Perhaps no individual in the U.S. did more to shape Americans’ visions of the screen format than architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Taliesin, his home and studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin, is a case in point. In many of the rooms of the house, Japanese screens of various heights, stretched flat, were placed on the wall, newly framed by him. Sometimes Wright designed wooden slats to hit the screen at the folds of each panel. He had been incorporating Japanese screens into rooms in this manner since at least his 1906 proposal for the remodeling of the Peter A. Beachy house in Oak Park, Illinois.

It was the fashion of the times—as evident in the homes of other Asian art collectors such as Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston—to place screens flat against the wall like a painting, but Wright made them part of the wall. While he may have been an advocate for the nontraditional incorporation of the folding screen into American domestic architecture, he also resurrected one of the screen’s premodern uses: that it was meant to be lived with, not simply put up on a pedestal and admired.

_{Frank Lloyd Wright bedroom at Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1911 (rebuilt 1914 and 1925). Photograph 1925/29.}