In 1887 a twenty-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright arrived in Chicago from his native Wisconsin to pursue his dream of architecture. Within three years he had become Louis Sullivan’s head draftsman. By the time Wright established his own firm, he was specializing in domestic architecture—an area often neglected by the leading architects of the day—and he was now determined to bring a new architecture to the American prairie—an architecture rooted in his philosophic beliefs concerning human nature.

His first masterpiece, the Winslow House in River Forest, appeared in 1893, and scholar Grant Carpenter Manson once declared it the beginning of Wright’s “First Golden Age”—a house that constituted an “amazing leap into the future.”

This course—which presumes no prior knowledge—examines Wright’s Chicago-area houses before 1910 (many of which have been beautifully restored), stressing the underlying philosophic premises that guided his architectural choices.