Something right about Wright
RACHEL PEARSON

Chicago is a good city so far. It is a rusted old city, solid brick, lurky with tetanus, with iron bridges and flyovers, with coffee shops inside the hulks of abandoned slaughterhouses. The old iron-making, meatpacking city seems to be rotting gently away among the chrome and glass of new construction.

I take the train to Oak Park to look at Frank Lloyd Wright's old house. The train is elevated, and creaks along at bicycle-pace, past brick house after tall narrow brick house, with downtown flung along the lake's edge at the horizon.

I sit in a seat beside the metal doors, which spring open at all the stops to let on people with unexplained limps and dirty gym bags and T-shirts from 1994.

There is no poetry on the subway here, no saxophone players, and the stations have been left to settle into themselves. From street level, they look almost delicate, all wrought iron and wooden steps, like elaborate porches strung up over the road. Things creak and whistle as you climb up.

I get off at Harlem, the last stop on the green line, just past the abandoned ruin of a Brach's candy factory. It's raining into the crumbled walls, and you can see a few tanks that were maybe once full of sugar or molasses.

I descend into a neighborhood of wide, tree-lined streets. This was all prairie when Wright moved in; his kids used to ride ponies in the fields where the houses lay now. From his bedroom, a wide clear window looks out over what would have been a long vista, now filled by block after block of fusty Victorian houses, with a few Wright designs sprinkled in.

Wright tried to integrate his buildings into the surrounding landscape. He dyed cedar paneling so it would blend with the trees, and splayed houses out along a horizontal axis, like the lines of the prairie. I bet he'd shudder at our Port Aransas houses, all pink and yellow and thumbing up out of the dunes.

Many of the rooms in his house are lit only by skylights and windows, and would've been turned to caverns at night.

The rooms are wide open, and made to seem wider by high ceilings, sparse furniture, and windows that bow out towards the yard. There are lots of nooks for reading and hiding, and high windows that let out onto the upper branches of trees.

His lines are mostly straight lines, and I found something comforting in that, in its refrain from complicating my view with curve or intricacy. I felt I could comprehend this house, and feel in its rooms the way I was supposed to feel within them, be affected as one was intended to be.

It's a nice thing, art, architecture. It's nice to be tugged away from yourself, and move among thoughts that are not quite your own, feelings which perhaps do not belong to you. It brings relief.

Rachel Pearson is a graduate of Port Aransas High School and The University of Texas at Austin. She may be reached via e-mail at rachelmpearson@gmail.com.