Unity Temple
— — concrete that learned to hold light.
Not only on a wall.
“Frank Lloyd Wright's 1908 building for a Unitarian congregation that had lost its old church to fire. Cast in monolithic concrete when no one else was building churches that way. The sanctuary is a cube lit from above, four bands of art glass and skylights filtering daylight through a coffered ceiling. Visitors come out quieter than they went in.
Unity Temple, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Unity Temple sits on Lake Street in Oak Park, Illinois, about ten miles west of the Chicago Loop. Wright designed it between 1905 and 1908 for the Unity Church congregation after fire destroyed their Gothic Revival building. He paired a cubic auditorium (Unity Temple) with a rectangular parish house (Unity House) across a low entrance loggia. In 2019 it was inscribed as part of The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright on the UNESCO World Heritage list.
The auditorium has no side windows. Daylight enters through twenty-five amber art-glass skylights set into the coffered ceiling and four ribbons of clerestory glass below the cornice. Wright tuned the palette to terracotta, green, and ochre so the room would feel warm even on grey Illinois afternoons. The coffers diffuse the light evenly across the cube, which seats about four hundred and never sets a worshipper more than forty feet from the pulpit.
Unity Temple was the first significant public building in the United States built entirely of exposed reinforced concrete. Wright kept the walls structural and unfaced, with simple wooden battens marking the form joints. The decision was practical and radical at once: poured concrete cost roughly forty thousand dollars when comparable limestone construction would have cost more than twice that. A four-year restoration completed in 2017 by Harboe Architects repaired the failing roof and the worn surfaces.