This Frank Lloyd Wright lamp just sold for a record-breaking $7.5M

Frank Lloyd Wright, one of America's most famous architects and the designer of Scottsdale's Taliesin West, had a big day on the auction block recently.

A 120-year-old lamp designed by the late architect sold for a record-breaking $7.5 million to an unnamed bidder during a May 13 Sotheby's auction. The price tag smashes the record for the most expensive Wright-designed object sold at auction, which was previously held by a ceiling light from the Francis W. Little House. That piece sold for $2.9 million in 2023.

The lamp, titled in the pre-auction materials as "An Important Double-Pedestal Lamp for the Susan Lawrence Dana House, Springfield, Illinois," was designed by Wright around 1903 and built by the Linden Glass Company of Chicago around 1904. Crafted from iridized and opalescent glass, brass-plated “colonial” zinc came and bronze, it measures about 23" x 32" x 19".

Before the sale, auction materials on Sotheby's website said the lamp "isn’t just any design object. It’s one of only two ever made, a sculptural masterpiece that brings together glowing glass, bold geometry and electric light in a way only Wright could. Created in 1902 for Susan Lawrence Dana’s Springfield home — one of Wright’s most extravagant commissions — the lamp is a rare glimpse into the architect’s total vision, from base to beam."
The lamp was last sold in 2002, when it fetched just under $2 million in a Christie's auction. Its original estimate for last week's auction was $3 to $5 million. The other version of the lamp resides in the Dana House, which is now a museum.

Jodi Pollack, Sotheby’s chairman and co-worldwide head of 20th-century design, called the lamp "a perfect, timeless artifact of Wrightian exceptionalism" in the auction catalog.

"What strikes us first is its commanding presence, the sheer gravitas it exudes," she wrote. "Then, its radiant, shimmering glass, which comes to life in an almost kaleidoscopic effect, shifting in colors as one moves around the lamp. The more time spent looking, the more readily apparent it becomes that one is in the presence of something vastly more complex than a strikingly beautiful object; it is a spatial composition of line and form, conceived as only Wright could envision with exacting architectural precision. Essentially a house in miniature, the lamp distills the pure essence of the architect’s design principles on a remarkably intimate scale."

Wright's design principles are on display all over the Valley. In addition to Taliesin West, Wright's studio and home that is a  UNESCO World Heritage Site, he also designed buildings such as Gammage Auditorium at Arizona State University in Tempe and the Lykes House in Phoenix.