Alternative placename: "The Harem"
House for Mr. and Mrs. Frank Wright Thomas, "The Harem" [Oak Park, Illinois] (1901)
Note: The following information concerning this project represents original research and analysis by John Geiger, and is based in his long and detailed study of the Frank Lloyd Wright literature as well as personal contacts with members of the Taliesin Fellowship and architectural historians. In addition, he added his own categories of building type and compositional form, as well as other points of consideration that he deemed important to understanding of the design.
Name of client: Thomas, Frank Wright.
Sobriquet or alternative place name: The Harem.
Design Status (as of 2011): Executed.
Occupancy form or use: HOUSING/Residential/Single Family.
Principal building materials: WOOD/Wood frame, stucco.
Number of drawings for this project detailed in the database: 16.
Drawing Number and Description
Roof type: Hipped2.
Note: Records a category devised by Geiger to classify the types of roof structure found in Frank Lloyd Wright projects. These terms were applied consistently through a choice list on Column [
ROOFTYPE] in Table MMTFDRAWINGS FILE, and may be searched.
Project Drawing Date Range
Note: Dates for preliminary and working drawings, as well as the start and completion of construction, appear here only when present in the database. Through careful study of original, reproduced, or published Wright drawings, John Geiger developed an elaborate granulation for design process dates and their attributions. Such information is largely available only for Wright projects dating from the mid-1930s until 1959. Sources were often footnoted by an alphanumeric system, but the references are sometimes missing from the locations where they were intended to be recorded; the relationship between footnote letter or numeral and reference is absent. In order to retain the presence of available information, citations are here shown grouped together in one comment field. Some understanding of the intended source may be discovered in remaining notes or frequently cited publications which appear in the comment field. The relevance of references provided by John Geiger can often be recovered through examination of the publications used in his research.See the list of principal bibliographical sources used for this purpose.
Date recorded by John Geiger for chronological sorting: April 14, 1901.
Working drawings date September 14, 1901.
Notes And References
Comments by John Geiger and/or sources of attribution (a) GEO0106 I have written about Thomas in WP/JGGOE2. Geiger 08/20/00 (1) Drawing .003 signed this date. Pfeiffer, Bruce Brooks and Futagawa, Yukio. Frank Lloyd Wright Monograph 1887-1901 (Volume 1) (Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita, 1986), p. 180, fig. .
Note: The information shown above is collected from a series of data table columns intended originally to record not only comments or notes, but also to cite sources of attribution for dates assigned to the various stages of drawing preparation in the design process. As with any primary archival source material, the references and sources of attribution shown here should be consulted where possible to affirm the data provided.
This commission is referenced and/or illustrated in the following publications:
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. In the Nature of Materials: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright 1887-1941. Boston, Mass.: Da Capo Press.
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. In the Nature of Materials: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright 1887-1941. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce.
Pfeiffer, Bruce Brooks. Frank Lloyd Wright Monograph 1887-1901 (Volume 1). Tokyo: A. D. A. Edita. [ISBN: 4-87140-512-5].
Wright, Frank Lloyd. Buildings, Plans and Designs. New York: Horizon Press. [ISBN: 0790979667].
Wright, Frank Lloyd. Frank Lloyd Wright: Drawings and Plans of Frank Lloyd Wright, The Early Period (1893-1909). New York: Dover Publications, Inc.. [ISBN: 0-486-24457-1].