Architecture & Design: Chicago, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania

Illinois, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania each hold a piece of Frank Lloyd Wright's career and the birth of the modern skyscraper.

In Chicago, students study the Chicago School through key projects such as the Montauk Building, the Auditorium Building and the Home Insurance Building, designed by William Le Baron Jenney and widely considered the world's first skyscraper. Walking tours led by the Chicago Architecture Center, including a “history of the skyscraper” route, take students past The Bean sculpture, up the Hancock Tower, and along the river to Mies van der Rohe's Lake Shore Drive Apartments. In Oak Park, students visit Frank Lloyd Wright's Home and Studio, and in Plano, Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House.

In Wisconsin, students visit the S.C. Johnson Administration Building and Research Tower in Racine, both designed by Wright, along with Wingspread, the house he built for Herbert Fisk Johnson. In Spring Green, students tour Taliesin, Wright's home and studio across its three iterations (1911, 1914, 1925), the fullest expression of his philosophy of organic architecture.

The trip closes in Pennsylvania at Fallingwater, designed in 1935 and completed in 1939 over Bear Run in Fayette County. Built largely from quarried sandstone found on the property, it remains the clearest expression of Wright's vision of architecture in union with nature.