The Architecture of Barry Byrne: Taking the Prairie School to Europe by Vincent L. Michael (review)

Ask the average midwesterner about the region’s exports and you can expect a variety of answers: corn and soybeans, automobiles, musicians as varied as Prince and John Mellencamp, or—only somewhat sarcastically—jobs. In The Architecture of Barry Byrne, Vincent L. Michael offers the modern built environment itself to that conversation. Michael moves beyond architectural exports like Louis Sullivan’s skyscrapers and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel to focus on the work of Francis Barry Byrne, an early apprentice of Wright’s who would go on to make a name for himself in modern architecture via radically new church designs. As a devoted Catholic, Byrne’s dramatically reinterpreted churches both incorporated Wright’s ideas of organic architecture and foreshadowed the later reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Byrne’s work itself became an export, as noted in the subtitle, as he was the only member of the Prairie School to design and build a structure in Europe. More than just a student of Wright’s, Byrne emerged as an important contributor to the rise of modernist design, only to be overshadowed by the likes of Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Active professionally from 1902, when he joined Wright’s Oak Park studio, to his death in 1967, Byrne’s story highlights the lasting influence of the late nineteenth century “Chicago School” of architecture as well as the midwestern contributions to the mid-twentieth century dominance of the International Style.

At its core, The Architecture of Barry Byrne recounts the architect’s growth and contributions through a narrative catalog of his most significant works. Although Michael devotes considerable attention to Byrne’s biography, the focus is undoubtedly on his buildings and architectural thought. Despite receiving his share of residential and commercial commissions, Byrne’s greatest works came in the form of churches, schools, and other religious structures, largely for the Catholic Church. As Wright’s apprentice, Byrne drew working drawings for and supervised the construction of Oak Park’s landmark Unity Temple (1908). Byrne left Wright’s studio in 1908 and, after a period on the West Coast, established his own Chicago practice. In 1922 he received a commission, with relatively few design constraints, for St. Thomas the Apostle church in Chicago. Although Byrne would turn the Prairie Style’s horizontal lines vertically, he took from Wright and Unity Temple an open floor plan as well as an altar pulled out into the church itself. In doing so, Byrne radically broke with centuries of Gothic tradition in which columns broke up the worship space and the sanctuary was pushed back, separate from the pews. The changes fit into evolving liturgical practices that welcomed more parishioners to the sacrament of communion and placed the ritual work of clergy within the sight of the congregation. Byrne would go on to develop landmark Catholic churches elsewhere over the course of his career, among the most significant being his 1928 Christ the King Church in Cork, Ireland. While Byrne’s Irish church is the European allusion in Michael’s subtitle, it is worth noting that, by the time Byrne received the commission, he had long since grown into a thoroughly modernist architect, complete with visits to Mies van der Rohe and Germany’s Bauhaus in 1924. Christ the King bears a greater resemblance to an angular Art Deco building than one of Wright’s Prairie Style homes and thus emphasizes Byrne’s European-styled modernism. Byrne’s later works, like the fish-shaped St. Francis Xavier Church (1949) in Kansas City, Missouri, clearly show his mastery of modern architecture without a formal commitment to any particular style.

While Byrne maintained a correspondence and friendship with leading modern architects, his contributions to the school of thought have largely been overshadowed by Europeans like Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius. Michael offers a number of reasons for this omission. For one, Byrne was infinitely more humble...