Hardy House Windows: Light, Shapes, Shadows

[Mark Hertzberg]

One of my favorite things in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Thomas P. Hardy House (1904/05) in Racine, Wisconsin, is the bank of seven windows in the front hall. I am taken both by the design – Robert McCarter has written that the floor plan of the house is articulated in white* – but particularly how the shadow of the pattern is projected into, and around, the front hall by the afternoon sun. See a selection of photos taken yesterday at www.wrightinracine.com

[Reidy]

I can't help noticing the resemblance between the Hardy interior colors and the Broadacre City shoes.

[SDR]

I always enjoy seeing Mark's photos of the Hardy house.

As for whether the windows in question here were designed to reflect the house plan, here's the evidence. McCarter points to the white glass---the parts that are dark in Mark's photo below, and are milky white in the Sotheby's photograph:


Photo © Mark Hertzberg


Photo © 2020 Sotheby's


Plans as published in "In the Nature of Materials"


What I see in the plan and the window design are symmetrical arrangements of rectilinear forms reportedly designed on a (invisible) grid. Any further congruence is just not there . . . is it ?

What I think is a fair claim is that the window design suits the house, and is sympathetic to Wright's plan. Perhaps that's what claimants are thinking, when they assert that a Prairie light screen or Usonian perf "contains a plan of the house" ?

S

[DRN]

Conceptual relationship?
Diagrammatic relationship with the parti?
Fay Jones often spoke of the part to whole relationship of his work. The parts were related to the whole, not necessarily literal miniatures.

[Roderick Grant]

DRN, I agree to some extent. Circular or triangular elements in the Hardy windows might seem at odds with rigidly rectilinear character of the plan, yet the Coonley Playhouse is similarly rectilinear, but the circles in the widows do not clash, nor do the triangles in Northome's windows. Then there are Gordon and Bachman-Wilson with their distended perfs. How do they relate to their respective plans?

I give the abstraction of the floorplan to the Hardy windows, but I don't give it much importance.

[SDR]

I'll agree with all that---but I see no "abstraction of the floorplan" of Hardy in that glass design; it could as easily be an abstraction of the Unity Temple, Coonley Playhouse or Larkin Administration Building plans, with its bilateral symmetry and rectangular elements, some long and thin (walls ?) and others closer to squares or double squares (spaces ?).

But the arguments made seem to me to support the contention that Wright and company never sought to miniaturize, or mimic---or even to make an abstraction of---any building's floor plan in its interior or exterior decor. (There may be cases that come close, intentionally or otherwise; I'd be happy to entertain them.) The "mismatch" of geometries Roderick alludes to is pervasive. The Robie house contains at least four totally different patterns or motifs in its various decorative interior elements. And, from a note I read this morning in a book about G M Niedecken's contributions to the Robie house, only the carpets there escaped Wright's attention prior to his escape abroad.

Wright's urge to create new graphic designs and patterns was apparently too strong to be constrained by his own principle of unity. It is what it is; they are what they are. More power to him . . .

S