How Frank Lloyd Wright remodeled the light court in Chicago's Rookery

TIMOTHY WITTMAN: It's true as much today as it was 110 years ago that when a building reaches a certain age, it looks dated. John Root is a designer who is working at a time when people still very vividly remember the Civil War. And certainly when Frank Lloyd Wright was called in to do this renovation, this building was 20 years old, and the tastes had changed.

We've got this dark color, which is no longer popular. We have extremely ornate decorative program, which is also out of date. It looks tired. So when we look at the light court in The Rookery, what we're seeing is largely the form that John Root left us.

What Wright has done is he's freshened it up. We see the white paint. We see the gold leaf, and we see the way the entire interior is brightened up. When you look at how ornate this is and how it has these chamfered edges, you know, it's got a octagon shape. And what Wright replaces it with is a right-angled shape, and how these really simple geometries come into play.

Just as Root took advantage of the opportunity to introduce art into a necessary structural feature in the roof, Wright introduced a beautiful feature with the light fixtures he introduced. And also, he's brought in an element that's exceptionally important to him, which is nature, which is why we have the planters introduced on the newel posts on the staircase.

We start to see a more and more aggressive battle between a conservative, traditional, classical brand of architecture and design in conflict with the more progressive, more modern ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright and the members of the Prairie School. This interior really does represent a point where those two forces are battling with each other. And Wright is trying to assert, right here in downtown Chicago, an example of what could be done with a more modern aesthetic.