Frank Lloyd Wright's Chairs, Furniture on the Edge of Art Deco

The geometric chair designs that put America’s most famous architect closer to the Jazz Age than his reputation usually allows

Frank Lloyd Wright spent his career insisting he belonged to no movement but his own, and history has mostly agreed, filing him under Prairie School and organic architecture rather than any of the era’s other design languages. He built his reputation on long horizontal lines, deep overhanging eaves, and a devotion to natural materials that owed more to the American Midwest than to Paris or Vienna. But look closely at his furniture, and one chair sits right at the edge of the Art Deco vocabulary, close enough that the National Gallery of Victoria, which holds an original in its permanent collection, describes its design as showing the style’s direct influence.

That chair is the Peacock, designed in 1921 for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Its hexagonal back and chamfered square seat echo the geometric ornament running through the entire building, and the original oilcloth upholstery formed a chevron pattern across the backrest, the kind of crisp, faceted geometry that would come to define Art Deco furniture later in the decade. The chair took its name from the hotel’s Peacock Room, a banquet hall decorated with abstracted low-relief peacock panels, and it appeared throughout the building, in front of the parlor fireplace, in a private theater box, along the long promenade.

The Imperial Hotel itself was Wright’s most ambitious total design, every chair, textile, and dish created specifically for the building down to the smallest detail, and it proved its worth almost immediately. Wright had insisted on a foundation of concrete piles sunk into the soft earth beneath Tokyo, engineering the whole structure to essentially float, and the decision paid off when the hotel opened in 1922 and survived the catastrophic Great Kanto earthquake the following year nearly undamaged, while much of the city around it collapsed. When the building was finally demolished in 1968, its furniture scattered into museum collections worldwide, and the Peacock Chair became one of the most widely held pieces of Wright’s design output anywhere.

The rest of his chair designs trace a longer arc across his career, each one carrying the same instinct for geometry into a different form. His early chairs for the Ward Willits House and his own Oak Park studio, both from the early 1900s, are built from sharp, angular wooden slats. The Taliesin Barrel Chair, developed while working on the Darwin D. Martin House, introduced a curved, cylindrical form he would return to and enlarge decades later. By 1949, working on his own Taliesin West studio, he arrived at the plywood Origami chair, angular in an entirely different way and still unmistakably his own.

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