Winslow House

The issue of monumentality seems to have been equally problematic for both Sullivan and Wright. Sullivan had already used monumental form in his Getty and Wainwright tombs of the 1890s, but were they equally suitable to house the living? The initial solution seems to have turned on the doubly articulated formula of Classical and stone if Urban, and Gothic and shingle if rural. Wright who was virtually in charge of Sullivan´s domestic work after 1890, demonstrated this dual principle first in his own house, erected in 1889 in what was still the prairie of American mythology – the nascent Chicago suburb of Oak Park – and then in the Orientalizing, Italianate Charnley House that he designed with Sullivan for downtown Chicago in 1892. Wright´s own house was derived in both profile and plan as Vincent Scully has shown, from the cruciform and T-plan Richardsonian pyramid-shaped houses that Bruce Price was then building in Tuxedo Park, New York. El tema de la monumentalidad parece haber sido igual de problemático para Sullivan que para Wright. El primero ya había usado formas monumentales en las tumbas Getty y WainWright de la década e 1890, pero ¿eran igualmente adecuadas para albergar a los vivos? La solución inicial parece haber girado en torno a la fórmula doblemente articulada de `clásico y de piedra si es urbano, gótico y de teja de madera si es rural`. Wright -que prácticamente se hizo cargo de las obras domésticas de Sullivan a partir de 1890 – puso de manifiesto este principio dual primero en su propia casa, levantada en 1889 en llo que todavía era la pradera de la mitología norteamericana – el incipiente suburbio de Oak Park, a las afueras de Chicago-, y luego en la casa Charnley, de aire oriental e italiano, que diseñó cono Sullivan para un solar del centro de Chicago.