Buffalo’s architectural story has always been one of ambition and artistry—a place where design meets imagination, and innovation takes root in the soil of Western New York. Few figures embody that legacy more completely than Frank Lloyd Wright. And no single work connects Buffalo’s architectural brilliance to the wider Finger Lakes region quite like his Tree of Life stained-glass window.
Created in 1904 for the Darwin D. Martin House, Wright’s Tree of Life window remains one of the most beloved examples of his art glass design. In it, he distilled the essence of a tree into geometric simplicity, squares forming roots, straight lines as the trunk, and angular chevrons spreading into branches. Gold, red, and green glass catch the light like leaves in motion.
For Wright, windows were not mere decoration. They were living instruments of light, dynamic and responsive to the natural world. Each glass piece, set at a slightly different angle, alters the way light drifts across a room, creating a subtle shimmer, as if the house itself were breathing. This was Wright’s genius: architecture that reflects and harmonizes with nature, rather than competing against it.
I first encountered Frank Lloyd Wright as a restless teenager, through the pages of The Fountainhead. Howard Roark’s uncompromising idealism spoke to me. But it wasn’t until I stood before Wright’s Tree of Life window years later—first at Cornell’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, and then at the Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo—that I truly understood the magnitude of his vision…