Frank Lloyd Wright's Glass Designs

 

Frank Lloyd Wright's Glass Designs

by Carla Lind

Singapore: Archetype Press, 1995

ISBN: 978-0-87654-468-6

(Amazon)

Read by the author in 2015, purchased for $4.49

There are a number of opinions as to the identification of primordial Tree of Knowledge. R. Yehuda state that it was wheat, as a toddler does not learn to speak until after eating grain. (Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 40a). 

Frank Lloyd Wright was a master of so many things, among them his use of decorative glass. This week I visited Fallingwater, and to mark the occasion I am posting about Frank Lloyd Wright's Glass Design is a slim, pocket-sized volume that highlights some of the different ways Wright used glass to adorn his houses. I have always been drawn to the design on the book's cover, taken from the Darwin Martin House (1904) and called the Tree of Life. While these geometric designs supposedly depict trees, they remind me of R. Yehuda's identification of the Tree of Knowledge as wheat. 

The inspiring pictures are accompanied by very brief essays and descriptions, identifying the different motifs used by Wright. Where Le Corbusier was using strips of plain windows to make his structures more abstract, Wright's fenestration has a completely different effect, with the large panes broken into small, detailed segments that somehow manage to make the spaces seem larger and smaller at the same time. 

The use of stained glass always brings with it ecclesiastical connotations. Moshe Safdie dealt with this in his book Jerusalem: The Future of the Past (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co,, 1989) and describes how he experimented with prisms to have the same effect without the baggage. (56-58). Wright saw this differently and relied on geometric figures that make the medium his own, so that the homes soar with beauty but in a domestic way that is far from gothic cathedrals.