OAK PARK – Architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed his Oak Park, Ill., studio in a way that its entrance would be shielded from traffic noise on what soon became a noisy Chicago Avenue.
To do that he hid the entrance behind two rows of ornate columns and also built a nearly 4-foot-high porch banister with red Chicago brick.
The columns, in collaboration with artist Richard Walter Bock, were designed in repeated panels, each showing a stork flanking an architectural scroll below the tree of life. The art represented wisdom and fertility, according to a tour guide at Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio.
Also at the studio entrance Wright placed two replicas of Bock's sculpture, "Boulder," flanking the door at the roof line. The sculptures of a crouching man appearing to be bearing the weight of the world were cast in red-dyed concrete. The pose symbolizes humankind bound down by life.
Click here to continue reading about a tour of this attraction, which Wright abandoned in 1909.
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