FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT'S LIGHT SCREENS: The influence of Japan.

Scholars have long identified a Japanese influence on the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, [1] even though he is well known for his insistence that his architecture and design were completely his own, without precedent. Yet examples of Japanese art and architecture were so widespread in the United States by the time Wright began work in 1886 that it is very difficult to imagine how they could not have affected him. [2] Furthermore, he himself was a brilliant and prominent collector of Japanese art, espedaily prints. [3] After visiting Japan for the first time in early 1905, he wrote with knowledge and insight about Japanese art for the catalogue of an exhibition of his prints by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) held at the Art Institute of Chicago the following year, [4] and in The Japanese Print: An Interpretation in 1912, a treatise on Oriental color theories, compositions, and symbolism that is central to his theory of ornament. [5] In both The Japanese Print and in an article o f 1908 entitled "In the Cause of Architecture," he described the relationship of Japanese art to his "organic" design, explaining that for the Japanese, design was a spiritual endeavor, the highest form of achievement, and the mother of all the arts and crafts. [6]

An important component of Wright's architecture in the first half of his career was the leaded-glass window, or "light screen," as he preferred to call it (see P1.II). He incorporated leaded glass in at least three-quarters of the buildings he designed between 1886, when he became an apprentice in Chicago to the architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee (1848--1913), and 1923, when he last designed leaded-glass windows. His contribution to this medieval art form lies in his interpretation of it as a screen, a concept clearly borrowed from Japanese design, rather than as a picture, as it was seen by his contemporary Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933). This interpretation freed Wright's design from representational images and solid color, permitting him to revolutionize stained glass through abstract geometric patterns in clear glass.

The maturing of Wright's glass designs coincided with his development of the idiom of the Prairie house around the turn of the century. A distinguishing feature of the Prairie house was its deep overhanging eaves sheltering bands of casement windows (Pl. I). Wright would have experienced the effect of this relationship between roof and windows at the Ho-o-den, the Japanese pavilion at the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893 (Fig. 1). When the Ho-o-den was built, Wright was working as an apprentice for the pioneering Chicago architectural firm of Adler and Sullivan on the Transportation Building for the exposition. [7] Erected on the Wooded Isle in the Lagoon, the Ho-o-den survived until 1946, and stood not far from Wright's Frederick C. Robie House (see Pl. II) and Midway Gardens (1913-1914; demolished 1929), in what is now Jackson Park.

The Ho-o-den was a half-size replica of a Fujiwara-era Japanese temple. [8] It had a steeply pitched roof with wide overhangs, and its walls were composed of sliding shoji (paper screens) with small wood mullions. The deep eaves had a very practical purpose: when it rained, they protected both the paper shoji and the interior, if the screens were open. More important to Wright was the way the eaves permitted the gentle light of early morning and late afternoon to penetrate the interior, casting long shadows that defined shape and volume. At the same time, they prevented the harsh direct light of midday from flooding in while still allowing it to be reflected indirectly from the pavement or lawn outside. As Wright wrote:

Overhangs had double value: shelter and preservation for the walls of the house, as well as this diffusion of reflected light for the upper story through the 'light screens' that took the place of the walls and were now often the windows in long series. [9]

In 1886 Edward Sylvester Morse (1838-1925) had published Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings, the first Western treatise on Japanese residential architecture of the Meiji period (1615-1868). It showed details of the Japanese house and its construction with a thoroughness that immediately made it a standard resource on the subject. [10] Morse lectured in Chicago numerous times between 1890 and 1915, [11] and although it is not known whether Wright actually owned a copy of Japanese Homes, [12] it seems highly likely that he knew it, [13] and perhaps even met Morse through Silsbee, whose cousin Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (1853-1908) was a friend of Morse. [14]

Illustrating Meiji-era shoji, Morse described them as