Frank Lloyd Wright’s work is renowned across the country: Throughout his life, from 1867 to 1959, he designed more than 1,000 projects, ideating incredible feats like Fallingwater in Pennsylvania and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. But few places speak to Lloyd’s heart quite like Wisconsin.
In the southern part of the state, the 200-mile Frank Lloyd Wright Trail offers an intimate portrait of the influences and vision of the architect. Guided by freeway signs along Interstate 94 and U.S. Highway 14, travelers can admire his works along with the green hillsides and red barns that influenced his nature-embracing design philosophy. The nine works on this route aren’t necessarily a collection of his most iconic designs—the only spot on this list that’s also among his sites recognized by UNESCO is Taliesin—but they contextualize his grand ideas within his upbringing in the Midwest as a simple country boy of Welsh heritage. (He lived here for the first 20 years of his life.)
The route is best completed in the spring or summer, as many of these sites are open seasonally. The sites are within a day trip’s distance of big cities Madison and Milwaukee, making for a perfect weekend adventure in the region.
To understand just how meaningful this part of the country is to Wright, turn to an essay he penned titled “Why I Love Wisconsin”: “Wisconsin soil has put sap into my veins. Why, I should love her as I loved my mother, my old grandmother, and as I love my work.”
Spread across eight sites, these nine works can be found on Wisconsin’s Frank Lloyd Wright Trail.
1. Taliesin and the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center
- Visit: Costs vary depending on the tour, starting at $35; taliesinpreservation.org/tours
Frank Lloyd Wright designed hundreds of private homes throughout his 70-year career, but his own living space was something else. Not to be confused with his home in Oak Park, Illinois, or Taliesin West in Arizona, Taliesin is Wright’s 800-acre estate that was built in 1911. The house is on his favorite hill from childhood, and its name—meaning “shining brow” in Welsh—speaks to its location. Wright wanted to create a home that was on the “brow” of the hill rather than on top of it.
Taliesin is an amalgamation of Wright’s ideas, life events, and quirks. Chinese artwork depicting a mountain landscape in the living room space reflects the hills you see out of the nearby window. Through hallways that lead into large, open-layout rooms, Wright employs his hallmark “compression and release” principle, a deliberate technique that leads people from constricting spaces into large ones.
Wright designed a restaurant that would serve as a stop for tourists approximately two miles south of his home, which is now the Frank Lloyd Visitor Center. The building encourages guests to enjoy the surrounding area with elements such as expansive windows on the side by the Wisconsin River. Wright died before he saw it fully come to fruition in 1967.
Built for businessman Albert Dell German, the A.D. German Warehouse stored items such as sugar and flour until 1927.
Photo by Aaron of L.A. Photography/Shutterstock
2. A.D. German Warehouse
- Visit: $20 per person, $40 per person for private tours, adgermanwarehouse.org
In Richland Center (the city where Frank Lloyd Wright was born in 1867), the A.D. German Warehouse is the only warehouse designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Construction on the four-story, brick structure started in 1917 and finished four years later—costing more than four times the initial estimate of $30,000.
The warehouse features a striking decorative concrete cornice made up of rectangles and squares. Throughout many of his buildings, including some on this trail, Wright focuses on a shape throughout the entire property. The cornice is reminiscent of Mayan patterns and design; some scholars attribute the inspiration to his admiration of pre-Columbian architecture, while others attribute it to European design practices at the time.
Wright was enthusiastic about the Wyoming Valley School project, donating his design and two acres of land for it.
(Left) Photo by Jim Packett/Shutterstock; (right) Courtesy of WisconsinValleySchool
3. Wyoming Valley School
- Visit: $20 for adults, wyomingvalleyschool.org/tours.html
In 1956, the town of Wyoming, Wisconsin’s school board asked Frank Lloyd Wright to design a building that would consolidate six school districts in the area. The architect (who was also a resident of Wyoming) drummed up the one-story Wyoming Valley School, reportedly saying, “It’s just one of the things I plan to do around here to make this a wonderful valley.” Classic Wright touches include clerestory windows and panes that almost completely wrap around the building, as well as large fireplaces at the center of the assembly room. The hexagonal building houses two classrooms, an auditorium, a kitchen, and a teachers’ room.
Wright completed the school in honor of his mother, Anna Lloyd Jones, who was a kindergarten teacher and instilled Wright’s love of architecture early on: He said that his architectural designs were influenced by the wooden Froebel blocks his mother purchased for him in childhood. The school operated from 1958 until 1990. In 2011, it reopened as the nonprofit Wyoming Valley School Cultural Arts Center.
Tours at the First Unitarian Society Meeting House are available throughout the year.
Photo by Pamela Brick/Shutterstock
4. First Unitarian Society Meeting House
- Visit: $20 for adults; fusmadison.org/welcome/meeting-house/tours
Frank Lloyd Wright came from a family of Unitarians, and the First Unitarian Meeting House was Wright’s church. Designed in 1947 and constructed in 1951, the building features triangles as the main shape, with a triangular roof, triangular tables (also designed by Wright), and a “prow,” a glass and wood window structure on the southern side of the auditorium. With this shape, Wright wanted to give people an “expression of reverence.”
Throughout his career, Wright relentlessly pursued a design he dubbed “Usonian,” which celebrated open landscapes and the country’s natural materials. He insisted on completing the church using only natural stone and wooden two-by-fours, which tour guide Roberta Harriet Carnes says started a “cat and mouse game” between church contractor Marshall Erdman and Wright.
“Fairly early on, Marshall Erdman began to realize these trusses were not strong enough [to support the “prow”]. And so he asked Wright if he could incorporate some pieces of steel strategically in the building, and Wright said, ‘Absolutely not,’” Carnes says. Erdman would slip a few pieces of steel into the building when Wright was off-site as a result.
On top of the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center is the William T. Evjue Rooftop Garden.
Photo courtesy of Monona Terrace
5. Monona Terrace
- Visit: $5 for adults; mononaterrace.com/experience-monona-terrace/tours-and-education
The Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center opened its doors in 1997, but Wright designed it more than 50 years earlier, in 1938. He had a vision for “a dream civic center” that included an auditorium, conference rooms, and larger meeting places and would connect to Lake Monona. The architect devoted more than 60,000 hours to this passion project, getting only $250 in compensation.
Wright employed the circle as a motif throughout the Monona Terrace, from the outward look of circles to circular skylights on the interior. Of course, Wright wanted to emphasize the nearby beauty of Lake Monona. Throughout the lakeside walls on both the first and second floor, nearly floor-to-ceiling windows in the shape of a semicircle draw in plentiful light and views of the lake’s calming waters.
Wright created more than 900 drawings for real-estate entrepreneur Arthur L. Richards in the hopes of bringing the American System-Built homes project to fruition.
Photo by Rita Harper
6. Burnham Block
- Visit: $15 per adult; wrightinmilwaukee.com/visit.html
Constructed between 1915 and 1916, the six homes on this block in Milwaukee form the largest concentration of Wright’s American System-Built designs—homes that were the architect’s attempt to design affordable housing options. The four duplexes and two bungalows aren’t large. As guests walk through the house, they encounter hidden doors and strategically placed windows that make the spaces feel much larger than they are. A fireplace in the 805-square-foot Model B1 is placed in the middle of a living room rather than to the side, leaving the imagination to decide where the living room ends. Room windows are placed in corners, immediately in the line of sight from the entryway, deepening the sense of space.
Burnham Block Curator Michael Lilek says Wright aimed to democratize affordable housing as Henry Ford did with the automobile, drawing up floor plans that buyers could mix and match to their preference.
The United States’ foray into World War I in 1917 diverted public consciousness (and raw building materials) from homeownership to wartime efforts. The project eventually fizzled out, as Wright focused on designing the Imperial Hotel in Japan from 1917 to 1923. Burnham Block never took hold of the country like the Ford Model T. But Lilek says the houses still affect visitors today: “[Burnham Block] is really about inspiring people to think about the way they live in the houses and the buildings that they choose to live in, and maybe to say, ‘Look, my life would be better if I had a beautiful space or if I thought about the spaces that I live in.”
One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs is the 153-foot tall SC Johnson Research Tower.
Photo by Rachel Hershberger
7. SC Johnson Administration Building & Research Tower
- Visit: Free; reservations.scjohnson.com/Info.aspx
Herbert Johnson Jr. approached Frank Lloyd Wright in 1936 to build the “best office building in the world” for household goods company SC Johnson (then Johnson Wax Company). Wright enthusiastically accepted the commission, designing the SC Johnson Administration Building & Research Tower in Racine, Wisconsin.
The headquarters exemplify what Wright thought a workplace could be: “as inspiring a place to work in as any cathedral ever was to worship in.” The administration building’s “Great Workroom” is the most notable example. The half-acre space makes a person feel small, in part thanks to 21-foot-tall, lily pad–like columns. Sixty or so of them are interspersed throughout the layout and contribute to Wright’s “compression and release” technique. Wright pioneered the open-plan office (credited from his 1906 design of the Larkin Administration Building), and the workroom also follows this design, which was revolutionary at the time.
The Johnson family lived at Wingspread for two decades.
Photo courtesy of Wingspread in Windpoint
8. Johnson Foundation at Wingspread
- Visit: Free; reservations.scjohnson.com/info.aspx
Herbert Johnson Jr. was so pleased with Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for the SC Johnson headquarters that the then company president asked Wright to design his private residence in 1938. The 14,000-square-foot building in Racine, Wisconsin, was a prairie-style home, characterized by its horizontal-focused design (as opposed to vertical). Johnson Jr.’s home was the last and largest prairie-style home Wright ever designed.
Named “Wingspread,” the property homes in on Wright’s idea of “organic” architecture: Limestone, brick, stucco, and wood are the main materials of the home. Its layout also ties the home to its earthly landscape; the living room is inspired by the Native American wigwam, with elements including a central fireplace and a hole in the top to let the smoke out. From the living room, four wings expand outwards: the parents’ wing in the north, the children’s area in the east wing, a kitchen and house staff area in the south, and carports in the west.
