Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park is getting even more international recognition: The church has been nominated for consideration as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage site.
In conjunction with the nomination, the Unity Temple Restoration Foundation recently announced a new fundraising campaign so that modern architecture icon can undergo a $25 million complete restoration.
“The nomination calls attention to Frank Lloyd Wright in general,” said Celeste Adams, president and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust, which is also conducting its own fundraising campaign. “The award establishes a broader international awareness of the cultural importance of Frank Lloyd Wright sites. It’s good for Chicago, Oak Park, and Frank Lloyd Wright.”
Designed for Wright’s own Unitarian congregation and dedicated in 1909, the cubic, flat-roofed Unity Temple is one of the earliest public buildings in America to feature exposed concrete. Wright’s bold, experimental design incorporated the use of poured-in-place reinforced concrete, used primarily at the time for industrial structures.
Wright designed the building to house two distinct spaces: Unity Temple, a four-level cubic sanctuary for worship, and Unity House, for the congregation’s social and cultural gatherings. The two spaces, connected by a single-story central foyer, feature decorative art glass ceilings. The building is praised for its geometric massing, use of modern materials, and innovative configuration of space.
UNESCO representatives will do an on-site review of the church this year, and the final World Heritage designation decision will be made in summer 2016. The designation is honorary, identifying sites around the world as having “outstanding universal value.” It does not provide protections or funding but requires that the owners and stewards of the property have made a commitment to its preservation and protection in perpetuity.
This is the first modern architecture nomination for a World Heritage designation, Adams said.
“It’s Wright’s only existing public building of the Prairie period,” Adams said. “It established Frank Lloyd Wright as a great American architect. It was a highly sophisticated building early in his career. … It set the course for other designs and was innovative and creative, a new aesthetic in modern design.”
The Unity Temple Restoration Foundation has raised almost half of the $25 million they hope to raise for the church’s restoration. The Alphawood Foundation committed $10 million to the project and the Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation, which occupies the church, raised $1.5 million.
Together, the groups are undertaking the fundraising effort and an additional $5 million is being raised to establish an endowment for continued maintenance of the building. The restoration project will restore the temple’s architecture and interior design to its original condition, as well as implement improvements such as a geothermal heating/cooling system.
Exterior restoration, which will begin in April, includes outside wall repair, skylight replacements, new roofing, landscape and exterior lighting. The interior work, scheduled to be done this fall, will include restoration and preservation of wall finishes, lighting and art glass.
The project is expected to be completed in late 2016, said Heather Hutchison, executive director of the Unity Temple Restoration Foundation. The last large-scale restoration was conducted in the 1970s, she said.
Hutchison is hopeful that worldwide, people will join in on “this phenomenal philanthropic endeavor.”
“The scope of both the exterior and interior work tells the story of how comprehensive the restoration will be and how important it is that we get started,” said Hutchison. “Philanthropic support — gifts large and small — from people in Chicagoland, across the country and indeed all over the world, will bring this 20th century icon of modern architecture back to life.”
Both the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust’s website (www.flwright.org) and the Unity Temple Restoration Foundation’s website (www.utrf.org) will feature updates about the restoration project.
Anyone wanting to contribute should send donations to: Unity Temple Restoration Foundation, 875 Lake St., Oak Park, 60301, Attention: Heather Hutchison, executive director. For more information, call (773) 892-2839 or email [email protected].
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