Unity Temple

This guide to Unity Temple in Chicago opens with a lightning strike that burned the congregation's wooden church to the ground one night in June 1905, and the thirty-eight-year-old architect from their own pews who showed up the next day with an offer to rebuild. It follows Frank Lloyd Wright's forty-five-thousand-dollar budget and his decision to pour the whole building in raw concrete, a material no one had used for worship before, and the money troubles that nearly ruined him along the way. Wright made worshippers walk a low, dim passage before the room opens up around them, the way you are walking now.