Audioguides Oak Park

Frank Lloyd Wright moved to Oak Park in 1889 and spent the next twenty years designing his way out of everything architecture had been before him. The studio he built attached to his house on Chicago Avenue was where the Prairie Style took shape - the horizontal lines, the integration with the landscape, the belief that a building should grow from its site rather than sit on it. Today Oak Park contains the largest concentration of Wright-designed residential buildings in the world: Unity Temple on Lake Street (1908), the studio-house itself (now a museum), and dozens of private homes spread through the walking streets.

Ernest Hemingway was born at 339 North Oak Park Avenue in 1899, grew up in the village, and later described it as a place of 'broad lawns and narrow minds.

' His birthplace has been restored to its 1890s appearance and is open for tours. The contrast between the two personalities the village shaped is one of its more interesting contradictions: Wright, maximalist and rule-breaking, Hemingway, minimalist and rule-breaking in a different direction, both from the same quiet suburb.