pittsburgh passing H.H. Carnegie, Frick and Mellon, great patrons of the arts, all made their money here before moving to the East Coast. 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Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers, Pittsburgh is modern, dynamic, sleek, the smoke and steel of the past having been replaced by glass and aluminium. 4.45pm (British Airways) from London Heathrow directly to Pittsburgh, arriving c. Please scroll further down to view the itinerary for 2024. In contrast to these urban scenes, the tour meanders through the gently prosperous mid-western countryside of three states, staying in the leafy university town of Madison sited on the isthmus between two lakes, and finishing at Mies’s sublime Farnsworth House on the banks of the Fox river. Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee art museum, spreading out over Lake Michigan, bears equal testament to that city’s revival. Beautifully sited on the confluence of two rivers, Pittsburgh epitomises American self-belief and its capacity for self-regeneration, and is unrecognisable from its former ‘rust-belt’ image. Little wonder that it became so natural a home to the New Bauhaus and Mies van der Rohe, through whose elegantly sparse work Chicago’s influence extends to this day.Īs well as building, Chicago’s citizens collected and the Chicago Art Institute quickly established itself as one of the great galleries of America a status shared by the Carnegie collection in Pittsburgh where the tour begins. Following the fire of 1871, it reinvented itself as the first modern metropolis, with the ‘Chicago School’ developing the technical means for, and artistic expression of, a new kind of city, and of course, the skyscraper. Carl Sandburg’s ‘City of Big Shoulders’ is still the continent’s most enjoyably assertive and distinctly ‘American’ city. That Chicago was the centre of Wright’s sphere is no coincidence. Exteriors stress continuity with nature, and brilliantly amplify their location be it the Wisconsin hills of Taliesin, or the Pennsylvanian gorge of Fallingwater. Interiors merge inside and out, with their fluid plans reverently anchored by their great hearths. ![]() Wright embraced the Arts and Crafts, Japanese art and architecture, as well as the material advances of steel and concrete cantilevers to ‘break the box’. Frustratingly, visiting his work makes this seem fair: in an extraordinarily long career Wright created a modern organic architecture infused with the artistic freedom and reverence for nature of his nineteenth-century American inheritance. Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959), his own greatest admirer, said he had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. ![]()
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