My visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s home

On a recent trip to Chicago I had a chance to visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s home at Oak Park, Illinois. I have heard much about his work and even had a chance to visit Falling Water, just outside Pittsburg, but to see his home and studio from his early years was very fascinating.

A walking tour (which included an ipod guide) was very educational. You my browse some of the pictures I took in this tour of houses he commissioned. The best part of the tour however was visiting the inside of his home and studio. The home had been converted to a boarding house during his divorce years with his first wife but it has now been restored to much of its original form.

Frank’s Early Years

Frank Lloyd Wright was born in the agricultural town of Richland Center, Wisconsin, United States, on June 8, 1867, just two years after the end of the American Civil War. He was brought up with strong Unitarian and transcendental principles (eventually, in 1905, he would design the Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois). As a child he spent a great deal of time playing with the kindergarten educational blocks by Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel (known as Froebel Gifts) given to him by his mother. These consisted of various geometrically shaped blocks that could be assembled in various combinations to form three-dimensional compositions. Wright in his autobiography talks about the influence of these exercises on his approach to design. Many of his buildings are notable for the geometrical clarity they exhibit.


Wright's home in Oak Park, Illinois
Wright began his formal education in 1885 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School for Engineering, where he was a member of a fraternity, Phi Delta Theta. He took classes part-time for two years while apprenticing under Allan Darst Conover, a local builder and professor of civil engineering. In 1887, Wright left the university without taking a degree (although he was granted an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the university in 1955) and moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he joined the architectural firm of Joseph Lyman Silsbee. Within the year, he had left Silsbee to work for the firm of Adler & Sullivan. Beginning in 1890, he was assigned all residential design work for the firm. In 1893, Wright was fired from Adler & Sullivan by Louis Sullivan himself, after Sullivan discovered that Wright had been accepting clients independently from the firm. Wright established his own practice and home in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, IL. He had completed around fifty projects by 1901, including many houses in his hometown.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Feeding Blogger into Joomla. Atom to Rss

If you have tried to feed your Google Blog (Blogger) into Joomla you would have noticed Google gives you an Atom xml link while Joomla uses RSS feed. There are a lot of complicated conversion tools out there (which this simple mind finds hard to comprehend) to convert Atom to RSS and some are for commercial use where they plug in their ads or you pay a fee. I finally found the best one that met my need and was very simple to use plus it was free. The Feed Normalizer seems to solve my problem very easily and I was able to use the link they generated into Joomla. Hope this helps anyone trying to solve the same problem I had.

Disc Golf

I have recently been introducing my friends to the wonderful world of disc golf (frisbee golf). If you have never done this before give it a try. Out here in central pa we have 3 courses I know of, these are in Gifford Pinchot state park in Lewisberry, D. F. Buchmiller park in Lancaster, and Codorus state park in Hanover. You may locate a disc golf course located near you here. If anyone wants to go, pm me at the cpaswing board. This game can be played in any weather! Really!

The nice thing about this sport is there is usually no fee to go out and play. Depending on the course you may or may not lose a disk but they are relatively cheap and I usually carry a few extras to play with anyway! There are many etiquettes like in any sport but the key is to have fun and feel free to ask some experienced player for game pointers and etiquette

Specialized discs for the sport are available at any Dicks sporting stores but you can start of with any frisbee to get a feel for it.

Geo Surfing

I dont know what it is about maps, but I cannot get enough of it. It is facinating to see where you live or lived, what is around you, or seeing places you plan to visit. What has makes it even better are the arieal photos or sattelite images. You might actually see your appartment or house, and if the images are recent and of high resolution you might even see your car parked outside. Sattelite images have existed for a while taken from landsat sattelites and arial photos and in the past these were availabe in Teraserver but now with Google Earth they have made "geo surfing" much easier and much more fun. With added terrain and other information overlays it is amazing how many places you can now discover all over the world (some areas have better resolution than others). To use google earth you will have to download an application and most computers shuold be able to handle this. Microsoft maps.live has recently taken geo surfing one step further by allowing you to actually navigate some big cities like Baltimore in 3D by allowing you to even turn corners in a street around building which look more realistic than goolge has. However if you dont have the latest and greatest computer dont even bother downloading their application (actually a plugin) it will hog your computer resources and if you dont have the right video card it will crash your machine (you will get the blue screen of death!). Since this is very new you might wait till they fix some of their bugs. For best geo surfing experience use a pc game pad!

Happy geo surfing!