“Glass as Ornament: From Richardson to Wright”

AboutTraces the development of ornamental glass in American architecture from H. H. Richardson's Trinity Church in Boston, where John La Farge introduced opalescent stained glass in the late 1870s, through Louis Comfort Tiffany's innovations of the 1880s-1890s, and finally to its structural, abstracted use by George Grant Elmslie and Frank Lloyd Wright in the early twentieth century. Discusses Tiffany's "squash" and "eggplant" windows for the George Kemp house (1879), his decoration with Stanford White of the Veterans' Room at the Seventh Regiment Armory, and his chapel interior at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, comparing its round-arched, mosaic-covered design to Louis Sullivan's "Golden Door" of the Transportation Building at the same fair. Argues that while Tiffany and La Farge treated glass pictorially, as painting in another medium, it was Elmslie and Wright who first fully integrated ornamental glass architecturally, treating it as a transparent solid subordinated to and structurally continuous with the building itself, citing Wright's window for the Darwin Martin house (1904) as the culmination of this development.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0032-843X%281975%2934%3A2%3C28%3AGAOFRT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23