Patrick Cannon will present an informative talk on domestic architecture in Chicago and Oak Park at 2 p.m. Wednesday, April 17, at the Oak Park Arms, 408 S Oak Park Ave, Oak Park. The event is free and open to the public.
Cannon is the author of “At Home in Chicago: A Living History of Domestic Architecture.” He will present information on the city’s 200-year history through different home styles such as log cabins, cottages, bungalows, three-flats, and the mansions of Chicago and Oak Park.
“These homes show how we lived and how we continue to live in the place we call home,” Cannon said.
As an undergraduate of Northwestern University, Cannon took an elective course on the Chicago school of architecture taught by its acknowledged authority, the late Professor Carl W. Condit. A trained structural engineer himself, Condit’s enthusiasm for his subject was expressed not only in his lectures but in several walking and bus tours that opened his students’ eyes to the architectural museum that surrounded them.
Cannon’s move to Oak Park in 1974 was coincidental with the now Frank Lloyd Wright Trust’s acquiring Wright’s Home and Studio and the beginning of its restoration. He became one of its first volunteers, and in the more than 45 years since, he has given hundreds of tours of the building and its surrounding Oak Park neighborhood. In addition, he has given tours of Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park and famous Robie House in Hyde Park. In recent years, he began doing bus tours of Wright sites in Oak Park and Chicago.
Among Cannon’s favorites are Wright’s Robie House, Mies van der Rohe’s 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, H.H. Richardson’s Glessner House, Burnham and Root’s Rookery Building and Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge’s Chicago Cultural Center (formerly Chicago’s Public Library).
His other books include “Hometown Architect: The Complete Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park and River Forest, Illinois;” “Prairie Metropolis: Chicago and the Birth of a New American Home:” and “Louis Sullivan: Creating a New American Architecture.”
Oak Park Arms Senior Living is a rental retirement community that provides senior housing in the form of independent living. A licensed home care agency is onsite to provide support services for seniors. An award-winning adult day care program is located inside the Arms. Furnished apartments are also available for a short-term stay – a weekend, a week, a month, or longer.
For more information call 708-386-4040.
