During the formative years of his career, before the turn of the century, Wright struggled to find his voice as an architect - and as a designer of glass - by trying a variety of styles and forms until he found the ones that spoke for him. Windows were a challenge to the young architect, who recalled: "Often I used to gloat over the beautiful buildings I could build if only it were unnecessary to cut holes in them." A trial panel the Luxfer Prism Company combines Victorian-style pressed glass jewels with the stark rhythmic patterns of vertical lines and squares that prefigure his later designs.

By the last years of the nineteenth century, Wright discovered the vocabulary he had been seeking. The windows he his own Oak park office and studio are some of the first in which he relied on colored glass arranged in intricate rectilinear patterns. The autumnal amber, gold, and olive green would be the palette of the typical Prairie window, which appears in the majority of Wright's buildings constructed between 1897 and 1909.