projects. As Joseph Siry put it so aptly in his 1996 monograph on the building, "So successful was Wright in fixing the terms of discussion about his own architecture that the shifts in his accounts over time have often been left unexamined." They have compounded this error in two ways; they have consulted the edition of 1943 (usually in the form of a later reprint) rather than the less widely available but somewhat more revealing first edition of 1932, and they have failed to check the accuracy of the architect's statements against other appropriate sources. And, surprisingly, even those authors such as Gill, who were aware of Wright's tendency to create history in order to show off his unquestioned abilities—this original and innovative genius—in the most favorable light, appear never to have confirmed the supposed "facts" with as much as an examination of the local Oak Park newspapers or the extensive pictorial archives of the Frank Lloyd Wright Memorial Foundation at Taliesin. Only after introducing the subject in an article and then in his monograph, Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Architecture for Liberal Religion, of 1996, did Joseph Siry explore the theological underpinnings of the building's design. Yet, in spite of his scrupulous utilization of the original documents, there is still no detailed examination of the day-by-day and blow-by-blow account of the creation of this great and inspiring building.

It is, therefore, the intention of this book to examine this important national landmark, Unity Temple, from both artistic and historical perspectives, and to document the paths to its construction and reception. In addition to utilizing unpublished and never- before-quoted correspondence of the building committee for the new church and the minutes of the board of trustees and various other documents in Unity Temple's archives, Wright's own words shall be examined, and we shall attempt to understand how and why he chose to write the distorted but extremely important seven-page chapter of An Autobiography. And Wright was to reference Unity Temple over and again in his writings, noting only two years before his death, "Here came the poetic principle of freedom itself as a new revelation in architecture. This new freedom that was first consciously demonstrated in Unity Temple, Oak Park." In trying to understand the genesis of this great building, design, technical, economic, and human factors will be explored, and, hopefully, we can emerge with a new and more complete view as to the sources of Wright's design and its importance in the history of both American and modern architecture.