An Architect Designs Glass

"Ornament ... non-existent unless integral."
Frank Lloyd Wright

Recognized today as one of the most significant architects of the twentieth century, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867- 1959) is less well known as one of America's premier designers of stained-glass windows. From his earliest architectural designs of 1885 through 1923, Wright designed over 160 structures with leaded-glass windows, of which almost 100 were built. This vast corpus of stained glass rivals the output of his contemporaries Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) and John La Farge (1835- 1910). Rejecting their taste for illusionistic glass pictures, Wright invented a new style that combined expanses of clear glass with touches of color in bold geometric patterns.

Decorative glass was integral to Wright's architectural vision, and he expanded the frontiers of stained glass in both its use and its design. He called his windows "light screens," a term that evoked Japanese shoji screens, which were arranged in bands as his windows were. In Wright's buildings, inside and outside were joined by these large expanses of glass. The intricately patterned lines of lead maintained the boundary of the building's structure and sometimes echoed its silhouette, but the sparkling glass made the openings permeable, almost diaphanous.

For Wright, architecture was a language. There are three overlapping phases in the development of this language in his window designs. The first, found in his earliest buildings (1885-1899), is characterized by the use of clear glass and curvilinear forms. The second, seen between 1897 and 1910, incorporates symmetrical, rectilinear, or chevron motifs and relies on warm golds, browns, and moss greens, often with iridescent surface effects. This was the period of his Prairie houses, perhaps his most beloved architecture. The third phase, from 1911 to 1923, strengthened by his exposure to avant-garde European art and architectural movements, combines bold primary and secondary colors with buoyant asymmetrical designs based on triangles and circles. Motifs typifying one phase--such as triangles in phase three--are forecast in the preceding period, as Wright experimented with new ideas within the dominant idiom he had established.