“'The Century's Triumph in Lighting': The Luxfer Prism Companies and Their Contribution to Early Modern Architecture”

AboutTraces the history of the Luxfer Prism Company, founded in Chicago in 1896-97 by James Pennycuick and a group of prominent local businessmen, which manufactured prismatic glass tiles designed to redirect daylight deep into commercial interiors. Describes the technical development of the product (including physicist Henry Crew's and Olin Basquin's scientific daylight calculations and the patented "electroglazing" process), its extensive marketing as both a practical daylighting solution and a stylistically modern building material, and Frank Lloyd Wright's role, while his office occupied the same floor as the Luxfer Prism Company's, as a paid designer of forty-one patented ornamental prism-tile patterns. Documents installations in numerous Chicago buildings, with particular attention to Louis Sullivan's use of Luxfer Prisms on the Gage Building facade (part of the Holabird & Roche McCormick Buildings group, 1898) despite site architect Edward Renwick's objections, on the Schlesinger & Mayer (later Carson Pirie Scott) store beginning in 1899, on the Chicago Stock Exchange trading room, and later on the Van Allen and Son store in Clinton, Iowa (1913-15). Also quotes William Gray Purcell's recollection of Beaux-Arts architects' contempt for Luxfer Prisms as an affront to classical precedent, and traces the material's eventual decline and replacement by other lighting technologies.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28199503%2954%3A1%3C24%3A%22CTILT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L