Frank Lloyd Wright Style "Parade" Coonley Playhouse Stained and Leaded Glass Panel. Has label with certification of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

Size: 19 X 4 3/4 in.

#5361 .

Born in Richland Center, Wisconsin in 1869, Frank Lloyd Wright became one of the pre-eminent architects of the early 20th century and designed many structures to express his theory that aesthetics and function should work together. Wright's houses had a unique style of being a horizontal plane with no basements or attics. They were built of natural materials, were never painted, and had low pitched roofs and deep overhangs and walls of windows, and his rooms opened to each other with a centered stone or brick fireplace. In 1885 he dropped out of high school to work for Allan Conover, the Dean of the University of Wisconsin's Engineering department, and spent two semesters studying civil engineering. In 1887 he moved to Chicago and joined the firm of Adler and Sullivan, directly under Louis Sullivan. While there he met Catherine Tobin and the couple moved to Oak Park, where they built a home and raised their five children. In 1893 Wright opened his own firm in Chicago, before transferring the practice to his home in Oak Park five years later. In 1909 Wright left for Germany and lived with a woman named Mamah Borthwick Cheney. In 1911 they moved to Spring Green, Wisconsin where his mother had given him a portion of some of the family land. On it he built the Taliesin estate and lived there until 1914 when a mentally unstable servant murdered Cheney and six others before burning the residential wing to the ground. In 1932 Wright opened Taliesin up as an architectural fellowship where young students could pay to work with and learn from him. He married and then quickly separated from Miriam Noel before meeting his third wife, Olivanna Milanoff. In 1937 Wright moved his family and fellowship to Phoenix, Arizona where he built Taliesin West and spent the last twenty years of his life, dying in April 1959. By then he had created 1,141 designs, of which 532 were completed, and he was one of the most recognizable architectural designers in the world for his nature-focused, “form as function” style.

A philanthropist named Avery Coonley commissioned Wright to design a kindergarten, the Avery Coonley School Playhouse, in 1912 on Fairbank Road in Riverside, Illinois. The art glass windows of the Coonley Playhouse feature one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s best known designs. A festive pattern based on balloons, confetti and American flags, the design used in these windows represents Wright’s first departure from his signature style using only straight lines. Except for a few relatively plain panes, the windows of the Coonley Playhouse are now all replicas, and a handful of the originals can be seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Art Institute of Chicago. The kindergarten school moved from the Coonley Playhouse in Riverside to a larger facility in Downers Grove in 1916 and eventually became a full K-8 elementary school that still exists today. The original Coonley Playhouse near the estate in Riverside is currently a private residence.