There’s a guy in my yoga class who won’t sit on a plastic chair. He doesn’t like plastic—not plastic utensils or water bottles or the purple foam blocks we use in class for support when attempting a tricky posture. He prefers natural materials, like wood or stone or metal. He’s more of an Arts and Crafts type of guy. Until I moved to Chicago I thought arts and crafts meant paper maché and decoupage, potholders and mosaicked candleholders.

In Chicago and anywhere else, Arts and Crafts refers to a particular style of design that usually starts and ends with Frank Lloyd Wright, a name I knew like the names Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keefe—a popular great American artist—a name so familiar and popular that I made it a point to feign paying homage at the all you can eat American culture buffet. But since I was now living in a bungalow, a close relative of the Craftsman style, I thought it was time to become better acquainted with this favorite son of Chicago.

Things from your life

It is far more fascinating to come into a room which is the living expression of a person, or a group of people, so that you can see their lives, their histories, their inclinations, displayed in manifest form around the walls, in the furniture, on the shelves.

…A hunting glove, a blind man’s cane, the collar of a favorite dog, a panel of pressed flowers from the time when we were children, oval pictures of grandma, a candlestick, the dust from a volcano carefully kept in a bottle … spiked sea shells with the hum of the sea still in them.—Pattern 253 from A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

Architecture aficionado friends from Minneapolis were visiting with their nine-year-old son, Isaac, which offered a perfect excuse to drive out to the western suburb of Oak Park, where Wright lived and worked from 1889 to 1909. We could tour Wright’s house and studio. A volunteer docent-led tour is the only way to see these spaces—literally–you can’t enter the house or studio otherwise. But before you step inside the wood shingle-style house, there are a few housekeeping items to go over: No smoking. No food or drink. No cell phones. No photography. No photography with cell phones. No backpacks, bags, or umbrellas. No firearms. No fireworks. No running. Purses must be carried in front or checked. No gum chewing. No headphones. No rap music. No extreme woofers. No cleats, tap shoes, lug-soled boots, or lugheads. No touching. No heavy petting. No Mid-century modernists, no Greek revivalists. No bric-a-brac, gingerbread, or crocheted doilies. The docent glared preemptively at our nine-year-old. Isaac is lanky with long, fine, curly blonde hair, given to exuberant bounding and bouncing, like a blonde Irish setter, only smart and funny. “NO touching.” She reiterated.

Now we could enter.

After that kind of buildup, we were ready for the gates of heaven or Oz to open, and the house is certainly impressive. Wright worked out design concepts in his own living space, using the house as a cocktail napkin sketchpad, remodeling and adding on, and building an adjacent studio where he developed what became known as the Prairie Style of architecture–his response to the horizontal landscape of the Midwest prairies.

But this was Wright’s home, where he lived with his first wife and six kids. The adjoining kids’ bedrooms with the partial dividing wall that would allow for the lively exchange of pillows between the two rooms got a big thumbs up from Isaac, as did the barrel-vaulted playroom with built-in bench seating, fireplace, ceiling wood light screen, and the loft where an audience could be seated for performances or kids could dangle precariously over balconies. Our guide pointed out that the seating and ceiling height of the loft were kid-sized. “Can I go up there?” inquired our kid Isaac. No. No kids allowed in the kid space.

Back on the first floor we are allowed to peek into the dining room with Wright’s trademark quarter-sawn oak tall back chairs that match the quarter-sawn oak table. The chairs look monstrous, the seats low to the ground, and the tall tall square spindle backs rising above the head of anybody seated to form a narrow rail fence around the table. Isaac said it for us all, “If I sat in one of those chairs, I would feel like I was in jail.”

Our guide referred to the table and chairs as an example of Wright’s “room within a room” design aesthetic; that the chairs around the table create an intimate setting, a cozy little enclosure—or a noose.

It’s no secret that Wright was a bit of a design terrorist. He considered building, site, and furnishings as part of a whole, He designed the furniture and lighting for his houses, windows, doors, and specified wall color, and even the art to be displayed in the rooms he created. He repeated motifs in lockstep, such as lotus flowers, butterflies, and sumac trees in carpets, windows, and lamps. In fact, he would have preferred that clients not mess up his designs with their crappy stuff.  “…the houses were…painful to me after the clients brought in their belongings,” he wrote in his autobiography.

As my young friend Isaac was suggesting, there is a certain discomfort in Wright’s inclusive intentionality, his designs are personalized to the extent that we may feel alienated and excluded. How do real people live in Wright’s houses–these museums to his aesthetic–with their clutter and fingerprints, television poodle lamps and collections of glass clowns?

After we moved into our dirty brick Chicago bungalow, neighbors were quick to let us know that our house had an interesting recent history. A schoolteacher had lived in the house all of her life. The schoolteacher’s parents bought the house in 1927 from the architect who designed it. Every detail, from the wallpaper, to the matching brass sconces in the living room, to the color of the paint on the moldings, was specified in the home’s original blueprints. Interesting that our bungalow was designed with similar precision and attention to detail as practiced by Frank Lloyd Wright. The story was that when the schoolteacher retired, she became a recluse, rarely leaving the home. Neighbors never saw her. When she died, the executor of her estate, a cousin from California, came to town. The house was filled with artifacts and mementos along with piles of garbage and junk—years of old newspapers, canned goods, the original one-legged porcelain cast iron kitchen sink, ticket stubs, a wall-mounted green glass cup and toothbrush holder.

The cousin believed that our modest little bungalow was a valuable period-perfect relic of a time past. He spent four years cleaning out the house and trying to rally support from the city and various historical societies to convert the house into a bungalow museum while the twenty-seven heirs licked their lips and tapped their toes in anticipation, “Where’s mine? Where’s mine?” A court order forced the museum-minded executor to sell.

I like our little bungalow better after hearing its story. Our schoolteacher, with her piles and collections, would most likely not have been an ideal tenant for a Frank Lloyd Wright House. Most of us would be too messy and complicated, too much of ourselves to live in a Wright house. As we pile up our plastic chairs and sea shells, so Frank Lloyd Wright collected the astonishing things of his life: tall back chairs that frame our coming together, colored glass that changes the way we look out, buildings that have meaning beyond their making.

Back in Oak Park, our guide points out a display of geometric wood blocks on one of the built-in shelves in the children’s playroom. These are Froebel building blocks, Wright’s favorite toy as a kid. “For several years I sat…and played…with the cube, the sphere and the triangle—these smooth wooden maple blocks…All are in my fingers to this day.” And all are still relegated exclusively to his fingers alone. Isaac has to shove his hands in his pockets to refrain from touching this thing from Frank Lloyd Wright’s life.

Photo by Flickr user functoruser