7 Frank Lloyd Wright Windows to Go Home

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Hundreds of windows that Frank Lloyd Wright designed in the early 1900s for the Martin House Complex in Buffalo, N.Y., have ended up scattered in private and museum collections. Seven of them are about to return to the newly restored house, which was built for the soapmaking magnate Darwin Martin. The panes, patterned with green and gold checkerboards and chevrons, have long belonged to the University of Victoria in Canada, which is donating them to the house museum.

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Mary F. Roberts, the Martin complex’s executive director, said her team has spent years requesting the windows’ return from the university and from many other institutions. Many panes and other architectural components were removed during the Martin property’s decades of mid-20th-century neglect and then surfaced on the market.

The University of Victoria’s Legacy Art Galleries will put the Martin windows on view for two months starting July 15, in an exhibition, “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright.” After that, experts will reinstall the panes at the house. Two of the windows in the university collection had been already copied for the Martin building, and those copies are now being donated to the university galleries.

Among the institutions that own Martin windows are the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Fla.

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