Charles E. White, Jr.

Charles E. White, Jr. (1876–1936) was a noted Chicago area architect who for a time worked in the Oak Park studio of Frank Lloyd Wright and who, both before and after that time, had a successful and influential career as an architect and a writer on architectural subjects. It is fair to say that White is an under-appreciated member of Wright’s Oak Park studio staff.

Charles Elmer White, Jr. was born May 18, 1876, in Lynn, Massachusetts, the son of Charles E. White, Sr. and his wife Agnes Elizabeth Safford. Through his father, White was a direct descendant of American Revolutionary War soldiers William Loud and Michael Porter.

While the "Book of Chicagoans" (1917) states that White took special classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Paul Sprague writes in "Guide to Frank Lloyd Wright and Prairie School Architecture in Oak Park" that White graduated from the architecture program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1895, M.I.T.'s registrar's office has no record of him ever attending, either a regular or special student, much less graduating from the institution.

For approximately eight years, White worked in the East, chiefly practicing architecture with Walter R. B. Wilcox in Burlington, Vermont. At the age of twenty-seven, White then moved to Chicago in 1903 to work for Frank Lloyd Wright, at the time when other employees in the studio included Walter Burley Griffin, Marion Mahony, Isabel Roberts, and artist Richard Bock. The letters which White wrote to his friend Wilcox offer valuable insights into the building methods, working relationships and responsibilities of the Oak Park studio in what has been called Wright’s "first golden age" when the Prairie Style was developed. When writing about this time in his life, some architectural historians have mistakenly called White a "student” or “apprentice” of Frank Lloyd Wright; both terms are incorrect. White was an architect in his own right, having practiced architecture for nearly a decade in the East before the three years when he worked in the Oak Park studio.

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