Frank Lloyd Wright

The B. Harley Bradley house is widely considered Frank Lloyd Wright’s first Prairie house. With its low-slung roofs, stucco and dark wood exterior finishes, and bands of windows encircling the house like a necklace, the house established the Prairie paradigm. For the first – but hardly the last – time, Wright envisioned the multiple windows as a continuing composition, spread through casements and transoms, one to the next, framing the view of the Kankakee River and reflecting the elevation of the house in the angles and proportions of the lead lines.

His glass designs were not limited to the outer walls. He also designed glazed doors for the built-in bookcases and buffet. His most colorful glass for the house were six horizontal panels above the dining room table, one of which is offered here. Executed fully in opalescent glass so that the light fixtures and ceiling structure were not visible about them, the panels utilize a palette of tawny ambers, yellows, and golds. Like most of his laylights, Wright spun the panels one-hundred-eighty degrees when placing them, so that bright and prominent triangle motif alternated from left to right, panel to panel. He used the same organizational principle in the laylights for the Ward Willits house (Highland Park, Illinois, 1901) and Unity Temple (Oak Park, Illinois, 1905).

An unusual feature of the Bradley windows throughout the house was the use of lead came to assemble them. Although zinc came existed by the time these windows were made, for unknown reasons Wright chose to have them fabricated with lead. Although this was the traditional material for stained-glass windows, it was heavy and malleable, and so could sag under its own weight and that of the glass it supported. For this reason, it required steel support bars to span the width, adding rigidity to the panel and transferring the weight to the frame. 

The design of the laylights is remarkably sophisticated for Wright at this period. Although the glass only has six or seven different colors, the design is incredibly ornate, with pieces less than 1/4 inch wide. The weaving of rectilinear pieces throughout the design is cleanly and scrupulously designed and executed. A most unusual technique, called feather cutting, flanks the large triangle device. Coming off the points of tiny triangles, open seams, without lead, create the most delicate lines possible in leaded glass. Impossible to create in a window – they would let the rain in – Wright used the technique in the laylights of the Willets house and buffet doors for the Warren McArthur house (Chicago, 1902). The laylights required the utmost skill in manufacture, but it is not known who produced them. Both the Linden Glass Company and Giannini & Hilgart worked with Wright at this time, providing other windows of similar glass and techniques.

Some historians have seen a Native-American influence in this design. Wright himself left no commentary on it. He was knowledgeable, to some extent, about Native Americans in the Great Plains area, hiring Orlando Giannini to paint them on his bedroom walls. Later, at Taliesin West (begun in 1937), he incorporated Native art and design into the decoration. The design source of the Bradley laylights remains unknown.

JULIE L. SLOAN