Category: General

Colored postcard of the Home Building, Frank Lloyd Wright's first design.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s aunts

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Jennie and Nell Lloyd Jones that is.

I have to approach them that way—

As the Big Boy’s Aunts

—or I wouldn’t get as much interest on this post.

They were the first of the Lloyd Joneses born in Wisconsin. Their three brothers and three surviving sisters (including Wright’s mother) had been born in Wales, starting in 1830. Aunt Nell was born in 1845, and Aunt Jennie in 1848.

My post today will be about them. That’s because

on March 9, 1887

Aunt Nell wrote to her nephew

            newly arrived in Chicago

about working on a building plan.

That building–in the postcard at the top of this post–would be the newest construction on their planned school; as well as the first structure that Wright ever designed.

Hold on a moment.

before I get to Nell’s letter, I want to write more about the Aunts.

They never married and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville Normal School in 1870. Here’s a photo from the class of 1870, below.

A photograph in sepia tone of two young women with dark hair.

25-year-old Nell is on the left, and 22-year-old Jennie is on the right.

This is my screengrab of the photograph by John Robertson, at the University of Wisconsin—Platteville. Archives and Area Research Center. Local Identifier: Record #889.

You can see the page with the whole photo of the class here.

The Wisconsin Historical Society has a photo of them at their school after 1887:

Aunt Nell is on the left with the white hair.

Nell’s white hair:

Wright’s sister, Maginel, wrote about this in The Valley of the God-Almighty Joneses:

Aunt Nell’s face had been badly scarred by smallpox… and her hair had turned snow white during the illness. Once, years later, she told me about it. At the time she fell ill she had been engaged to a young man with whom she was deeply in love…. then,… she was stricken, and lay for weeks horribly ill…..

            When her fiancé came to see her he was appalled. He stayed for awhile, and… promised to return the next day. He never came back….

            “Oh,” I said to her, “Aunt Nell, how did you bear it? What did you do?”

        She gave me a grim little smile. “I hoed onions, my dear,” she said. “I just hoed onions all summer long.”…

            Maginel Wright Barney, The Valley of the God-Almighty Joneses: Reminiscences of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Sister (Unity Chapel Publications, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1965), 118-120.

Onions?

Did Nell have onions on her belt because that was the style at the time?

No.

During the American Civil War, people were asked to raise onions which could be sent to the soldiers to protect against scurvy.1

Did Maginel also write about Jennie’s personal life?2

Here’s part of what Maginel wrote:

   Aunt Jennie… was merry and animated…. It was she who told me stories of the family’s beginnings in Wales, and of their venturing to the primeval forests in Wisconsin…. Aunt Jennie had a romantic heart; yet she never married….

“The Valley of the….”, 119-120.

Some of Maginel’s memories are wrong. She wrote that Jenkin was 16 when he joined the Army. Jenk, the last of the Lloyd Jones children born in Wales, was born in 1843. The Civil War started in 1861, when he was 18. So, they must have been raising onions for the troops at that time, too. Maginel wrote that Nell’s hair went white the summer she had recovered from Small pox and had her heart broken.

Yet

the photo in 1870 of the graduating class from UW-Platteville shows Nell with jet-black hair.

So, either Nell conflated the story of the heartbreak and hoeing onions, or her niece Maginel did. Or maybe Nell had her heart broken twice.

As for Jennie –

Why didn’t she marry? Jennie told Maginel that she just couldn’t say yes to any of the men who asked her to marry them.

Maybe that contributed to the story Taliesin tour guides had created when I was there: that the two sisters vowed never to marry because one was romantically wounded.

Read my correction on this in the next post, “More on Frank Lloyd Wright’s aunts“.

Well, their decision to devote their lives to education is good for all of us.

Because they created and ran the Hillside Home School for 28 years.

1887 to 1915

NOW

I get to why I’m writing today. In early 1887, Jennie and Nell decided to start their school in The Valley.

Nell taught history at the Normal school in River Falls, Wisconsin, and Jennie was then an instructor in a kindergarten teacher training school in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Then Nell wrote to “My Dear Frank“,

Nell wrote “I heard you have been down to Hillside to look the ground over”.

SO, obviously the Aunts had spoken to him before about designing a building.

And while an unknown woman, “Miss Daniels”, had been drawing the beginning of the plan, “Miss D.—” didn’t feel it was finished/good enough.

            Then Nell wrote details about the plan on what they wanted.

The new building

  • Should face east
  • The first floor would have a room of 26 X 28 feet [67.6 square meters] to be used as a parlor or perhaps dining, and have an open staircase
  • One upstairs bathroom
  • Several small rooms – 6?
  • And two larger rooms over the kitchen
    • I’m guessing those rooms were the Aunts’ bedrooms

She wrote a few more things, like that they didn’t need closets. And they hoped to start “in the spring”.

Then Nell finished her letter with,

I hope you are well, happy and satisfying Mr. Silsbee.3

 I write in great haste but with much love

Ellen C. Lloyd Jones to Frank Lloyd Wright, March 9, 1887. Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, FICHEID: J001A03.

Construction on the building didn’t start in the spring, but they finished it in November.

We know that because of the “Home News”

It tells us that the Hillside Home School opened the week of September 22. And, then there’s this in the Weekly Home News from

the week of November 10

Frank Lloyd Wright of J.L. Silsbee architectural firm of Chicago here to finish up details and supervise the clearing and grading of grounds.  “Mr. Wright is an able young artist and if all had a ‘barrel of money’ with which to carry out his attractive mansion and cottage plans they might be happy yet.”

It’s likely this positive description came from The Aunts. Because Wright himself was just 20 years old.

More links:

Georgia Snoke (a member of the Lloyd Jones family, from the Jenkin Line), crafted a nice write-up on the Aunts from unitychapel.org (the website kept by the Lloyd Jones family). That page is available at this link: http://www.unitychapel.org/the-aunts.

Georgia provides information on the Aunts’ emotional lives, which may help to illuminate why these two women never married.

The postcard at the top of this post looks up and west at the Home Building that Wright designed for the Hillside Home School in 1887.
It’s available in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, Illustrated by Vintage Post Cards, by Randolph C. Henning, 87.
First published February 7, 2024.

Notes

1. “Onions were used to protect against scurvy” is another thing I learned while working at Taliesin.

2. Why do you keep calling her Jennie when The Master called her Jane?

She was known as Jennie all over the place. She was identified as that in the UW-Platteville photo, on photos of her while the Hillside Home School ran, and by Maginel in “Valley of the God-Almighty…”. As I wrote in my first Hillside Home School post, Wright’s sister was named Jane, but known as Jennie. So I think that’s why Wright referred to his aunt as Jane. I’m insistent on this because it seems that she wanted to be known as Jennie.

3. Wright’s first employer, Joseph Lyman Silsbee (1848-1913).

I wrote more about the Aunts and the school in my next post, on February 22, 2024.

Exterior photograph of Taliesin in snow. Published December 1911. Property: the Chicago Tribune.

Another Change at Taliesin

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This part of Taliesin in the photo above is the part that faces the Wisconsin River. A photographer for The Chicago Tribune took this on Christmas day, 1911.

The other night I was thinking about changes at Taliesin and remembered something I haven’t written about: the expansion of Taliesin’s “Front Office”. That is, in the room next to Taliesin’s Drafting Studio, Wright moved the wall to the north.

The First Time

this part of the building appeared in photographs was the photo at the top of this post. The photographer took it on Christmas day 1911, the day Wright gave a press conference that informed the world that Mamah Borthwick and he were living together at Taliesin.

I mentioned the press conference here, here, and here.

Drawing Time!

I’ve added some for you, so you know what part of the building you’re seeing in the old photo. The first drawing, #1104.013, is a nice rendition of Taliesin 1911-14. It’s in the book, In the Nature of Materials: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, 1887-1941, by Henry-Russell Hitchcock:

Taliesin Floor plan. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1104.013.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1104.013.1

And below is a closeup, with the Front Office near the middle of the drawing:

Taliesin Floor plan, The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1104.013

The drawing has the “TERRACE” under a roof, just like you see in the photo (the roof is noted by the arrow):

Exterior photograph of Taliesin in snow. Published December 1911. Property: the Chicago Tribune.

Here’s comparison:

This photograph I took below looks straight at the part of the building that had the “TERRACE” in the black and white photo:

Looking south at Taliesin from Office Terrace. Photograph by Keiran Murphy.

I took this photograph in 2004 while researching the Front and Rear Offices.2

The “TERRACE” was below the wall of rectangular windows behind the trunk of the White Pine tree.

btw: the pine trees (there were two) were removed in 2019. Don’t cry about it: one tree was dying (fixing Taliesin’s drainage took away a water supply); and each of the tree limbs weighed, like, 100s of pounds. Everyone in preservation at Taliesin felt nervous at every strong summer rainstorm.

Going inside

Wright never named the room, really. Moreover, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation staff didn’t call it the “Front Office” when I started at Taliesin.

           At that time (1994), Foundation staff used it as their business office.

The Foundation used the space until 1998 when the Tea Circle Oak tree fell (I wrote about that in this post). Here’s a photo from there:

Taliesin's Front Office. Photograph by Stilhefler in 2018.

Today I’m going talking about the part of the room on the right.

I didn’t work on the restoration of the studio after the tree fall,

—Why? at that time I was just a tour guide—

so writing this post gives me a chance to educate myself.

More drawings—

Here’s one showing the other side of the room. It shows that part of Taliesin you see today in the Garden Court when you take a tour:

Taliesin elevation. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1403.020.

Details on the drawing indicate that Wright probably drew it by 1913.

The drawing’s ID, “1403.020”, implies that it’s a drawing from Taliesin II. It’s the “1403”: 1914-25. But that’s wrong because of details in the larger drawing. That drawing can be currently (and until August 2024) be seen online here.

The windows you see in 1403.020 were added in 1913-14. Wright was adding the windows (and making other changes) when the photo below was taken:

Wisconsin Historical Society, Lynn Anderson collection, c. 1901-c. 1987. ID #68047. Looking northeast from Taliesin tower with drafting studio and courtyard in view. Possibly late fall.

The Front Office is to the left of the large chimney for Taliesin’s Drafting Studio.

I’m always happy when I look at this photo because of all the changes you can see going on. While Wright was always doing that, they were rarely caught in photos. Among things happening, there are the windows near the ground and the clerestories in front of the chimney.

If you want to know what a clerestory is:

it so happens I wrote a post about what looks like one at Taliesin (BUT IT’S NOT).

Anyway, back to the Front Office:

in that drawing I added above with the red, you can see Wright labelled the room as “Library”.

And in 1911, when draftsman Taylor Woolley took the photo below, you can see bookcases against the wall on the left:

Taken by Taylor Woolley in Wright's Taliesin drafting studio, 1911. Looking west.

This photo’s also in my post, “Don’t Touch That Stone“.

But he changes his mind and puts in the windows. He designs furniture to be put elsewhere to at least (maybe?) put drawings. The collections coordinator for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation noted there were several pieces of furniture, below:

Taliesin section drawing. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), 1104.011.

And

This drawing says “1104.011”, when it’s actually Taliesin II (“1104” means Taliesin I: 1911). 

Although, here former Archives Director Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer made the mistake.

There’s a photo looking at a drawer, or drawers. It’s been published a few times. I took a photo from the book, Frank Lloyd Wright, Selected Houses, v. 2: Taliesin, then put in an arrow pointing at the drawers:

Photograph taken in Taliesin drafting studio toward Studio alcove. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

 

It looks like Wright gobbled up a bit of the terrace by 1916, where he put that set of drawers. He added a flat roof because he enclosed the terrace when expanding the room:

Taliesin Roof plan. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1403.019.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, drawing #1403.019.

I added the red outline to highlight the roof, terrace, and descending stairs. So, he pushed out part of the room (expanding it), then added the flat roof on top. There was a door under that roof, so you could walk out to the terrace, then down the stairs.

So he did name the space!

Or part of it. He thought this area was part of the studio, and this was the “studio alcove”. He apparently kept it this way into the 1920s, judging from a later drawing, #1403.023:

Taliesin Floor plan, The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1403.023

The drawing was originally published in Wendingen Magazine (in Holland) during issues it published on Wright in 1924 and 1925.

I’ve posted parts of this drawing before: here, here, and here (I like using it because that bastard didn’t create many drawings for all the changes he made).3

It occurred to me that, by 1924 he perhaps added two “studio alcoves” for the draftsmen that he wanted to live at Taliesin for extended periods of time.

After all,

by the summer of 1924, his personal life was looking up in (what he thought was) the end of his relationship with his second wife. Little did he know how things were going to change.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). Wright standing at car outside of Taliesin. Mid-to-late 1920s.

This is a photo of Wright standing outside Taliesin apparently in the 1920s when he’s got kind of Knickerbocker-vibe.

actually, I just looked at the link I put up there: those don’t “have” a Knickerbocker look; those ARE Knickerbockers. I don’t know whether I’m proud or slightly disturbed that I instantly remembered that word. I can only imagine he was wearing those long black socks to keep the ticks at bay. 

He’s standing in the space that became Taliesin’s Lower Parking Court. The Front Office is out of the photograph, on the right. A recent photo of the area where he’s standing in the photo is here on Wikimedia Commons.

 

The photograph at the top of this post is printed it with a story “Flashback: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin was a refuge for illicit romance….” and was printed December 4, 2020.
Originally printed January 20, 2024.

Notes:

1. In the spirit of education, I’ve used those drawings from ARTSTOR a LOT on this site. Because I don’t want the fuzz (really, lawyers demanding money) coming after me. Hopefully I’ll figure this out because the site is supposed to be retired in August 2024. LATER: all former ARTSTOR images are now on JSTOR.

2. I have a feeling that some of you might be jealous and want to go onto that balcony. I’m no expert, but from a liability standpoint I can’t imagine anyone on a tour (or just visiting) being allowed up there. Because the edge of that balcony doesn’t even come up to my knees. If you fell off you’d either drop about 12 feet onto a concrete terrace; or 40-to-50 feet down the hill on the north side of the building.

3. While some of #1403.023 is incorrect, it’s not (as far as I know) in this area. You can always write me if you’re curious about what’s inaccurate.

Keiran Murphy sitting on the couch in the libing room on Ash Wednesday, 1982.

Dune, by Frank Herbert

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Me at the age when I discovered the novel, Dune

As far as I know, this post won’t be about Frank Lloyd Wright or Taliesin. Since Dune, Part Two (the second part of Dune, the movie) will be released on March 1, I intend today to write about the novel.

In particular, my earliest experiences with it.

It begins

when I was a teenager. Like many kids, I had intense loves at that young age.

Although Dune wasn’t on that list. At least, not at that time.

When I was in both grade and early high school, I was addicted to the rock band, The Police.

I could write a long post just about them, but, you know…

If I said that I liked the complex writing and subjects in their music, I would be lying.

I first heard “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” when I was 12 and

like many other middle-aged respectable women today I’m sure

had a total 12-yo’s crush on Sting.

I liked the other bandmates,

and eventually knew a tremendous amount about them –  

            Which is why I mentioned drummer Stewart Copeland’s birthday in this post

But I mean, c’mon – what 12 yo isn’t gonna love this? A few months later I was crushed to find out he was married, but, still:

Screen cut from the video "Don't Stand So Close To Me" by The Police.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNIZofPB8ZM

Screenshot from that video.

Ergo

in 1983, my love of The Police introduced me to Dune.

I found out that Sting was going to play a character named Feyd Rautha in the upcoming movie directed by David Lynch.

I don’t remember how or when I first acquired the book. My mom might have given it to me at Christmas. And while I don’t remember the first time I read it, I’d never come across such complete “world building” before. The entire “Duniverse” had a complex history, vocabulary and culture.

            After all, the book has a glossary and appendices with essays on its fake history.

I consumed

the information about this fictional universe just as I consumed history about The Police and,

—yes—

Frank Lloyd Wright.

In case

You’ve not heard about Frank Herbert’s book, or seen it,1 I’ll give you a short overview:

SPOILER ALERT

not that you can’t find all this information and more all over the internet,
but putting in “Spoiler Alert” has become like covering your mouth when you sneeze

Dune is a science fiction novel taking place in an interstellar planetary system of humans over 20,000 years in the future, after humankind has left our solar system.2

The civilization has 10,000 human worlds, an Emperor, and Dukes in charge of planets.

Space travel between them is possible in part because of a mind-altering and addictive substance known as the Spice or Melange, which exists only in one place in the universe: Arrakis.

Arrakis is a desert planet commonly known as Dune.

And for good reason:

Arrakis has no open water, clouds, rain, fog, mist, or almost any other kind of moisture you can think of. The natives (the Fremen) even have special devices called “Dew Catchers” to gather drops of water in the morning after sunrise.

The only thing Dune seems to have really going for it is the Spice.

Therefore, spice is incredibly valuable and makes Dune a place of intrigue, battles, and death. Yet, what also makes Dune deadly are its sandworms. These worms have crystalline teeth and “swim” through the sand on the planet’s surface. They can reach 300 meters in length and can’t be killed by known weapons. In order to get the spice, you need to go into the desert and as they say, “where there is spice,… there are always worms“.

The story starts

In the year 10,191 A.G.2 The Padishah Emperor, Shaddam Corrino IV, orders Duke Leto Atreides to take over the planet of Arrakis.

Despite the fact that Duke Leto knows that he’s walking into a trap, he uproots his family and entourage from Caladan (the watery home world of House Atreides for 20 generations) to Arrakis.

With him he brings his concubine, Jessica, and their 15-year-old son, Paul.

The Lady Jessica

is a member of an ancient group of women known as the Bene Gesserit. The Bene Gesserit—whose motto is “We exist only to serve”—is sometimes mistaken for a religious group.

They’re a lot more than that and they are, I think, why I first fell in love with the entire story.

I don’t remember, ever before in my young life, encountering female characters that were so strong, insightful, or knowledgeable.

I wanted to be like those black-robed women. I remember trying to move very purposefully and being very quiet. I wanted to have a mind trained to pick up on the slightest things. 

These women could

  • move faster than the human eye if they wanted to in order to kick your ass
  • determine if someone is lying
  • undo any lock
  • survive any poison
  • completely control people through their voice
  • control the sex of their off-spring

While Jessica was ordered to bear a daughter for Leto, she bore him a son, who she had been teaching many of the things she had been taught. He will, by the end of the novel, become the Emperor.

Where’s Sting?

Sting as Feyd-Rautha

Screen grab from an unpulished scene of the 1984 movie, Dune, by David Lynch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCbR0wZWJxQ

The photo above is a screengrab of Sting with one of his two facial expressions as Feyd Rautha in Dune.

That’s not to say anything about his acting abilities.

is the nephew of the Baron Vladimer Harkonnen.

Oh, right:

I forgot them!

The Harkonnens, another Great House in the story, is an ancient enemy of the Atreides.

            as one would expect

and have run Arrakis for 70 years.

What I described

Is explained basically in the first 30 pages of the 500-plus page novel.

I haven’t even talked about Mentats (human computers), which exist only because there are no digital computers (which was either genius on the part of Frank Herbert or luck).

See, Dune is complicated

AND:

I’m old-school on Dune and have cranky opinions on whether the movie — or mini-series — director got the details correct. Or if they made decisions that annoy me.3

Dune Part 1 from Denis Villeneuve was the first movie we saw in the theater after vaccines became available; then we saw it once more when it came to our hometown.

So I am really excited to see the next one.

 

Published January 7, 2024.
I was in the 8th grade when Mom took my photograph at the top of this post. I can tell by the smudge on my forehead that it was Ash Wednesday. The Persian cat I’m holding, Magoo, was mostly patient in how I used to hold her for so long… constantly. I’m wearing the polyester school uniform of my Catholic grade school. In grade school, the uniform was dark green. In high school, it was dark blue. In a jubilant rally a week after high school graduation, a bunch of us tried to set one on fire. That’s when we discovered that these uniforms don’t burn: they melt.

Notes

1. you need to get out some more.

2. The year is 10191, A.G. which stands for “After Guild”. So it means that this take place over 10,000 years after inter-space travel. In The Dune Encyclopedia the Guild was founded over 10,000 years after humankind left our solar system.

3. Weirding modules!!

Photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright by Edward Steichen, Bequest of Edward Steichen. Located in the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Wright was not a shyster

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A trickster, possibly.

maybe an s.o.b.

But not a con man (not even on the order of Harold Hill).

However, I know why you think Frank Lloyd Wright was like that.

After all—

He borrowed lots of money from people and couldn’t give it back.

And pulled so much money out of former client Darwin Martin.

Check out this documentary on Wright, Martin, and Buffalo that came out in 2016. It’s great.

Then,

In 1932, Wright convinced a bunch of kids (the Taliesin Fellowship) to give him money to learn about architecture when he had no clients.

But while they paid him,

they fixed his buildings both before and after he had clients again,

Photograph by Hank Schubart 1932-34. Property: The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).Apprentices working at Hillside probably in 1933. Yeah, chiseling stone without a shirt on (like the man pictured above) isn’t up to OSHA standards, but then again, I found newspaper stories around that time in which people had to be reminded not to throw cans of used motor oil into their fireplaces to get the fire going (and usually suffered burns from the resultant explosions).

And farmed

his land,

Apprentice Bill Patrick hoes squash in a photograph on page 66 of the book: A Way of Life: An Apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright, by architect Lois Davidson Gottlieb.

While working in the kitchen and serving meals.

As well as,

BUILDING

his furniture

like his drafting tables for the Hillside studio.

You know, drafting? Like, doing something people should get paid for?

Although I get the feeling that becoming an architect is like becoming a doctor: you get the degrees, then you go and work in an office.

… which you get paid for…. C’mon: stay focused!

And later,

Even when things were on the up again, they built the “camp” in the Arizona desert starting in the late 30s.

a.k.a., Taliesin West.

And that’s not counting

the whole, “leaving his wife and 6-kids” thing.

Yeah yeah yeah: it was a lot, ok?

My fingers are too tired to copy/paste all of the stories that will come up. You can read about it if you put “frank lloyd wright” and “scandal” into a search engine.

But as I told architectural historian Kathryn Smith one time:

“with Wright, there’s a difference between the ideal and the reality.”

Then,

I read The Lost Years by Anthony Alofsin. Alofsin identified Wright’s desire to create an educational community back in 1909-11. Wright thought this education would transform architecture:

Recalling the training of artists in Japan or the practice of apprenticeship in the Middle Ages, he concluded that a new education was necessary for youth, incorporating the spirit of great architecture, “the study of the nature of materials, the nature of the tools and processes at command….”

The Lost Years, 1910-1922: A Study of Influence, 90.

Not only that:

Wright seemed to honestly believe that he could build beautiful homes for less money.

Even though the whole country didn’t take him up on that.

So, he wasn’t just full of it. I believe he actually did think it would all work out.

Moreover:

He honestly thought that, within a few years of its beginning, his apprentices wouldn’t have to pay tuition for being at the Taliesin Fellowship. He thought that the cost of their tuition would pay for itself while he created a self-sustaining community.

For example,

he wrote this in a brochure for the Taliesin Fellowship:

[T]he Fellowship has a two-hundred-acre farm, and as another there are yearly fees fixed at about what a medium-grade college education would cost plus work the apprentice can do. Eventually, paid services to Industry in architectural research will contribute substantially to put the tools needed into the hands of the workers and reduce or eventually abolish the fee so worthwhile young men and women may work for their living not as education but as culture.

The Taliesin Fellowship (brochure for the Fellowship), December 1933.

Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings, volume 3: 1931-39. Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, introduction by Kenneth Frampton (Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York City, 1993), 163.

And the work

in the self-sustaining community of the Fellowship would teach apprentices to be better architects. He wrote this in the 1943 edition of an Autobiography:

The field work is as important a responsibility as the work in the draughting room, or in the garden, the kitchen or the dining rooms. This seems very difficult for young America to accept. One of our young men could not see the work in the kitchen as anything but menial work to be done by a servant. When he was told he didn’t have to do it his conscience troubled him because all the others were going that work…. After the work in the kitchen he would sit and make drawings for the new arrangements he felt we needed. He would suggest new systems of serving, which would eliminate waste motions. He was just as interested in work as in any other. His knowledge of the working of a kitchen and dining room on whatever scale is instilled into his very being—a knowledge earned and gained by him by way of actual experience—not by way of a superficial inadequate theory of designing.

Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, new and revised ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 425.

otoh:

There’s no denying what Priscilla Henken witnessed when she and her husband David were apprentices during World War II. She wrote on August 6, 1943 about the inefficiency she witnessed in the Fellowship:

“plows, rakes, hoes, wire rusting in weather of all sorts – and forgotten; berries neglected on the bushes; man power used to dress up a house instead of to repair it—all to show off for guests. Potemkin’s false front and shabby rear.”
Taliesin Diary: A Year with Frank Lloyd Wright, by Priscilla Henken (W.W. Norton & Co., New York, London, 2012), 206.

Like I said:

With Wright, there is a difference between the ideal and the reality.

 

December 31, 2023.
The portrait at the top of this post is available online here from the National Portrait Gallery.
I added Wright’s quote in the photo. It came from a letter he wrote the people of Spring Green that was published in the Weekly Home News on June 10, 1926 while Wright was having problems with his second wife, Miriam Noel. When I found the photograph by Edward Steichen, I thought of putting the quote in it because it’s like one of those inspirational posters that has taken a turn. I laughed so hard I cried.

Notes:

1. “Shyster” is apparently based on a German word from the 18th century. When I looked for “Shyster” on vocabulary.com, I found that:

A shyster is someone who might rip you off or do something unethical in order to get his way. A used car salesman might tell you a car is a thousand dollars, but when you read the fine print, it turns out you’ll pay a lot more. That salesman is a shyster — someone who lies and deceives for his own benefit.

Photograph of a portion of the Taliesin estate. Taken in March 2004.

Easy Info on Frank Lloyd Wright

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Looking (true) west toward the Taliesin estate from the edge of the parking area of the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center.

I’m working on my next post. So, I figured I would throw out easy dates and pieces of information about Wright and Hillside to give you a little amusement.

Wright’s height:

5 feet, 8-and-a-half inches tall (1.74 m).

That’s what they tell you when you go to the Oak Park Home and Studio. His passport in 1905 has that height, and it makes sense to me.

In addition,

His height in the photograph below might help to prove it. It was published in 2014 in the Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly (the publication from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation):

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery and Architectural Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Published in the Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly, Summer 2014, v. 25, no. 3, p. 11.

He’s standing against the big stone pier in Taliesin’s Breezeway with the Taliesin Drafting Studio to his right.

When I saw that photo, I grabbed a tape measure and drove up to Taliesin. I realized the pier could be used as a way to figure out the man’s height. When I got there, I measured the height from where he was standing to the bottom of the stone that you see above his head that sticks out a little bit from the pier.

The height to the bottom of that stone was—I SH*T YOU NOT—5 feet 8 inches tall.

Now, he was leaning a little, and the angle is different and other things have changed, but that was the height.

I remember it because you remember something 5’8″ tall when it comes to Wright.

I can’t tell you his shoe size, though.

Ok, onward:

What day was Wright born?

June 8, 1867 (I wrote about it on this page).

What color was his hair?

Brown, before it went white.

His eye color? His son, John Lloyd Wright, when describing his father, wrote:

“Brown eyes full of love and mischief, a thick pompadour of dark wavy hair – that is my father when I think of him as he was when I was very young.”

John Lloyd Wright’s book, My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright (Dover Publications, 1992; first published as My Father Who Is On Earth, in 1946), 25.

However,

in this 1959 photo taken at Taliesin West, Wright has distinctly non-brown eyes:

Color photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright. Mike Siegal. Seattle Times. TNS.

And then there was this color photo on the cover of the Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly. His eyes look light brown. What the hell:

Cover of the Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly volume 16, no. 1

It appears the two photographs were taken on the same day.

Regardless, perhaps John remembered his father’s eyes being brown, but apparently your eye color can change, which makes my musing moot.

Did Wright ever talk to his dad after his parents split up?

(they divorced in 1885)

Apparently not, according to biographer Meryle Secrest.

And apparently, he didn’t go to his father’s funeral. Wright’s dad, William Wright, died on June 6, 1904 while living with one of his other sons in Pittsburgh. Architectural historian Robert Twombly noted that in his biography on Wright.

His father isn’t buried in Pennsylvania: his remains are in the Brown Church cemetery in Bear Valley, Wisconsin, about 20 miles from Taliesin. Of course, in 1904, Wright lived in Oak Park, IL.

Yet,

Wright didn’t go to his mother’s funeral, either. She died on February 9, 1923 and is buried at the Unity Chapel cemetery within sight of Taliesin. There’s no evidence that Wright was at her funeral. It’s hard to believe it since the chapel is down the road from his home, so it makes me think he was in California working.

Now let’s look at Hillside

The building on the Taliesin estate that Wright originally designed for his aunts in 1901.

Did Wright design furniture for it?

Apparently not. It doesn’t show up in photos or the few drawings that still exist for the building.

Plus,

I searched for them, just in case there were drawings that hadn’t been recognized in his archives. I did that in 2009 while Anne Biebel (principal, Cornerstone Preservation) and I were working on the Hillside Chronology.

That’s how I ended up finding the drawing of Taliesin 1 for the first time.

I wrote about the second time I found a Taliesin drawing, here.1

Did Wright ever design stained glass for it?

No.

Even though he was doing lots of stained glass designs at that time, Hillside just had diamond-pane glass.

It’s economic, and Hillside was (is) in the countryside. Here’s a photo showing a boy outside of the building. You can see the the glass on the right hand side of the photo:

PHotograph of boy in striped, long-sleeved shirt and shorts in summer, with buildings behind him.
Wisconsin Historical Society, Lewis, John P. : Wright collection, 1869-1968.
Image ID: 84042

You can see the photo in my post, “Another Find at Hillside“, which explains the building on the left hand side of the photo.

Will the diamond-pane glass at Hillside ever come back?2

No.

Wright began looking for replacement glass at Hillside while prepping for the Taliesin Fellowship in the summer of 1932. So he definitely did not want the diamond-pane glass there.

On July 20 of that year

his first letter (ID: M031B09), to Mautz Paint and Glass Co. in Madison, Wisconsin (now owned by Sherwin Williams) apparently went unanswered.

Neither did

the letter (ID# P015A05) written on August 23 to the Patek Brothers in Milwaukee.

However,

they had luck with the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, which sent glass to Wright and Hillside on December 20 (as seen in ID #P018B05). 

I do not know how Wright paid for it, but the shipped glass might have been in the condition that Wright first asked for from the Mautz Paint and Glass Co. The letter to that company asked for glass that was once known as “cull-plate,” or any “second hand plate in any proportion.”

Sounds like he was trying to get rejects, or returned glass. That way he could have done it by just paying for the shipping.

Wright could have changed the glass later when he had money, but he didn’t. So, again: the diamond-plane glass isn’t coming back.

 

First published December 18, 2023.
I took the photograph at the top of this post in March 2004.

Notes:

1. Someone should pay me to do this stuff since I’m so good at it.

2. The guides asked that a couple of times while I worked at Taliesin and did the

 

question and answer feature.

Looking (plan) west in Taliesin's Drafting Studio. Frank Lloyd Wright's desk is on the right, with his vault behind the stone wall. Photo by Keiran Murphy

The Restoration of Taliesin’s Drafting Studio

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Today I’m going to write about the restoration of the Taliesin Drafting Studio from 1998-2000.

Why?

It’s a tangent.

On November 9, 2023 I watched a “Wright Virtual Visit” from the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. That afternoon, they broadcast a program about the current preservation work at the Hillside theater on the Taliesin estate.

Read about how Wright redesigned that part of the building after a fire in 1952.

The theater has been undergoing a restoration for several years (prolonged by, oh yah, a world-wide pandemic). The work includes moisture mitigation, climate control, and the construction of green rooms in Hillside’s dirt-floor basement. The photo below is what I think of when I think “Hillside basement”:

A dirt floor, stone walls and debris in the Hillside Home School basement. Photo by Keiran Murphy.

I took this photograph in 2009.

That ain’t so anymore. In fact, to see what’s happening is—personally—mind bending. Getting a climate control system into the Hillside Theater was first talked about in the late 1990s.

The prospect became like getting heat back into the house.

So I thought

“Yeah, SURE you’re gonna do that….”

Taliesin, at least, has wooden floors. The only wooden floors at the Hillside theater are on the stage. Everywhere else has stone, concrete, single-pane glass, and metal furniture.

He didn’t care so much once he no longer lived in Wisconsin year-round.

Major preservation of the Theater started moving in 2018 with the announcement of a Save America’s Treasures grant to restore the space.

See Taliesin Preservation’s blog post about the project.

Since the Wright Virtual Visit showed how close it is to being done, 

I love

that the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation got to show their work.

Taliesin’s Director of Preservation (Ryan Hewson) kept me and my husband apprised about what they were going to do, and one of my photos of him in the basement is below:

Looking east in Hillside's basement while the space is being prepared for rehabilitation. By Keiran Murphy

I took the photo above when Ryan gave us a tour in September, 2020.

Here’s the before/after photos from the Virtual Visit:

Before and after photos of the Hillside Home School Basement on a Wright Virtual Visit.

In my photo of Ryan, he was standing to the right of where they later put the red Exit  sign.

As I watched

This Wright Virtual Visit, I thought about the work the Preservation Crew did to restore the Taliesin Drafting Studio in 1998-2000.

The work, completed in just over 2 years, mostly didn’t get press coverage.1

So that’s why today

I will give you the shorthand version of that project.

On June 18, 1998

an 80-m.p.h. (129 km/h) straight-line wind storm came through Wisconsin and knocked the 229-year-old Taliesin Tea Circle oak tree onto the roof of the Front Office at Taliesin.

Photograph of Taliesin Tea Circle in the summer of 1994.

Photograph by Keiran Murphy.

Of course I was there. Well, not literally standing there, but I worked at Taliesin. And those facts:

  • the date,
  • the wind velocity,
  • and the age of the fallen oak,

were branded into my brain.

The tree fell on the first day of my weekend.

But while I wasn’t working that day, I drove to Taliesin when I heard that something might have happened with the Tea Circle tree. As I drove up the hill around Taliesin, I was disconcerted because the tree’s crown was… in the wrong place. That’s because, of course, the tree had fallen over.

Check out images of the fallen tree and building from Taliesin Preservation’s Facebook page.

It was so weird that the big oak with its canopy of leaves sheltering the Taliesin Tea Circle—and at least half of the courtyard—was, suddenly, gone.

A positive observation

came from former Wright apprentice, Herb Fritz.2 Herb asked a friend (and former guide)3 to bring him to Taliesin after the tree and its debris were taken away.

Why?

Herb said that he had waited his entire life to see Taliesin without that tree.

Its disappearance opened an unobstructed view of the building.

Back to the point:

The tree was lost on a Thursday. The Preservation team came the next day to assess the damage, and began planning the restoration.

Ideally, you wouldn’t have to restore a space while simultaneously repairing its pre-existing problems but there wasn’t any choice.

If you want to get into the damage assessment and exploration, look at this link.4 It’s from the Wayback Machine.

When the tree fell,

I wasn’t yet working as the historian. But other members of the staff worked quickly to figure out the history of the room at Wright’s death.

The major restoration work

WAS NOT

in Taliesin’s Drafting Studio.

It was in the Front Office, the space adjacent to it. However, one of the restoration issues was that not many photos showed that area.

Not only that,

but the room was, at that time, the office of the CEO and staff of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation for 6 months every year.

It looked like an office.

It had a photocopy machine, a fax machine, and regular desks and drawers.

A door and non-original wall separated this office space from the studio, so they could keep working while Taliesin tours went on. You can see the wall in the photo by Judith Bromley in the Kathryn Smith’s book, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin and Taliesin West:

Taliesin studio with a drafting table, rug, fireplace, and artworks. Photograph by Judith Bromley.

Photograph taken in 1996. The wooden tall-back benches are in front of the wall that separated the studio from the Front office.

That wall had probably been there for over 25 years.

Everyone moved from the office while tours kept going through the Drafting Studio.

For future historians: that’s why the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation ended up in the former horse stable at Taliesin. That horse stable had been converted into office space when Taliesin Preservation started. That’s where I first worked with images and figured out the history of Taliesin’s dam.

The Preservation office created a plan on what to do.

That first winter:

The Preservation Crew had to work one floor below. They had to push the wall back into place and structurally secure the area.

But they could not stand upright in the area with the dirt basement. So, they shoveled out the dirt by the bucketload.

The shovel handles were too long.

So they had to cut the handles down so they had room to dig.

The other work

was figuring out what things in the 1950s looked like in Wright’s former office.

Fortunately, they found photos taken by Ezra Stoller in 1945 1951 (see through the link).

As well as photos that Maynard Parker took in 1955:

Looking (plan) southwest in the Taliesin studio in 1955. By this time, he used the studio as his office. 

You can see them at work in the photos below:

Reconstruction of Taliesin's Front Office in 1999. Photograph by member of the preservation department.

Two photographs taken in 1999 by someone from the preservation department. Courtesy Taliesin Preservation.
If you take a tour you walk through both of these spaces.

The left-hand photo shows that insulation was installed under the roof. They figured the extra thickness less than an inch (or about 2 cm) was acceptable. On the right-hand photograph, the red vertical lines were used for the post placement in the rebuilt bookshelf you see below:

Taliesin's Front Office. Photograph by Stilhefler in 2018.This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

If you want to know what was there on that wall: there had been built in cabinets that were used by the office, including all of the office supplies.

Once the crew did the important structural work they had to restore the studio.

When doing that, they reconstructed a couple of built-ins around the fireplace and a box in front of the stone vault.

Additionally,

I recall that they found Wright’s office desk. It had been in a former work space and had to be restored. Unfortunately I forget who gave the money for that. So when you go into the former studio today, that desk is original. A recent photo of it is through this link. But you see on historic photos that it was a LOT messier when Wright was alive: 

Photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright at his desk. Taken in 1957. Eugene Masselink is standing with him.
Wisconsin Historical Society.
Collection: Richard Vesey photographs and negatives, 1955-1963

It looks like Wright’s secretary, Gene Masselink, is talking to him at his desk in August 1957. Photograph by Richard Vesey.

Sometimes I think Wright’s desk should still be filled with all of this stuff, just like it was when he was alive. However I think that veers into hyperreality via Jean Baudrillard. That is: the fake is better than the real. So we gotta stick with the reality that’s there at Taliesin. Because, even though I love Taliesin, I will not dress up as a female Fellowship member in the 1950s. Making bread, playing musical instruments, working in the fields, and cleaning Mr. Wright’s Bedroom would make me cranky.

 

Published December 1, 2023.
I took the photograph at the top of this post in 2005.

Notes:

1. It’s not that we didn’t want to. There just wasn’t the money or staff. Plus, once the restoration work was mostly finished, the tour season (a.k.a. the money machine) started. All we could do was add “Come see the newly restored Taliesin Drafting Studio” on information about the upcoming tour season.

2. Herb (1915-1998) was the former apprentice whose offer of stone to Wright that I wrote about in my post, “In Return for the Use of the Tractor“.

3. That friend, Craig, is with me in this web page someone wrote about their visit to Taliesin.

4. At that time, Taliesin Preservation did the preservation/restoration work as well as tours. Since early 2020, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation has carried out all the preservation work while Taliesin Preservation, Inc. does the tour program.

UPDATE:

I found the episode where the tree is discussed in All Things Considered. The story comes in the last 5 minutes of the June 21, 1998 episode.

Taken in summer, photograph looking (plan) east in "Mrs. Wright's Garden". Taken 1961-1969. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

The Prisoner, Taliesin, and my sister

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The photograph above shows “Mrs. Wright’s Garden” at Taliesin. Taliesin’s Hill Crown is to the left of the wall. His sister’s house, Tan-y-Deri, is in the distance on the right.

All of us have engaged in things where obscure cultural touchstones are a part of the back-and-forth discussion.

For instance:

You can show a photograph of a Penny Farthing bicycle and some, like me, will instantly think of the surreal television series, The Prisoner

“Surreal” is probably not the correct term

but I have an MA in Art History and early 20th Century art is among my favorites, so I think I outrank you.

but it works for the description of a striking television show.

Likewise, I always think of The Prisoner when I see the photo at the top of this page, which comes from page 53 of Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin, by Frances Nemtin.

What you are seeing is the sitting area around “Mrs. Wright’s Garden” at Taliesin. And the swirly canopies above the chairs are making me think that. 

Which

the Taliesin Fellowship started construction on by 1961.

they later added a swimming pool, which you’ll see below.

But the photo above just has the little wading pool on its right-hand side. That little pool has a fountain feature in blue like the feature you see, in red, at a pool at Wright’s Taliesin West.

I took a photo of the pool and showed it in my post, “Taliesin West Inspiration“.

Another photo,

below, shows the area in 1968. By then it had an inground pool:

Photograph in summer looking (plan) east at the pool in Mrs. Wright’s Garden. The photographer, “Jim” Potter, said he took this photograph in 1968.

The swirly canopies over the chairs, and my thoughts of The Prisoner comes from the umbrellas over the chairs at the top of the post make me think there should be some women standing in mini-skirts in the ’60s, like this enjoyable foray from the Carol Burnett Show:

Screenshot of Vicki Lawrence dancing with Carol Burnett in 1967 during the Carol Burnett show.

For years

the pool and garden were just south of Taliesin’s Hill Crown. The area was surrounded by square, limestone walls and was added by 1961 (and the pool was added by ’68). Its existence (along with the Taliesin pond on the estate) probably increased mosquitos, so netting was added above it. The netting was light blue, which you can see in the photo.

btw: the chairs were there when Wright was alive. If you look at the book by Nemtin, you can see a photograph of Wright and his family sitting in them on Page 62.

The pool and walls were removed after Olgivanna died in 1985 (she died in March and I think they started the removal that summer). If you look closely at the Hill Crown retaining wall, you can see where the stone changed. Just so you’re not crawling around on the grass during your next Taliesin tour, I took the photo below at the Hill Crown retaining wall:

Close-up looking at the stone on the retaining wall at Taliesin's Hill Crown. Photograph by Keiran Murphy

I took this in April 2005. The slight arc I pointed out on the stone in the photo was where I think a “Moon Gate” went (you can see another moon gate in the two photos above).

Because of the garden/pool

I’ve introduced at least two people to the surreality of The Prisoner by sending them the photo of that pool.

well, okay, and maybe talking to them about show and showing them clips on YouTube. But that’s… mostly it, I swear.

So

moments from that show (which I’ve only seen once or twice) still make me twist my head up like a dog trying to understand what the hell the silly humans just said.1

And yet, we all have these things. 

Iconic moments

images, words, and ideas that connect us to a certain group at a certain time.

And once, while at college, one of my roommates kept a running list of the “in-jokes” we all shared. As I recall we had a list of over 100 in-jokes at the end of our sophomore year.

btw—several, including me!, have won awards.

We’re all winners.

And yet, The Prisoner brings to mind

another tangent:

hang on:

It’s the moment when I was introduced to a set of Star Wars fans. I found out about this subset while watching Weird Al Yankovic‘s video for “White and Nerdy“. The guy I was dating mentioned Weird Al getting a videocassette copy of a program.

That moment slipped by me as unimportant.

Not important to me, but important to him and others in this small subset. Because what Weird Al surreptitiously received was a contraband copy of The Star Wars Holiday Special. a.k.a.: The Special That Director George Lucas Tried To Kill, but was unsuccessful due to geekiness at the Ultra-Level.

As a result, that boyfriend and I watched the SWHS on YouTube. I will not provide a link to that show; if you want to see it, goddamn it, Google it. It is a thing you cannot unsee. I later wrote to myself that:

Yes, I am one of the few, the not-so-proud, to have seen the mythical ‘Star Wars’ Holiday Special….

I now know what makes Harrison Ford so bitter.

And, oh those inside jokes, the moments of small touchstones.

Lastly, regarding touchstones:

We in the U.S.A. are upon Thanksgiving and many of us are reminded of family.

And, of those small touchstones and family thoughts, I recall that I expected a time in which I’d have to start listening to my oldest sister prepare for her upcoming birthday. I figured she would talk about this in the year up to it. Because that birthday would be on the numbers that you see below:

Numbers representing the date January 23, 2045.

Could have been that she never would have thought about it and would have thought I was weird for it coming into my head.

Which still brings me back to something published a few years ago on Facebook by Lay Minister Patti Fitchett: “He’s my brother and he weighs a ton!“

Her essay addresses what it’s like to lose a sibling. In part she writes:

Often our feelings for our real life siblings don’t come close to the fairy tale relationships we see depicted in movies. How many of us remember a childhood punctuated by shrieks of “Mom, they’re pointing at me again! Make them stop pointing at me!”?

If I’m around in the future I might remember that numerical coincidence that will mark her birthday anniversary.2

 

First published November 22, 2023.
The photograph at the top of this page was published in Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin, by Frances Nemtin, p. 53. It is care of The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

Notes:

  1. The Simpsons did a great send up of moments from The Prisoner in this edited video.
  2. Bummer alert: E will not be here to celebrate it and is not here to remember it. That’s due to dumbass cancer.
Exterior photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright's Hillside school. Taken in summer 2009 by Keiran Murphy.

More evidence of Hillside fire damage

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A photograph looking northeast at Hillside. You can see the south wall of his theater with the glass, and a wooden structure over the back steps to the Hillside sound and projection booth, and the Hillside chimney with signs of fire on the chimney stack.

In my last post on November 3 I talked about fire remnants that people can see on tours of the Taliesin estate.

After that, researcher Greg Brewer1 reminded me that, D’UH, there’s a big reminder of Hillside’s 1952 fire that anyone can see if they take a tour.

btw: the “D’UH” didn’t come from him. It’s my own internal dialog. Most people who know me have probably heard “d’uh” come out of my mouth multiple times a day; it’s a reaction to the realization that whatever I had concluded was wrong and/or hilariously incomplete.

Why . . . ?

did I gravitate to the more difficult thing to see at Hillside in that post?

My mind goes for the stuff that’s unusual to me.

The Theater chimney is so average to me that it didn’t jump out in my memory.

See? I’m too smart for my own good sometimes.

So what I’ll write about this post is what Greg Brewer remind me of: what anyone can see outside of the Hillside Theater.

It’s a ghost left over from the 1952 fire, on the outside of the Hillside theater chimney.

You can see this ghost in the photo at the top of this page and when you take a Taliesin Estate tour or the Highlights Tour.

Here’s a pre-fire photo:

You can see the roof of the theater in the c.1920 photo below from the National Library of Australia:

Looking northeast at the Hillside Home School building by Frank Lloyd Wright

National Library of Australia—Eric Milton Nicholls Collection

When you click on the photo, the date from the library says “1903”, but that’s because they’re going on the date that Wright’s Hillside building was initially constructed. The photo was taken by former draftsmen for Wright (Marion Mahoney Griffen and Walter Burley Griffen) when they visited the U.S.

Then in 1940, Pedro Guerrero took a photo of that part of the building and you can again see the roof at the chimney before the fire of 1952:

Looking northeast at Hillside structure by Wright, 1940. Photograph by Pedro Guerrero.

This photograph was published in the book, Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, volume 4, 1939-49. Ed. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer.

The fire happened in April 1952. The Taliesin Fellowship apprentices cleaned up the site that summer and began building the theater that stands in its place.

A sign of Wright’s control

Of course the Old Man had control of everything that happened during the Hillside reconstruction.

That’s why

the Hillside Theater chimney still includes the signs of the fire.

We know about Wright’s control over this because of former apprentice Jim Pfefferkorn (1922-2016). He wrote a remembrance about the work he did at the Hillside Theater.

In particular, Wright directed Pfefferkorn to build the wooden box off over the stairs up to the lighting booth.

You can see that box in the photo at the top of this page.

Wright visited the work a lot. While Pfefferkorn was building the box, he asked Wright if they should lower the chimney, since it now looked bigger in relation to the building.

Pfefferkorn said that Wright looked at the chimney/roof for awhile, then decided it should stay as it was.

That’s another example

Of Wright’s control over the different places at the Taliesin estate.

 

First published November 12, 2023.
I took the photograph at the top of this post in 2009.

Note:

1. Thank you, Greg for reminding me of this detail of the chimney.

Brewer presented at the 2022 conference of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and wrote about Frank Lloyd Wright’s Roloson Houses and unbuilt Roloson Apartments in the Journal of Organic Architecture + Design, Vol. 8, No. 1.

Looking northwest at Frank Lloyd Wright's Hillside building during April 26, 1952 fire

Charred Beams at Taliesin

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I’m going to write today about two places on the Taliesin estate where you can see fire damage.

One place where fire happened, Taliesin, is well known. The other place is Hillside, which you can see in the photograph at the top of this page.

See, there are five buildings on the Taliesin estate. 1 You can see them listed on the aerial below:

Screenshot from Google aerial. Names of buildings on Taliesin estate added by Keiran Murphy.

This is a screenshot I from Google maps several years ago.

When you take a tour you can see fire damage in both Wright’s residence and in Hillside. You see Hillside and Taliesin on either the Highlights Tour (over 2 hours) or the Taliesin Estate Tour (4 hours). But since all of the tours take place on the Taliesin estate, sometimes people refer to either site as “Taliesin”.

So, just like Taliesin gets mixed up with Taliesin West, or the House on the Rock, the Hillside building gets mixed up with residence Taliesin.

Speaking of,

This happened with Time Magazine.

I know you’re shocked.

On June 8, 1998, the Volume 151, No. 22 issue of Time came out, and it concerned the “Artists and Entertainers of the Century“.

They picked Le Corbusier as the greatest architect of the century. We weren’t heartbroken. Their choice makes sense: Corbusier had a lot of influence on overall building design.

Yet,

in the issue, they added a paragraph entitled, “Frank Lloyd Wright: A Maverick Who Believed in Form With Feeling“.

With this paragraph they included a photo of “Frank Lloyd Wright’s home”.

I think the photo they used was by Wright’s photographer, Pedro Guerrero. It showed the building like the one below:

That’s not Frank Lloyd Wright’s home.

I think the Taliesin Preservation‘s media person contacted Time. I’m sure they ran a correction but I don’t remember seeing it.

So, what’s this all about again?

This post is about areas in both the Taliesin structure and Hillside where you can see evidence of fire. First I’ll talk about fire evidence at Taliesin, because it’s easier to see.

It spontaneously came on tour,

because things on tours organically cycle through the narrative. Usually stuff is picked by guides talking to each other.

For instance, at one time guides talked about Wright and Thomas Jefferson: both had Welsh ancestry; had homes they constantly modified; had similar religious beliefs; were farmers as well as architects; and both apparently died in debt.

The reason why Jefferson was brought up is because there’s a plaster maquette of Thomas Jefferson’s bust in Frank Lloyd Wright’s bedroom. It’s in this photo on Wikimedia Commons.

I even added the Thomas Jefferson maquette in my first Nanowrimo novel, “Death by Design“. it’s November 3, so remember that you still have time to write your novel this month.

But, right now

guides pay attention to charred beams at Taliesin.

You see them when you walk in the Breezeway between Taliesin’s studio and the Living Quarters. They are visible through the wooden grate you see in the ceiling below:

Looking (plan) south in Taliesin's Breezeway. In view: the lit ceiling grating, the top of the pier in the Breezeway; and a "caution" tape as Taliesin was under construction during Save America's Treasures in 2003-2004

I took this photo during the Save America’s Treasures drainage project that took place at Taliesin in 2003-04, so that’s why you see the “Caution” tape.
I wrote about some of that project here.

The guide often invites people to look up at the safety light in the ceiling. From there, they see charred beams, like in the photo below:

Seeing charred beams at Taliesin sistered next to fresh beams. As viewed through a wooden ceiling grate. Photo by Keiran Murphy.

No one in the tour program deliberately brought the charred beams onto the tour.2 For years, lot of guides might not have known about them.

So: what changed?

I think people noticed after Taliesin got a donated sound system.

In 2005 Bill Costigan of Poindexter’s sound design donated great audio speakers to Taliesin. Bill and an employee set the system up at Taliesin that spring while we were preparing for the tour season.

long-story-short: he had previously seen an old boombox playing music in Taliesin’s Living Room balcony. That made him take pity on us.

At that time, interior tours closed down for 6 months of the year. In April staff cleaned and prepped for the season. Since Costigan and his assistant came in April, they could do everything without running into tours.

While setting up, they took an extra speaker and placed it into the Breezeway to broadcast music.3 The music made people look up, and notice the charred beams. Therefore, the guides brought info about the charred beams onto the tour.

I believe the beams were damaged after the Taliesin II fire.

Then,

someone read something that Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer wrote about Wright’s reactions to the Taliesin fires. Since Taliesin’s living quarters were destroyed twice but his studio wasn’t touched, Bruce relayed that in 1957,

Wright said

“God may have judged my character, but never my work.“

Letters to Apprentices by Frank Lloyd Wright. Edited and introduction by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, p. 3.

Perhaps Wright was inspired by the recent Hillside fire

Hillside’s 1952 fire destroyed classrooms, the dining room, and the Playhouse theater, but didn’t touch the Hillside Drafting Studio.

The day after the fire, Wright gave the Weekly Home News a great quote about that fire. Wright told the Home News that:

“That smoke-tone is wonderful. I couldn’t have darkened it so evenly if I’d done it myself. Nature is God’s technician.“

The Weekly Home News, May 1, 1952, front page.

You can also see why the rest of the building wasn’t damaged in the photo Maynard Parker took in 1955:

Looking west at Frank Lloyd Wright's Hillside Home School. Assembly Hall on left, Hillside Drafting Studio on the right under the "serrated" roof line. Photograph by Maynard Parker. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

There’s a bridge separating the older part from the Drafting Studio on the right. This provided at least a stopping place for flames if the wind had shifted that day.

Unfortunately,

Tour guides usually don’t have time to point out visible charred wood at Hillside. It’s a bracket under the ceiling.

Tours usually enter the room like Maynard Parker photographed in 1955:

Looking east in the Hillside Assembly Hall. Photograph Maynard Parker taken in 1955. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 

To see the fire-damaged bracket, you’d have to walk into the center of the room and look back. Plus, most of the time tours enter the Assembly Hall, the tour commenced less than 20 minutes before. That’s too much info to give people that early.

I usually talked about the fire when we were looking down into the Hillside dining room. Because the Dining Room’s existence is due to the fire. The photo below is looking toward the dining room from the Assembly Hall. The dining room is under the gable. You can’t see the bracket from here:

If you wanted to point out the burned bracket, you’d have to direct people above what you can see in the balcony. And then telling people to look, “under the ceiling… to the right…. You see that black wood? No, not that one…” is counter-productive.

Although, evidence of the 1952 fire is in the floor boards. Sometimes I noted that if there was time. I put a photo below showing the floor at the edge of the Assembly Hall where you can see the change:

Looking south at the floor on the edge of the Hillside Assembly Hall. This part of the floor shows changes made after the 1952 fire at Hillside.

Ghosts of changes are always instructive in the buildings on the Taliesin estate. 

 

First published November 3, 2023.
The photo at the top of this post appeared in a newspaper story about the fire. The newspaper image was given to Taliesin Preservation, so I don’t know which one.

1. or seven. Due to the changes that Wright made to Hillside, some count it as three buildings. I learned Hillside as one building so… tomato tomahto?

2. Which is probably good because things coming through the viscous bureaucracy might have robbed it of its vitality.

Like when I first started giving tours and used Narciso Menocal‘s interpretation of the Flower in the Crannied Wall sculpture at Taliesin.
Menocal’s interpretation, too, was viscous. I was newly-minted out of Grad School but even I realized that my folks on tour were just being polite. What can I say?

3. They put one over Taliesin’s Loggia, too, but I don’t know what happened to it.

But wait! There’s more!

Right after I published this, I was reminded of another, easy reminder of fire damage at Hillside. Read that post, “More evidence of Hillside fire damage“.

Frank Lloyd Wright and Alexander Woollcott standing outside of Taliesin. Photograph in the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Edgar Tafel collection.

A room at Taliesin

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Alexander Woollcott with Frank Lloyd Wright outside of Taliesin. 

a room that existed before we (or I) knew it existed.

I’m going to write about my discovery of that room’s appearance today. It’s the room with the windows that you see behind Wright, Woollcott, and the birch trees.

It was thought that the room was originally designed for Wright’s youngest daughter Iovanna (born to Olgivanna in December 1925).

Meryle Secrest wrote in her Wright biography that in March 1925, Wright and Olgivanna “made an impulse decision to start a family of their own.” [Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography, 315]

Secrest gave no evidence for this “impulse decision”. Obviously something impulsive happened and Olgivanna was young and pretty, so I’m like, “Yeah… Sure.”

Here’s where it is:

The room is one floor above Olgivanna’s bathroom, so you walk by it as you go into her room on a tour through Taliesin.  

FYI: The bathroom was dismantled, so it’s not on tours.

You can see the outside of Iovanna’s sitting room when you’re on the Hill Crown at Taliesin. Wright added the parapet1 which you can see in this photo I took:

Looking at Taliesin living quarters on a sunny day in spring. Iovanna's sitting room is behind the parapet. Photograph by Keiran Murphy

Taliesin Fellowship apprentices did the construction of the rooms in 1933-34. Abe Dombar wrote about it in this February 9, 1934 article:

Two new rooms were added to the pageant of Taliesin’s 40 rooms merely by lowering the ceiling of the loggia and raising the roof above it to get the most playful room in the house.  The boys call it a “scherzo.”  This is little eight year-old Iovanna’s room.

Several new apprentices, with the aid of two carpenters, were working on the job continuously from the architect’s first sketch on a shingle to designing and building in of the furniture.  And the girls made the curtains.  In celebration of the completion of the room we had a “room-warming” in the form of a surprise party for Iovanna. 

Abe Dombar. “At Taliesin,” February 9, 1934. Reprinted in At Taliesin: Newspaper Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 1934-1937, ed. by Randolph C. Henning, (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), p. 20-21.

It makes you think:

While kids may have been more hardy in the past, that is a lot of space for a little girl. Here’s one drawing that shows it:

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #2501.008.

Although the rooms in the 1930s were smaller, there was still a bedroom, sitting room, and bathroom.

That makes sense

when you think of the playroom he scaled down for his kids in his first home in Oak Park, Illinois.  

I was told years ago that it was originally scaled down for Iovanna when she was 8, but I’ve never seen an interior photo taken at that time.

Not that this would matter anyway. Remember: Wright’s building scale already messes with your mind.

However,

The number of rooms is also due to things happening in the Wright family.

See,

when the Wrights started the Taliesin Fellowship in 1932, Olgivanna’s oldest daughter, Svetlana (“Svet”), was 15. So the next summer, Wright designed those bedrooms for both Svet and Iovanna (then 7 years old).

But things got complicated.

One of those complications was related to one of the first Taliesin Fellowship apprentices: Wes Peters.

No doubt

Olgivanna made sure to keep her pretty young daughter away from all of the architectural apprentices in 1932 and ’33. But it was all intense and, even if you had them working 15 hours-a-day, young is young and those two (Wes and Svet) fell in love.

They wanted to get married and Svet’s parents said absolutely not.

And, yes, Frank Lloyd Wright fell in love with Catherine Lee Tobin when he was, maybe 19-20 (Kitty was 16-17); and Olgivanna got married when she was 19, but the marriages for those two ended in divorce, so….

But, come on:

check out the screenshots from the film apprentice Alden Dow made in 1933, the first summer those two knew each other. They’re so cute:

Screenshots of William Wesley Peters and Svetlana Wright Peters in 1933 film by Alden B. Dow.

The movie is the property of the Dow Archives, but you can see it in sections through this link.

So, in September 1933,

Wes and Svet left the Fellowship, even though Svet couldn’t get married until she was 18. You can read about their history in this book, “William Wesley Peters: The Evolution of a Creative Force“.

Svet’s age (15 or 16), gets me scandalized, but then again: I’m no longer a teenager.

I mean: I was completely bummed when—in grade school in the spring of 1980—I found out that Sting was 28 years old and married. But then I realized that, “uhh… Keiran? Sting’s not waiting for you.” [I may remember this moment because I was surprised by that grown-up thought]. 

You can read my teenage thoughts about Sting in my post: “Dune, By Frank Herbert“. I wrote this about the second installment of the Dune movie by Denis Villeneuve that came out in March 2024.

To get back to Iovanna’s bedroom:

For years, we thought that before that area had rooms and a bathroom, there was just a mezzanine up there that ended above Taliesin’s Living Room.

You can see it at the top of this post.

And that it ended on the other end just over Wright’s bedroom.

To picture it, you can see part of the mezzanine in this post.

However, in 2004-5, I was asked to research the entire history of that floor up there.

So I did what I usually try do:

I try to wipe my mind of preconceptions2 and look at photos. And so, for the the first time, I saw something earlier photos at Taliesin that shouldn’t have existed at that time. I saw in these earlier photos a chimney flue for the fireplace that’s in Iovanna’s Bedroom. Among other photos,3 the flue appears in one taken in 1928:

Photograph by architect George Kastner of Taliesin. Taken on November 11, 1928.

This photo is published on p. 4 in the Journal of the Organic Architecture + Design archives, Vol. 7, no. 3, 2017 in the article for that issue, “Desert and Memoir: George Kastner and Frank Lloyd Wright,” by Randolph C. Henning.

That flue I pointed out goes to only one fireplace: the one for Iovanna’s Bedroom. Yet George Kastner took this photograph in 1928, 5 years before the apprentices even started working in that area. So it didn’t match what I thought I knew. I thought that, before 1933, this stone mass was simply… stone. That it was like the stone mass that’s on the south side of Taliesin’s living room. That this part was only stone.

Like what was in Hillside’s Dana Gallery on the Taliesin estate that I wrote about in “Truth Hiding in Plain Site“. That it was mostly stone before the Taliesin Fellowship.

But since I couldn’t deny what was in photographs,

I got in my car and drove to Taliesin to see what I could find.

I went upstairs, looking for evidence that things had changed. First thing I noticed was that the stone was executed at one time, as opposed to being changed later. See my photo of the fireplace below:

Interior photograph of fireplace in Iovanna Lloyd Wright's Bedroom. By Keiran Murphy on 9-24-2003.

Contrast this

With the fireplace in the adjacent room. In 1933-34, Apprentices built that fireplace out of the existing chimney. And it certainly looks like it.4 

I took the photo below where you see the side of the chimney. On the left hand side you see stone that used to be outside. The red stones were those that went through the Taliesin fires in 1914 and 1925. The lighter stone on the right is stone placed there by apprentices when they built the fireplace mantelpiece:

Side of the chimney in Iovanna Lloyd Wright's sitting room. Photo by Keiran Murphy in 2003.

 

After looking at the two fireplaces, I thought about that “At Taliesin” article. In the article, Abe Dombar says,

Two new rooms added to the pageant of Taliesin’s 40 rooms….

But there weren’t two rooms on that floor in 1934. There were three: Iovanna’s bedroom, the bathroom, and the sitting room (the room at the newer fireplace).

In fact, the drawing doesn’t label Iovanna’s bedroom. It only labels “Iovanna’s room”, which is the sitting room with the new mantelpiece.

And one more thing: the bathroom

You can see the bathroom in the plan above. When I started thinking maybe Iovanna’s Bedroom was there before 1933-4, I thought how it doesn’t make a lot of sense for Wright to build a bathroom out of line with the bathroom one floor below. Often bathrooms are in line with each other because this makes laying the plumbing lines easier.

yeah, yeah, yeah: we can talk about how impractical Wright could be as an architect, but at Taliesin he had to live with whatever he designed. And bathrooms are expensive, even if the labor was free….

Moreover,

in 2007, I looked at Taliesin’s drawings for real in Wright’s archives. Luckily for me, Taliesin’s estate manager suggested I take photocopies of Taliesin’s drawings so I could take notes on what I saw in them.

In drawing #2501.007, I saw the word “nook” in pencil with a line going about where Iovanna’s Bedroom was:

Elevation of Taliesin. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). #2501.007.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #2501.007.

I can’t tell you when 2501.007 was drawn, but the details say 1925-32. I think that in the early Taliesin III period, what became Iovanna’s Bedroom was originally a sitting room, a “nook”, that could be used as a bedroom if needed.

alas, we don’t have Wright’s design for the couch/bed simplicity of a futon frame

3 more things:

coz: in for a penny, in for a pound

One Taliesin drawing shows the “sash details” of the windows in Taliesin’s Living Quarters. This is drawing #2501.032. See the detail of it below:

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). 2501.032.

The three windows I pulled out from the drawing match the three windows currently on the east wall of Iovanna’s Bedroom. The drawing labels these windows as being for—not a clerestory or above the mezzanine, but—”Gallery Bed Room”.

Also, in 2006

The Taliesin Preservation crew worked in a closet in Iovanna’s Bedroom and found remnants of pipes going through the floor above Olgivanna’s bathroom. I asked what those pipes could be, and one crew member (I forget who) said they were small enough to be used for a sink, but not a toilet or tub.

Wright could have had this little room up there and if someone were just staying overnight, they could use the sink in the morning to brush their teeth.

One of those people might have been architect Philip Johnson

See, back in the 2000s someone emailed me at work. He was working on a book of interviews conducted by architect Robert A.M. Stern with Philip Johnson.

Stick with me here

At one point, Stern talked to Johnson about Wright:

Robert A.M. Stern: And in researching for the book [on the International Style] you also went to visit Wright?

Philip Johnson: …. We went to see Wright in 1930 in Taliesin East [sic].5 I stayed overnight in the part that’s now all closed in and ruined, in the upper terrace there, just above the big room. We visited and had a great time and we realized that he was a very, very great man.

The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews with Robert A.M. Stern (The Monacelli Press, printed in China, 2008), 41.
The book’s price tag is over $40, but I’m that crazy: I got the book on sale for $10.

He mentions “the big room”. In 1930, there wouldn’t have been any other “big room” on the Taliesin estate except for the Taliesin Living Room.6 He was wrong about the placement of the room on that floor, but there was nothing else up there in 1930 that matches it.

OK!

I hope I explained what I found/think.

That is:

When Wright rebuilt his living quarters after the 1925 fire, he built a mezzanine above the main floor that ended in a small room with its own fireplace, three windows on the east wall, and windows (or possibly French doors) on the other side.

The windows above and behind where Alexander Woollcott and Frank Lloyd Wright are standing in the photo at the top of this post might have looked into this “nook”.

 

The photo at the top of this post was taken 1937-41 and published in Apprentice to Genius: Years with Frank Lloyd Wright, by Edgar Tafel, p. 179.
First published October 22, 2023.

Notes

1. He expanded the space and added the parapet in 1943 for an anticipated visit by Solomon Guggenheim (of the Guggenheim Museum commission) and curator, Hilla Rebay.

2. Which I remember every damned time I think about the window found in Taliesin’s guest bedroom that was staring me in the face for years in photos. I’ll write about it another time to go over it in detail. It’ll be penance.

My Penance Post is at “Another Taliesin mystery that I missed“

3. I think I first noticed it in a photo that I can’t show because I don’t think it’s ever been published. It’s Whi(x3)48218, an aerial photograph in the Howe Collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

4. Her personal spaces were featured in a Wright Virtual Visit in 2021, which is on Facebook, here.

5. Johnson was wrong on when he and Hitchcock visited Taliesin. According to Wright on Exhibit, the book by architectural historian, Kathryn Smith, they came in June 1932. Wright on Exhibit: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architectural Exhibitions, by Kathryn Smith (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2017), 83.

 6. It wasn’t at Hillside because Johnson said they visited it and while it was a great building, he described Hillside in 1930 as “a total wreck”.