Celebrating Frank Lloyd Wright’s 150th
Birthday:
His Chapel Design for Cooksville
Wisconsin is celebrating the birthday of Frank Lloyd Wright,
born 150 years ago in 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin, He was and is America’s
most famous architect —perhaps the world’s, as well. Wright designed about 150
structures for Wisconsin alone, with about 43 being built. He died in 1959 in
Arizona.
And Frank Lloyd Wright has a connection to Cooksville.
One of his designs was for a chapel to be built near the little
historic village in Rock County. Wright named the chapel a “Memorial to the
Soil.” Designed in late 1934, it was to be a small Prairie School style family chapel
that he also referred to as a “Chapel Cast in Concrete” and was inspired by Walt
Whitman’s poem, “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”
However, the Cooksville chapel project was never built.
The chapel had been commissioned by the Gideon Newman family
of Cooksville, but which family member(s) actually dealt with Frank Lloyd
Wright in the 1930s is not known. The Newman family was one of the early settlers
in the village, where they farmed nearby land. The younger Gideon Newman may
have known Frank Lloyd Wright at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where
both were in attendance in 1886. And, of course, by 1934 Wright was a
well-known architect, with his studio at Taliesin near Spring Green, Wisconsin.
The Cooksville chapel was to be built just north of the
Badfish Creek on the Newman family farm.
Existing evidence of the “Memorial to the Soil” project consists
of sketches, drawings and prospective elevations, as well as newspaper articles.
They reveal a beautiful Wrightian “organic” Prairie School style building
horizontally hugging the soil. A welcoming Art Deco stylized sculpture stands near
the entry and a small garden and pool is visible through the windows behind the
choir’s benches. The drawings are presently housed in the Avery Library of
Columbia University.
A Milwaukee Journal newspaper column dated December 9, 1934,
and collected in “At Taliesin,” by Randolph C. Henning, a compilation of
newspaper articles, described the creation of Wright’s design: “To memorialize
the Wisconsin pioneers, a chapel of reinforced concrete and glass (broad and
sturdy) for the early family of the Newmanns (sic) at Cooksville came to the drawing board from the master’s
hand last week, soon to be turned over to eager apprentices for working
drawings. Whitman’s ‘Pioneers! O Pioneers!’ has found third-dimensional form in
architecture here.”
The Cooksville chapel plan was pictured on the cover of the
catalogue for a Milwaukee Art Museum exhibit of Wright’s work in 1992. A
Milwaukee Sentinel newspaper article about the exhibit called the chapel project
“extraordinary” and “an elegantly rendered plan.”
Wright wrote the following inscription on his finished plan
and view: “Memorial to the tiller of the ground making the earth a feature of
the monument or vice versa. FLW.”
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A copy of Wright’s plan for his “Memorial to the Soil” chapel
was provided by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation at Taliesin West to the
Historic Cooksville Trust (HCT) in 2012 for educational use. Copies of other sketches
(“study images”) of the project have been sent to the HCT in 2016 from the
present Frank Lloyd Wright Archives in the Avery Library of Columbia University.
Postscript: Frank Lloyd Wright’s uncle, Reverend Jenkin
Lloyd Jones, preached at the 1879 dedication of the Cooksville Congregational
Church, which is now part of the Cooksville Historic District.
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[Thanks to the Frank
Lloyd Wright Foundation, Taliesin West, for the use of the image of the
“Prospective and Plan, Chapel in Cast Concrete (“Memorial to the Soil”),
Cooksville, 1934, Copyright 1985 The Frank Lloyd Wright Archives.”Also, thanks
to the Avery Library Archives of Columbia University for sharing other working
drawings of the chapel project, copies of which are in the Cooksville Archives.
Larry Reed]
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