The Unity Temple
Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright,
Built from 1905-1908 in Oak Park, Illinois
Purpose
This temple when built must comply with three conditions:
1. It must be adapted to the community.
2. It must be durable and permanent.
3. It must be beautiful.
- Reverend Johonnot, in his sermon “Building a Temple unto God”
Wright designed a Unitarian Church meant to fulfill the traditional purpose of worship as well as provide a space for community service, creating the Unity Temple for worship and the Unity House for community and secular activity. He sought to eschew traditional conventions for religious architecture in order to reflect a grounded, liberal religion focused on the people within it. Thus the building serves not only its immediate congregation, but their neighbors, and the community of Oak Park as a whole.
Having moved to Oak Park at 21, Wright was himself naturally invested into its community. The print source Oak Park: The Genius of Frank Lloyd Wright explores his personal involvement as well as his other architectural endeavors in the suburb—he was involved in a great deal many more buildings than just the Unity Temple here. It’s especially interesting seeing the progression from buildings he worked on under Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler to those he helmed himself, how his philosophy and vision of the community bled into the buildings he created for it.
Exterior Images
Notice here how the building interacts with the hill it rests on, stabilizing itself via contrary motion. Its composition of solely poured reinforced concrete further emphasizes a feeling of stability, an important aspect of Wright’s belief in the complementary relationships between people and God and people and Nature.
Though not visible in frame, the entrance to the building is immediately below this text. The threshold from exterior to interior is marked here by a very simple mission statement.
The interior
The main congregational area within the Temple. Note how intimacy is created by the arrangement and division of pews into smaller areas in close proximity to the altar, without sacrificing the feeling of grandeur that usually accompanies worshipful space.
This cross-sectional floor plan shows how the density of space within the Temple is accomplished. Click for detail.
This section shows how the verticality of the room is still experienced fully in spite of compartmentalizing the pew spaces. Click for detail.
The unity of the temple
In Emersonian Transcendentalism in Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple, Naomi Uechi outlines the relationship between Wright’s architectural design philosophy and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalism, especially in the Unity Temple. Again, Wright finds himself emphasizing religion rooted in nature and humanity, calling the Temple a “natural building for natural Man”. His belief that buildings should harmonize with the environment surrounding them especially struck me because the Temple seems so directly unnatural in its intense geometry. However, this seeming contrast is the harmonizing agent aesthetically and philosophically for much of the temple: it reflects and counterbalances its surrounding prairie environment externally, while symbolizing the divine perfection of God internally. Thus its pronounced simple geometry unifies Nature, Man, and God, all of whom Wright is persistent in capitalizing.
Where Wright seems to never fail in noting his capital N, M, and G’s, I learned in an ArchDaily article about the Temple that Wright is not so persistent in anticipating the more technical details of his buildings. An insufficient internal drainage system created to avoid marring the monumental appearance of the building with gutters led to damage throughout the concrete structure, so much so that there have had to be substantial restoration projects to preserve the Temple in the past few years. Furthermore, this is not a problem just with the Unity Temple’s experimental concrete design: Wright as an architect frequently ignored the suggestions of the engineers he worked with or more generally lacked foresight into his buildings’ structural longevity. A BusinessInsider article about Wright’s shortcomings in this department highlighted these realities with the Temple as well as a few of his other works.
Two interviews
Frank Lloyd Wright speaking on the Unity Temple (1958)
In this interview with WNET New York in 1958, you can hear Wright describing his lofty ideals regarding the Temple’s sense of space, internal and external, and how these influence the proper experience of the building. He particularly notes how the basic external features allow for more expansive internal space, which likely influenced his decision to go with the internal drainage system over traditional gutters.
In this interview with a mechanical engineer working on the geothermal systems in the 2015 Unity Temple restoration, Mark Nussbaum describes other pragmatic issues that led to the degradation of the temple over time, some of which Wright couldn’t possibly have anticipated. For example, the impact of internal humidity on external surfaces and the use of geothermal heating/cooling were not considerations in Wright’s time. He also describes adding modern conventions such as exit signs in addition to updating the already discussed drainage issues.
Mark Nussbaum, mechanical engineer for the Unity Temple Restoration (2015)
the music of the church
One thing I didn’t think about even when considering the uses/users of the Temple was what the minutiae of a typical service would look like: details down to the instruments used for worship music really matter in regards to the consistency of the building’s experience. A bulky traditional organ would clog up the space with pipes, requiring some compromise of visual form or extensive avoidance of making them visible. A digital organ perfectly fits the space, not only avoiding this design problem but also representing the modernity the Temple is a landmark of—it speaks volumes that the congregation would make such a choice in 1994 so consistent to the Temple’s original design philosophy, almost 100 years after the building’s initial construction.
Gallery
I chose these images from a flickr gallery because they show so vividly the relationship between geometry and light throughout the experience of the Temple, from entrance to joining the congregation. I find the two images from the perspective of pews/altar especially striking because of their incredible symmetry—if you keep your eyes at the top half of the photo while it changes to the next, apart from the shift from B&W to color they feel totally identical. It’s especially poignant that, in this way, the preacher and the congregation share the divine experience as shaped by the room.
This book I found through the UT Library is a case study on the Temple, showing its philosophy, construction, history, and technical realities through image and text. Written by Robert McCarter, a practicing architect and professor, it comprehensively studies the building from all angles.
Sources: text
Sommer, Robin Langley., et al. The Genius of Frank Lloyd Wright: Oak Park. Barnes & Noble Books, 2001.
McCarter, Robert. Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright. Phaidon, 1999.
Siry, Joseph M. Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Architecture for Liberal Religion. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Uechi, N. “Emersonian Transcendentalism in Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 7, no. 2, 2000, pp. 95–113., doi:10.1093/isle/7.2.95.
Blog, / UTUUC Restoration. “The Mechanics of Restoration: An Interview with Mark Nussbaum.” Unity Temple: Preservation Blog, 11 Oct. 2015, unitytemplepreservation.org/2015/10/11/the-mechanics-of-restoration-an-interview-with-mark-nussbaum/.
Perez, Adelyn. “AD Classics: Unity Temple / Frank Lloyd Wright.” ArchDaily, ArchDaily, 18 June 2010, www.archdaily.com/64721/ad-classics-unity-temple-frank-lloyd-wright.
Varinsky, Dana. “7 Things Frank Lloyd Wright, One of the Greatest American Architects, Got Wrong about Design.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 4 Aug. 2016, www.businessinsider.com/what-frank-lloyd-wright-got-wrong-2016-8.
My shoddy illustration of the Temple’s north face from Lake Street: I tried to capture how detail is compressed into its top third or so, which further has its detail compressed into its top third. This mimics some of the spatial compression inside the Temple, showing a continuity of style and purpose between interior and exterior.
Sources: images
Header image: No attributed photographer.
Exterior image 1: Andrew Pielage.
Exterior image 2: No attributed photographer.
Interior image: Tom Rossiter courtesy of Harboe Architects.
Plan and section: ArchDaily article, cited above.
Flickr gallery: all photos property of @archphotographr.