rss-bridge 2026-02-25T23:53:08+00:00

‘H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery’

When re-hanging signage, “Mind your P’s and Q’s” ought to be “Mind your H’s and S’s”.

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H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery

The famed architect made a surprising error on one of his most notable buildings — or did he? A deep dive to uncover the truth.

Paul Lukas

Feb 25, 2026

December 5th, 2025. (Photo by Jonathan Hoefler)

Note: This is the first part of a two-article series. Also, it is not paywalled. Enjoy! — Paul

The photo above, taken about two and a half months ago, shows the entrance to Unity Temple, a Unitarian Universalist church in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. Designed by the renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright (himself a lifelong Unitarian), it opened in 1908 and is sometimes referred to as the world’s first modern building. Wright later said that the Unity Temple project was when he stopped being an “architect of structure” and instead became an “architect of space.”

Despite all of that, Unity Temple includes a surprising flaw. Can you spot it in that header photo?

Let’s zoom in on a section of the bronze lettering above the doors:

Rut-roh. (Photo by Jonathan Hoefler)

Now do you see the error? The “H” on the top line is upside-down! It’s particularly apparent because the crossbar of the “H” doesn’t align with the middle arm of the “E.” Compare that to the second line, where those two strokes do align. (If you look back at the header photo, you can see that the sign includes a third “H,” in the word “WORSHIP,” but that one is properly oriented.)

If this mistake sounds familiar, it’s because last summer I wrote about how the familiar blue “H” road signs indicating a nearby hospital are often upside-down. The person who alerted me to that “H”-driven phenomenon is the same one who spotted and photographed Unity Temple’s inverted “H”: my friend Jonathan Hoefler. He’s a famous typographer, so his radar is super-attuned to this stuff (plus his surname starts with an “H,” so he might be particularly sensitive to issues involving that letter). He let me know about the Unity Temple “H” after spotting it during a recent visit to Chicago.

I asked Jonathan if he said anything to the Unity Temple staff about the upside-down letter. “I didn’t have the heart,” he said. “Also, what could be done?”

That might have been the end of the story. I imagined writing a short post that concluded with something like “Hey, even Frank Lloyd Wright made mistakes!”

But then Jonathan added this: “The audio tour at the temple mentioned that the exterior was sprayed with gunite in the 1970s, making me wonder if the original lettering was removed and reinstalled, either introducing the error or preserving it.”

That was an intriguing thought, so I figured I’d try to find out if the letters had been temporarily removed as part of the 1970s gunite treatment. That was the start of what eventually became a lengthy research and reporting process. Along the way, I turned up a bunch of relevant information, including the following:

Unity Temple has two separate entrances, one at the east and one at the west. Each entrance is adorned with identical metal lettering spelling out the same phrase: “For the Worship of God and the Service of Man.” (Jonathan’s photos are of the western entrance, and he didn’t realize there’s an identical sign on the eastern side. If he had known, he would have checked the eastern “H” situation.)

Both signs were indeed removed for the gunite treatment and then reinstalled, just as Jonathan suspected. That was in 1973.

Both signs were badly vandalized in the fall of 2010, when thieves stole 58 of the 72 original letters, apparently intending to sell them for scrap. The remaining 14 letters were removed and new lettering was installed over both entrances about 20 months later, in the spring of 2012.

The new lettering was taken down in 2014, when Unity Temple closed for a $25 million restoration. It reopened, with the lettering back in place, in mid-2017.

This information cast Jonathan’s observation in a different light, because it means Unity Temple’s lettering — which is rendered in a custom typeface that Wright designed — has gone through at least four distinct eras:

Era One runs from the temple’s 1908 opening to the 1973 gunite treatment.

Era Two runs from the 1973 gunite treatment to the 2010 lettering theft.

Era Three runs from the 2012 installation of replacement lettering to the start of the 2014 restoration.

Era Four runs from 2017, when the temple reopened after the restoration, to the present.

Multiply each of the four eras by the three “H”s that appear in the slogan, and then again by the two separate entrances, and you have 24 distinct opportunities for an upside-down “H” to be installed! (And there could be even more eras, and thus more opportunities for inverted “H”s, if the letters were ever taken down and then reinstalled for some other reason that didn’t turn up in my research.)

So had the misoriented “H” that Jonathan recently spotted on the western sign been introduced as part of the recent restoration? Or maybe after the theft? Or maybe that “H” had been upside-down all along, and they just kept it that way with each reinstallation for the sake of consistency? Meanwhile, what about the lettering for the eastern entrance?

And most intriguingly: Had Frank Lloyd Wright himself ever been responsible for an upside-down “H”? Wright died in 1959, so he had nothing to do with the most recent iterations of the lettering, but what about the earlier time periods?

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My hope was to answer those questions by creating a comprehensive visual timeline of the lettering over both entrances, so I ended up doing a lot of photo research. Recent-ish photos of the building are fairly easy to find, especially on Flickr (a godsend, because Flickr pics are date-tagged). But older images — basically, anything earlier than 2005 — were surprisingly difficult to source. I ended up having to engage quite a bit with what I’ve come to think of as the Frank Lloyd Wright industrial complex — a dense bureaucracy of foundations, libraries, museums, and research institutions that control access to anything Wright-related.

While I didn’t achieve my original goal of producing a comprehensive visual record of the lettering, I did come up with a fair number of data points. Let’s start here:

Wright’s Original Conception

Wright’s original drawings for Unity Temple, shown above, include depictions of the lettering. Let’s zoom in to get a closer look at the key area:

The drawing clearly shows that the crossbar of the “H” should be slightly north of the equator, so to speak, thus aligning with the center arm of the “E.” That’s not surprising, but it’s good to establish this as our baseline of Wright’s intent.

1930s–1940s

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