Unity Chapel

Small 1886 chapel where Frank Lloyd Wright is buried, designed with his teacher Joseph Lyman Silsbee.

Unity Chapel sits beside a small country cemetery on the gentle ridge just south-east of Taliesin. It is a tiny shingled Gothic-Revival building, austere outside and unexpectedly warm inside with a panelled ceiling and oak benches. The exterior is by Silsbee; the interior is Wright's earliest credited architectural work.

The chapel can be visited as part of certain Taliesin estate tours, and the surrounding Wright-Lloyd Jones family cemetery contains the headstones of generations of the family, including the marker (now empty) where Wright was originally interred. A quiet, atmospheric ten-minute stop on a longer Wright pilgrimage day.

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A story
Wright was nineteen and working as a draftsman in Joseph Lyman Silsbee's Chicago office when he was given the job of designing the interior of Unity Chapel for his Lloyd Jones aunts and uncles. He later called it the 'first thing I built.' Wright was buried in the chapel cemetery in 1959, but in 1985 his remains were exhumed at his widow Olgivanna's request, cremated and moved to Taliesin West in Arizona — a controversial move never fully reversed.

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