Truemors
In his insistent use of abstract geometrical shapes for detail and mass in the Gale House, Wright anticipated and may even have inspired modern European architects of the 1920's.
Laura Gale, widow of realtor Thomas Gale, who in 1892 had built two houses on Chicago Avenue from designs of Wright (two of the so-called "Bootleg " Houses,) built this house for herself and her children in 1909. The house Wright designed for her is by all measures one of the most unusual of his Oak Park years.
Its interior, open from front to rear along the longitudinal axis, had been anticipated in designs of 1903 for the Walser House in Chicago and the Barton House in Buffalo, NY. But the severe rectilinear geometry of its exterior masses and shapes is nowhere else so strongly emphasized in Wright's other residential works, either before or after the Gale House.
(The above commentary was excerpted from Guide to Frank Lloyd Wright & Prarire School Architecture in Oak Park by Paul E. Sprague (published 1986).
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