A linked pair of concrete blocks are carefully composed of a rich layering of austere vertical planes, cantilevered slabs, with windows placed high, recessed behind geometrically decorated piers. To any passerby of Unity Temple when it was finished in 1908 on a prominent street in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, it was a building that did not fit easily into any tradition. Its material, forms and architectural language did not seem familiar to the common typologies of the suburban church. Even to visitors some ninety years after its construction, it is a building that gives one a very long pause: a religious structure of great audacity, but one of supreme logic and lyricism. It is truly one of the most extraordinary of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings during one of his most precocious periods, 1900-1909, a decade one could argue that Wright was the most radical and advanced "modern" architect in the world. Unity Temple is one of the pivotal buildings in world architecture for which every last detail is worth knowing.
Joseph M. Siry, Associate Professor of Art History at Wesleyan University, has a proclivity for in-depth studies of single buildings, most notably his book Carson Pirie Scott: Louis Sullivan and the Chicago Department Store (1988). He has now turned his attention to Wright's Unity Temple. His new book incorporates material that he has previously published in articles in The Art Bulletin (June 1991) and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (September 1991). Siry is an architectural historian who clearly relishes primary research: finding every possible source related to his building and putting together the most accurate account of a building's conception, construction, and reception. He does not take the conventional interpretations of a building for granted, but places them under the scrutiny of a fresh examination of all the evidence. His research for Unity Temple is expansive, meticulous, and even at times obsessive; there are 84 pages of notes for the book's 250 pages of text. Even the notes make a good read for a dedicated Wrightophile as one sees the obscure sources that Siry plumbed, along with his often fascinating digressions on issues that did not make it into the text. There is only one source that this reviewer found overlooked in Siry's bibliography: David M. Sokol, "The Role of Women and the Influence of Universalist and Unitarian Feminist Thought on the Design of Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple," Southeastern College Art Conference Review 12, no. 2 (1992): 87-93 (Sokol's article is even a partial critique of Siry's Art Bulletin article). Siry's book has been exquisitely produced and edited. This reviewer did not come across a single factual error and found only one typo, a rarity these days.
One of Siry's most important scholarly contributions is exploring the liberal religious background that lies behind Unity Temple. Conventional modern architectural histories tend to emphasize Unity Temple's abstraction, functionalism, and experimental use of concrete. All of these remain major considerations in interpreting the building. However, Siry begins, where one should begin, with the basic fact that Unity Temple was built for a congregation of Universalists and Unitarians. This becomes more intriguing when Siry considers the religious background of Wright's family. Frank Lloyd Wright was the son of a preacher and the nephew of Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones. A powerful figure in Chicago's Unitarian community, Jones worked with the architect Joseph L. Silsbee to create unconventional home-like structures for All Souls Church in Chicago (1886) and Unity Chapel near Spring Green, Wisconsin (1886). Siry traces how Jones's building projects culminated with the austere block of the Abraham Lincoln Center in Chicago, a new home for his congregation that had withdrawn from the Unitarian denomination because Jones thought it was too constricting. The uncle turned to his nephew and between 1898 and 1903 Frank Lloyd Wright, in association with Dwight L. Perkins, presented several designs for the center. The uncle was as strong willed as young Frank. When the building was finally built 1903-05, Perkins was the sole "constructing architect" since Wright had had enough of his uncle. Nonetheless, as Siry shows, the conception of especially the auditorium of the Abraham Lincoln Center, seems to be almost a dress rehearsal of many of the essentials ideas for Unity Temple. Wright was not designing in a modernist vacuum, but attempting to respond to the constant criticisms and ideals of his uncle's conception of an appropriate auditorium for liberal religion. Siry includes such pithy quotes from Jones criticizing his nephew's preliminary designs as: "`Do not be fooled by your window gardening, for we are not in Italy. . . . In wintertime those ledges will simply catch snow drifts and form icicles to stain the walls below and crack them.'" (p. 41)
In a wonderful exercise in local history that has international implications, Siry carefully examines the religious landscape of Oak Park. Unity Temple was constructed during a building boom of protestant churches in Oak Park. Siry plots the significance of Unity's move to a corner lot at Lake Street and Kenilworth Avenue in relation to the other churches and public buildings in Oak Park. The predecessor to Wright's Unity Temple was the traditional Gothic Revival Old Unity Church (1872) which burnt down in 1905 when its soaring spire was struck by lightning. Siry's research has even disclosed that the spires of Oak Park churches were often hit by lightning at this time (Wright, always one to respond to nature, then builds a flat topped church--one [lesser] explanation).
Another major contribution of Siry's book is his thoughtful and multi-faceted examination of the genesis of Wright's design, particularly the choice of a cubic auditorium rather than a traditional longitudinal design with spire. Once more a strong religious figure eloquently stated his ideas about liberal religious space for which Wright found a progressive architectural expression Rev. Rodney Johonnot played a key role in the building of the new church and his pronouncements at this time seem echoed in Wright's later account of Unity Temple in his autobiography. Johonnot stated in 1906: "`Without tower or spire it expresses the spirit of the ideal. By its form it expresses the thought, inherent in the liberal faith, that God should not be sought in the sky, but on earth among the children of men.'" (p. 77) For such an overtly original building as Unity Temple, Siry establishes a convincing series of antecedents that are plausibly sublimated within Wright's design, from New England meeting houses to an Adler and Sullivan synagogue to seventeenth-century mausolea that Wright visited in Nikko, Japan in 1905. A central idea that Siry presents is that Unitarians and Universalists often did not build conventional churches during the nineteenth century; one only needs to look at such landmarks as Maximilian Godefroy's cubic First Unitarian Church in Baltimore (1817-18). Suffice it to say that a square auditorium with galleries was an established type for liberal religions in America.
Wright was chosen as the architect in September 1905 and presented his first designs that December. A design was accepted in March 1906, construction began that May, but the building was not completed until October 1908 (dedicated September 1909). The minutiae of design changes and the evolution of the plans are expertly chronicled by Siry, including an instructive analysis of Wright's unit system of design. One of the most compelling sections of a monograph on a single building is usually the section on the actual construction of the building, where paper dreams collide with reality. One of the high points of this book is Siry' examination of the reinforced concrete structure. Wright was truly experimenting as he was trying to come to terms with this material both structurally and aesthetically. In fact, he had twenty different test panels made to choose the appropriate external finish for the building. He finally settled on concrete with "an aggregate of finely screened bird's-eye gravel of neutral color" that was treated with an acidic wash after it was poured to expose the aggregate (p. 145). Although concrete was chosen for its economy, the final building cost nearly twice the contracted price. Another fascinating episode during construction is that the famous decorative scheme of the auditorium with its painted planes, wood bands, and lighting fixtures, all creating a rich three-dimensional plasticity through rectilinear patterns, was being rethought and enriched right up to the last year of construction by Wright.
Unlike some monographs on single buildings, Siry's book is not just a building history and description, but also an interpretation of the building. The final chapters examine Unity Temple within a broader discussion of religious architecture and modernity. The concept of "temple" is explored particularly in relation to Japanese, Mayan, and ancient Greek architecture. Siry's conclusions (as throughout the book) tend to be stated in spare and precise sentences: "Thus Unity Temple exhibited a resonance with primitive types, yet transcended such models to signify its cultural present." (p. 212) Sometimes, lengthy discussions of other buildings (such as Olbrich's Secession Building, 1898, in Vienna) do not move far from an exercise in comparison and contrast. Siry's discussion of "Unity Temple and the Prairie School" is curiously brief and unsatisfying--more of a story could have been told. His section on "Dutch Responses" dwells on Robert van't Hoff's Henny villa at Huis ter Heide (1916-18) and he concludes that this "villa was the first European building to reflect the influence of Unity Temple." (p. 232) Siry fails to mention Wright's unbuilt project for "A Fireproof House for $5000" published in the Ladies' Home Journal (April 1907) and the Wasmuth folio (1910); this concrete house project is more directly the source for the Dutch villa than Unity Temple.
The most interesting section at the end of the book explores Wright's changing interpretations of Unity Temple after 1925, where the architectural conception of space becomes more prominent. At times Wright seems to be trying to repackage his earlier works so that they are more prophetic of the modernism of the 1920s and 30s. Particularly poignant is a black ink drawing of Unity Temple that Wright had one of his apprentices draw in 1929 (Fig. 148); when compared with a 1906 rendering (Fig. 81, probably by Marion Mahony) from a similar vantage point the differences are dramatic. In the 1906 rendering Unity Temple's finely drawn masses are surrounded by trees and sprouting vegetation from its planters, while the 1929 drawing makes the building more dynamic and reduces it to stark planes of black and white devoid of a natural context--Mendelsohn has replaced the Japanese print (p. 238) Siry's book concludes with an Appendix on the "Care and Restoration of Unity Temple from 1909" where one learns that the resurfacing of the building's exterior and repainting of the interior have altered one's perceptions of the original building over the years (Although what one sees today is much more accurate than what one saw a few decades ago).
As with any book, more could have been examined. This particular reviewer would have liked to have seen more of a discussion of the issue of "monumentality." In photographs, Unity Temple appears to be one of the most monumental of twentieth-century buildings, but upon visiting, one is struck at how humanly it is scaled. Yet, concrete introduces the issue of a lack of scale, since one has dispensed with such tradition modules of visual measurement as the brick in a brick wall. Unity Temple shares with the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 one essential issue, a longing to create instant monuments in the seemingly instant city of Chicago and its suburbs. Another issue that could have received deeper analysis was the interior decoration of the auditorium in relation to the broader issue of geometric abstraction in the visual arts of the twentieth century. Even today when one is in the auditorium of Unity Temple it is hard to fathom that this is 1908. For such a carefully crafted book one is surprised to see that there is not an extensive historiographic study of the changing interpretations by critics and historians of Unity Temple over the past nine decades. was also left guessing as to how Unity Temple fits into the broader development of concrete buildings at the beginning of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, these criticisms are like throwing bird's-eye gravel against a reinforced concrete wall.
Joseph Siry is an exceptional architectural historian and this is a superior book. The topics that he has chosen to examine in his study of Unity Temple are thoughtfully conceived and rigorously researched. The illustrations are a visual feast, including drawings and photographs from various archives, particularly the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, as well as including many period illustrations from such diverse publications as Cement World. and the annuals of the All Souls Church In recent years there has been quite a trend towards monographic studies of single Wright buildings. Siry's book is one of the best and will make a worthy bookend to Jack Quinan's Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building: Myth and Fact (1987). Joseph Siry has written a book that is a model of scholarship as he unravels the story of one of Frank Lloyd Wright's most important creations: Unity Temple.