Frank Lloyd Wright

The Susan Lawrence Dana House in Springfield, Illinois, is one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s largest and most decoratively ambitious Prairie-period buildings. Featuring a complex site-specific program of over 250 leaded glass windows and 100 original furniture designs, the house is further distinguished as one of only two commissions in which Wright identified a floral inspiration for his designs: sumac. The flowering plant is native to Illinois and its long, narrow leaves lent themselves perfectly to abstraction as ornament. This is epitomized by the Dana House windows, which opulently bridged naturalism and geometry in their translation of sumac into iridized and opalescent glass. The design from the windows echoed around the exterior of the house in the form of a painted plaster frieze and continued on the interior through its furnishings.

The decorative sumac theme extended to the present monumental vase, designed by Wright in collaboration with Teco Pottery. Wright was likely introduced to the Chicago-based pottery firm through mutual connections with its founder and fellow member of the Chicago Architectural Club, William Day Gates. Famous for their signature matte green glaze and botanical motifs, Teco’s approach to ceramics perfectly complemented Wright’s Prairie School style of architecture. Impressive in scale, the Teco green vase has both an architectonic and organic presence, tapering from a square base to an octagonal top. The edges of the vase are molded into sumac stems, whose leaves branch off like fletched arrows and accentuate the verticality of the piece. Placed in the living room of the Dana House after its construction, the vase encapsulates Wright’s belief in Gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art: “It is quite impossible to consider the building one thing and its furnishings another… They are all mere structural details of its character and completeness.”