Frank Lloyd Wright's "Machine Age" Stained Glass

Frank Lloyd Wright studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin where he read Ruskin and adopted Pugin's philosophy as his guiding principle. He embraced the integrity of materials; stone should look like stone, wood like wood, glass like glass. Wright's designs integrated buildings with landscape and furnishings. He introduced a new direction towards open interiors, a perfect setting for clear glass doors and windows.

"Nothing is more annoying to me than any tendency towards realism of form in window glass to get mixed up with the view outside," Wright wrote in an article in Architectural Record in 1928. His designs featured straight parallel lines and small squares in repeated patterns. The glass from the Coonley house has colorful circles like children's balloons. The Martin house in Buffalo has over 100 leaded windows and a gallery between the house and a greenhouse. Unity Temple has a skylight of amber squares "to get a sense of a happy cloudless day...no matter what the weather."

One of America's greatest architects was Chicago-based Louis Sullivan; he also designed geometric stained glass and frequently used opalescent glass. Like Wright, Sullivan designed the glass as an integral component of the architecture.

C. R. Ashbee, an English craftsman, visited Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago. Theirs was a lifelong friendship and Ashbee, in 1901, in his journal quoted Wright, "My god is machinery, and the art of the future will be the expression of the individual artist through the thousand powers of the machine... the machine doing all those things that the individual workman cannot do. The creative artist is the man who controls all this and understands it." This emphasizes one of the most interesting aspects of the age, the preoccupation with machinery as evidenced in art.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in his Manifesto on Futurism, 1909, wrote, "A roaring motorcar which runs like a machine gun is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace." George Antheil composed Ballet Mechanique, a musical piece scored for planes, percussion and an airplane propeller. His piano pieces include Airplane Sonata and Mechanisms. Arthur Honegger composed Pacific 231, glorifying a locomotive. Parade, a ballet by Jean Cocteau with music by Erik Satie, was staged in 1917 by the Diaghilev Ballet. The dancers wore costumes suggesting skyscrapers. The score included typewriter noises. A ballet called L'Homme et la Machine with a stage set of machinery was performed at the Casino de Paris in 1934.

Stained glass also glorified the machine. A 1927 French exhibition catalogue including work by Jeannin shows a series of stained glass windows in a newspaper office depicting transportation of news by auto and boat. Paule and Max Ingrand, in the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne of 1937, showed stained glass panels of an airplane, an ocean liner and a jazz band. In the same exhibit J. Largillier had a panel of a train. The great movie palaces of the 20s and 30s with exotic decors featuring artificially lighted panels and giant skylights and opalescent glass light fixtures are a true expression of art deco.

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