No entrance greets the eye at the intersection of Lake Street and Kenilworth Avenue in Oak Park, where Unity Temple, a fortress of an edifice in poured concrete, stands. A heavy structure in solid gray, the building almost repels with planes and right angles, and the visible windows are too high up to peer inside. To penetrate is, to borrow a phrase from choreographer Martha Graham, an “errand into the maze”—you circle the building, searching in all the usual places, and at last scurry down an unmarked sidewalk and up an unassuming flight of steps to arrive at a platform over which hangs a motto in brass, “For the worship of God and the service of Man.”
“It’s a functioning church, so there are people in here every day,” says Heidi Ruehle-May, executive director of the Unity Temple Restoration Foundation, which recently completed a $25 million restoration of the building. “It’s not the kind of space where you’re not allowed to touch or sit or breathe on anything. Our mission is to restore and preserve this building. Aside from that, we have an obligation, we feel, to use the space to help educate people on Frank Lloyd Wright and his architecture and to introduce as much arts and culture as we can into this space. One way we do this is to work with accomplished artists in the area to diversify the programming in dance and theater and nontraditional music to pull in as many types of audiences as we can to enjoy the space. A lot of the time the artists are inspired by the space or take something and tweak it based on this space.”
Fri 2/21, 7:30 PM and Sat 2/22, 5:30 PM, Unity Temple, 875 Lake, Oak Park, utrf.org, $29, $24 Unity Temple Restoration Foundation members, $19 students and children.
