Frank Lloyd Wright

Architects may come and
Architects may go and
Never change your point of view

When Paul Simon wrote that song, he was probably thinking more about Art Garfunkel than about Frank Lloyd Wright, the connection being architecture.

Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect who designed buildings, and also parts of buildings, notably stained glass windows. I love glass, and have made a couple of windows designed by FLW.

In terms of buildings, FLW seemed very courageous when he was dealing with horizontal lines. This is one of his most famous buildings:

And this is one of his most notorious. It was built long after his death to a design that was never built while he was alive, much to the annoyance of the FLW industry and fan club.

I am not suggesting that you would want to live in one of these, but they are visually interesting, and the horizontal lines are very striking.

When it came to stained glass design, something seemed to go awry. Windows tend to be portrait rather than landscape, and that meant that FLW had to work with a vertical design. I think that made him feel a bit lost, and he came up with designs like this one "The Tree of Life":

You can give yourself a headache trying to figure out where the tree is, and if there is one tree or three. There is a lot wrong with this design, in my view. It does have a stillness which is attractive, and the sparse use of colour does add to that sense.

But it fails to exploit the sensuousness of glass, which often comes from the impossible curves that glass can achieve. Here, there are no curves, just stark straight lines. The pattern demonstrates this better than he finished window:

So. Little colour, no curves. And no texture to the glass, either. The result is a panel which is very cold and cerebral. Easy to cut, easy to fabricate, but not very satisfying.

And to my eye, at least, the finished piece looks top-heavy, with all those mad chevrons and what might be meant to be foliage at the top.

Six of the vertical break lines run right through the glass from top to bottom, making the panel essentially weak. Without a frame, it would tend to fold.

This piece does make me wonder if FLW simply did not understand glass well enough to exploit its potential, and whether windows forced him to work in a vertical dimension that just made him feel ill-at-ease. It does look as if his house designs - like them or not - were confident, bold, organic. The glass feels formal, and does not really engage the eye at all. 

If eyes could shrug, they would.

FLW has little riffs and motifs which repeat in his glass - like the chevrons above. It is as if he was a musician who takes a solo and gets stuck with a riff and can't get off it. The result is often noise rather than melody, and there is something of that in these pieces of glass that try so hard - too hard - and feel so empty, soulless and unrewarding.

Glass is an exciting material, with potential that good designers are continuing to explore in new ways. Their designs are often successful in proportion to the degree to which they defy your expectations about glass and its limitations. 

Making pieces designed by the greats is a powerful learning experience. I can't say I learned much from working with FLW's designs beyond how not to go about designing glass.