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Photo looking west in Taliesin's garden court. Taken in 1929 by Architect George Kastner. Courtesy Brian A. Spencer, Architect.

Things I don’t know at Taliesin

Posted on 05/14/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 6 minutes

In 1929, architect George Kastner (then, a draftsman for Frank Lloyd Wright) took the photograph at the top of this post. It looks west in Taliesin’s Garden Court while stonemasons lay the wall that separates this courtyard from the other courtyards at Taliesin. This wall insured that this courtyard would be free from cars.

Today I will write some other things that I’ve not been able to figure out at Taliesin.

It’s part of the enjoyment all over Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin estate (and all of its buildings): there’s just so much to know!

I will just concentrate on the Taliesin structure (not the entire estate).

First of all:

while I thought you Frankophiles out there would like the photo at the top of this post

I am going to talk about what’s behind the wall you see under construction in the photograph at the top if this page. The photo is great, but there are things behind it that I haven’t figured out.

I’ll show two photos taken behind that wall that show what I can’t explain:

You’re looking at the door into Taliesin’s Front Office. Its windows look onto Taliesin’s Entry Court.¹

I put the arrows in the two photographs to show you the part that I’m curious about. The arrows point at pieces of wood embedded in the two piers. So it looks like something was there that was maybe horizontal. Was it a wooden gate?

The pieces of wood are gently worn and don’t look like they’ve been hacked off. But they’ve been there for a long time. And I cannot figure out when they were put there, or what their original purpose was. The piers might have something to do with the drawing from the Taliesin II era (1914-1925), below, but I do not know:

Cropped version of a floor plan for Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's Wisconsin home and studio. — The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). Drawing #1403.016.

But they do not appear in drawings, and photographs give me no clue of their purpose or use.

Another Taliesin change:

There was something that Wright changed to the west of this area. It’s on the south side of the old cow barn.

Wright placed the cow barn under Taliesin’s original hayloft. I’ll point you to the area in the photo below, taken in 1912:

Photograph looking west in Taliesin's Garden Court (then the forecourt). — Wisconsin Historical Society: Photo by Henry Fuermann and Sons.
Collection: Henry Fuermann and Sons Taliesin I and II photographs, 1911-1913, 1915.

Looking west. Taliesin’s hayloft, the horizontal part of the building under the roof, is in the background. Further beyond that is a cow with a baby calf. They’re past where Taliesin ended at that time.

At the ground level,

under the hayloft, you see the outline of a stone pier under the left-hand side. The stone pier is on the south wall. Now, Wright changed this area, but I don’t know when. However, you can see the change in the stone, like in the photo that I took, below:

Looking (plan) southeast. I took this on August 12, 2005.

If you look at the stone wall, I drew over the two vertical lines in the stone that show change. The arrow on the top is pointing out a wooden window. The window must have been put there fairly early because it shows up in a photograph from 1914. I posted about it in my second part of “What is the oldest part of Taliesin“. I’ll show that photo again:

Postcard of crowd at Taliesin. Caption on card: "WEST WING. WRIGHT'S BUNGALOW". Property: Patrick Mahoney — Property: Patrick Mahoney. Published in “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, Illustrated by Vintage Postcards”. Ed, Randolph C. Henning. Page 39.
Unknown photographer.

A postcard looking (plan) northeast at the western façade of Taliesin’s hayloft, summer (the hayloft is under the roof). Because the collection of people are unexpected at a farmhouse, Randolph C. Henning (who put this postcard in his book about Taliesin postcards), thinks this was taken the day after Taliesin’s 1914 fire and murders.

I don’t know why he did this, but a change appears in a drawing.²

That drawing is below.

I expanded the stone pier in the drawing:

Crop of floor plan showing Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio, Taliesin. — The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1104.009.

On the drawing, you can see where I wrote the words “cow barn”. At the corner on the right in the cow barn, you can see the drawing of a door swinging inward. The pier to the right of that door is hand drawn.

Here’s my thought: maybe he expanded the cow barn and added the door there. But I don’t know why. Then he didn’t need it anymore so he covered it up.

Now, the last thing –

This was at Taliesin in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.

This is a change that makes me go, “Uh… Mr. Wright?…

“wth are you doing?”

For reasons that I do not know,

Frank Lloyd Wright removed the wall corner one floor under Taliesin’s living room.

That wing of the building was rebuilt after Taliesin’s 1925 fire.

But later Wright removed a portion of the supporting wall at the corner on the ground floor of Taliesin’s living quarters.

For years.

Then, he changed it back to what it looks like today, with a foundation at the ground and walls, like you can see in the drone footage below:

This photograph comes from the drone footage in “Taliesin in Spring Green, WI”. That’s available on Travel Wisconsin’s YouTube page.

Well, except for the ivy growing on the stone. Man! stuff grows so much in a Wisconsin summer.

So here’s what happened:

Wright rebuilt Taliesin in 1925 after that second fire, and the building looked like it does now. Then, for some reason, he removed a corner on the first floor of that wing.

So, the corner of the building, under Taliesin’s Living Room, was cantilevered. It shows up in a drawing better than it shows up in most photos.³ Check out the drawing, #2501.015:

Elevation showing Frank Lloyd Wright's Wisconsin Home and Studio, Taliesin. — The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

[Yeah yeah yeah: I know I tell you to not trust Taliesin’s drawings …. Unless I tell you to trust the drawings.]

It looks like that corner cantilevered there by 1936.

I theorize this based on photographs taken by Edmund Teske in 1936 while at Taliesin. Teske’s photographs show changes around that area of Taliesin’s north façade. It’s occurred to me that maybe Wright was checking on cantilevering? It’s not like he’d never done it before….

Maybe he was thinking about something else?

This is why

I never ask those questions (“why did he do that?”). Still, I’ve had this one question—regarding this cantilever—for… 15 years?

Anyway, I’ll try to show it to you. The good thing is that photographer Pedro Guerrero took a photograph at Taliesin in the early 1950s in which you can see the cantilevered corner, hidden underneath the summer growth.

This photograph was published in the Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly magazine (v 8, n 3, Summer, 1997), p. 16-17. Here’s my copy of the photo:

You can find this photograph at Guerrero’s website. You click on the portfolio for Guerrero’s Taliesin photographs and keep clicking through until you come to it.

Although the reason why Wright changed it back is clear:

it has to do with sculptor Heloise Christa.

“Heloise” was a member of the Taliesin Fellowship for almost 70 years.

In 1990, she told the Administrator of Historic Studies of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Indira Berndtson, that Wright changed that corner in 1957. She knew that because the change was under Wright’s direction the year that she became pregnant with her son, Christopher.

Wright wanted to open up the space on the floor where Heloise lived so she had room with Christopher.³

First published May 14, 2023.
My thanks to Brian A. Spencer for allowing me to publish the photographs taken by George Kastner. That includes the one at the top of this post.

Notes

1. It wasn’t called the Front Office in Wright’s lifetime. It was sometimes referred to as the “back studio” (its space flows from Taliesin’s Drafting Studio to the east).
2. wow: something at Taliesin that exists in a drawing. It’s rare, but you can trust Taliesin’s drawings. Sometimes.
3. I know – once again a drawing at Taliesin seems to match reality. Strange stuff. For me, anyway.

First page of the Feature Section in the Washington Herald newspaper, on November 28, 1915. Includes drawings, letters, and photograph of the face of Miriam Noel.

What about the second wife?

Posted on 05/02/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Yah: what about Wright’s second wife? That’s who I’ll write about today.

Years ago, a group of coworkers and I performed a comedy sketch for a friend who was leaving Taliesin Preservation. At one point in the sketch, we voiced common questions that folks ask when they take a tour. Among them were “how tall was he?” and “why are all the ceilings so low?”

[which is simply hi-larious lemme tell you]

But my favorite made-up question was from the co-worker who said the title of today’s blog post. I found it such a brilliant, off-hand “joke for the world’s smallest audience”.

But that begs the question: what about Frank Lloyd Wright’s second wife?

Those in the Wrightworld know

She wasn’t Mamah

Wright and Borthwick never married.

That was in part because Wright’s first wife wouldn’t grant him a divorce. I think that Wright would have married Mamah, despite the fact that he spoke a lot at that time about changing roles of marriage and women, due to their reading of Swedish feminist, Ellen Key. Key promoted the concept that women should not be the property of their husbands.

Yet, he understood at that time that he needed to place Mamah “under my protection” (as he said) at Taliesin.

The woman of the couple “living in sin”

would be in a terrible position to earn a living. The Dodgeville Chronicle newspaper reported in its January 5, 1912 article that Wright told them:

“The only circumstance which is the basis for the statement that I eloped with another man’s wife or deserted a wife or abandoned my children will be found in the fact that I neglected to inform the newspapers of Chicago of my intentions and the arrangements which had been made honestly with all who had any right to be consulted.”

No: Wright’s second wife was Maude “Miriam” Noel.

While I touched on her once before, I will be writing about her in this post. That’s because her birthday is May 9 (she was born in 1869).¹

She was born Miriam Hicks in a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee, and took the last name of Noel after her marriage to Emil Noel. They might have married when Miriam was 15.² The two of them moved to Chicago, where Miriam had their three children. Miriam and Emil later divorced.³

She went to Paris in the first decade of the 20^th century,⁴ and became a sculptress (although nothing of her work survives). Apparently, she left Europe at the start of World War I to return to Chicago and live with her daughter, Norma.⁵ Now, WWI starts in full force by early August, 1914, and the fire and murders at Taliesin happened on August 15. Noel read about the murders, which recapped Wright’s personal scandals (etc. etc., plus ça change).

The papers, then, were inundated with the stories of the lives lost at Taliesin.

While Wright wrote years later in his autobiography that he destroyed piles of sympathy letters, he did read some of those sent to him. That’s because, while he was receiving too many sympathy letters to count, there were still business correspondence that he had to attend to.

So, Wright instructed his draftsmen in Chicago to go through the letters and contact him with anything of importance. Apparently, one of the men thought he would be cheered by this letter of sympathy that said that, as an artist who had suffered loss, she understood where he was. Wright received the letter in December, 1914.

The architect acknowledged it, so Noel wrote another one. According to biographer, Finis Farr, in the second letter, Noel suggested they meet:

[A] few days later Miriam Noel sat opposite Wright’s desk…. He saw a woman who was no ordinary person, and who retained much of what had evidently been great youthful beauty. Richly dressed, with a sealskin cape, she had a pale complexion contrasting with her heavy dark red hair….

“How do you like me?” Miriam Noel asked.

“I’ve never seen anyone remotely resembling you,” said Wright.⁶

Wright was in a very delicate spot.

Years later, regarding his mourning for Mamah, he wrote that,

A horrible loneliness began to clutch me, but I longed for no one I ever loved or that I had ever known. My mother was deeply hurt by my refusal to have her with me. My children—I had welcomed them always—but I did not want them now. They had been so faithfully kind in my extremity. I shall never forget.

But strange faces were best and I walked among them.

I do not understand this any better now than I did then. But so it was. Months went by, but they might have been, and I believe they were, for me, a lifetime.⁷

IMO,⁸ Miriam, whether she planned it or not, was the perfect person for him at that point. Wright was probably among the walking dead in those months after August 15, 1914. And along came this sensuous stranger, who he probably engaged with physically very early. The emotions, and intensity, probably distracted him emotionally.

In fact, very quickly the two were plunged into drama. By August of 1915, she wrote him these letters that implied already that they were having emotional fights. If you want to see some of this, read the November 28, 1915 edition of the Washington Herald newspaper (available via Chronicling America from the Library of Congress). The story includes part of one of the letters that Miriam had written in August 4. The writing is… turgid:

“I went to pieces at mention of the things that were going on at Taliesin. The disappointment was too horrible. I shall always go to pieces like this, I know. Your letter has just come. For God’s sake do not torment me by relating your life as it is at Taliesen [sic].

Fears Her Own Emotion.

“Do not come. I cannot see you again. It will simply precipitate another outburst. Your carnivals at Taliesin are not for me. I do not want to be in them nor do I want to be told of them. A merry party of debauchers using your house for purposes too shocking for words—invited for that purposes. . . . if you write me again about it, I don’t think I shall be able to read the letter.

Why are you reading these “turgid” letters?

That’s because of a woman named Nellie Breen.

Nellie Breen was Wright’s housekeeper. Wright unfortunately left her in charge of his home on several occasions. At that time Breen got a hold of letters written by Noel to Wright. Due to this, Breen went to the United States Department of Justice and filed charges against Wright. These charges were for Wright’s violation of the Mann Act.

Created in 1910, the Mann Act

“criminalizes the transportation of any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”

Or: another thing I learned while working at Taliesin.

Breen said Wright was violating the Mann Act by bringing Noel into Wisconsin from Illinois. And Wright had the charges dismissed due to the work by the lawyer Clarence Darrow

– yes it’s true! Wright really was related to ever-y-thing!

Ok, coming back from that

Thanks, Clarence!

Wright would stay with Miriam, from this time, and into his work in Japan on the Imperial Hotel. I theorize that Wright’s responsibilities on his commission kept him busy enough to get along with Noel for periods of time.

Wright’s son, John, had a front row to the relationship:

I remember… when Dad soft-shoed into the drafting room and read her note to me. He thought it wonderful. I thought it terrible. Dad viewed the occasion so lightly, he smiled when the poetess faced him, he winked and the poetess chased him. He had an empty place with him and he felt a need to fill it up with something that is a little like love, or was it poetry? But, as the drama developed and the meaning of the poetry became clear to Dad, it was too late.⁹

The last of the relay race:

Wright finished the Imperial Hotel, and he and Miriam came back to Taliesin by August 1922. That November, his first wife, Catherine Lee Tobin Wright, granted him a divorce. Then Wright and Miriam married in November 1923.

The second Mrs. Wright left him by May of the next year (1924). The two began divorce proceedings, which were stopped when, apparently, Miriam found out about Olgivanna (who I wrote about regarding Taliesin’s 1925 fire).

Which ignited Miriam’s revenge.

That a surprise? Look at the damned letter in the Washington Herald that she apparently wrote after they’d only been together for 8 months!

And on, and on, the relationship between Wright and Miriam twisted and tangled up, losing Wright his clients and even more dignity within the American press.

Lastly

If you want to read about Miriam, there are the biographies by Meryle Secrest, Brendan Gill, and Finis Farr that I wrote in the Notes, below.

In addition, author TC Boyle made her into a hell of a character in his book,

or an annoying PITA, depending on your viewpoint; both of which are legitimate

The Women (Penguin Books, New York, 2009).

One of our staff members read it to us at lunch. I wrote about this when I related some of what we did at my old job during the Winter.

First published, May 2, 2023.
The image at the top of this post comes from the cover of the November 28, 1915 Feature Section in the Washington Herald newspaper.

Notes

1. Miriam Noel died on January 3, 1930.

2. Meryl Secrest Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, New York City, 1992), 238.

3. Brendan Gill. Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright (G P Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1987), 235.

4. Secrest, note on page 581. According to Secrest, Emil Noel died in 1911. Secrest didn’t write whether Emil and Miriam were living together at the time, or if Miriam had left for Paris without her husband in 1904.

5. Meryl Secrest. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, New York City, 1992), 237-238. I’ve taken the basic biography of Miriam Noel from Meryle Secrest’s biography. Noel appears in the chapter, “Lord of Her Waking Dreams.” That title is a modification of what Noel wrote to Wright in a letter.

6. Finis Farr. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (Charles Scriber’s Sons, New York, 1961), 146, 147. Farr wrote that David Robinson, the Office Manager, gave him the letter. Ok: so that’s the guy we can blame for Wright meeting Miriam.

7. Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 191.

8. and, if I haven’t said this before: the tenor of this post is pretty much all imo. Not that I’m wrong, I just don’t want you to think that this is the lasting authority.

9. John Lloyd Wright, My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright (originally published as My Father Who is on Earth (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946; Dover Publications, Inc., New York; 1992), 108-109.

Headline describing the April 20, 1925 fire at Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's Wisconsin home

What a Way to Begin

Posted on 04/19/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Have you ever fallen in love with someone, were blissfully going along, and then

something crazy-bad happened

outside of the control of either of you?

It’s a test of your mettle. And you move beyond your fears and you are all there for that person. It’s a test and you’ve aced it, in this binding experience.

Well,

that is, in short, my completely unauthorized and totally subjective start of the story of Olgivanna Milanoff Hinzenberg (later, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright) and the dashing, brilliant architect, Frank Lloyd Wright¹ in the aftermath of the fire that ripped through Taliesin on April 20, 1925.

So, that’s what I’m going to talk about in this post. Because the anniversary is right around the corner.

Let’s go back in history

In 1924, Frank Lloyd Wright was living back in Wisconsin, after his supervision and building of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo Japan, followed by designing and building in California.

He referred to most of these California homes as the Textile Block homes. Wright had a cool idea with these homes. They would be made out of specially-designed concrete blocks, that used material from the site. This way they would be less expensive, and use local material as the aggregate that would normally be displaced during construction. Plus, Wright was trying to think of a way to beautify the “gutter rat” (as he said) of concrete. They were “textile block” because of the way they were “knitted” together. He tried to do this once more in Oklahoma, but it wasn’t as easy or as inexpensive as he thought they would be.

Then, by mid-May, 1924

he was newly single after his second wife, Miriam Noel, had left.

About 6 months later, in late November, Wright went to Chicago and visited friend Jerry Blum. Wright says in his autobiography that Blum was a “diamond-in-the-rough painter” who had been “spoiled” by his parents giving him “too much easy money.”² Blum brought Wright to an afternoon ballet performance in Chicago.

Afternoon ballet performances might not be the common thing nowadays, but then again, this was 1924. After all, my parents used to drive us to NYC in the late 1970s/early ’80s to see matinees on Broadway on Sunday afternoons. It was inexpensive, but mom made sure we all held hands because at that time, Times Square could be a little sketchy, to say the least.

The theater was packed and Wright and Blum sat in the box seats with one free seat. That’s where Wright and Olgivanna

had a meet-cute.

She was brought in to the only free seat in the theater just as the performance began. Wright wrote that he was drawn to this striking woman with no jewelry, and with dark hair worn straight down on either side of her face. He wrote in his autobiography in 1943 about this chance meeting:

Suddenly in my unhappy state something cleared up—what had been the matter with me came to look me in the face—it was, simply, too much passion without poetry… that was it, the best in me for years and years wasted—starved! This strange chance meeting was it… poetry? I was a hungry man.

An Autobiography (1943 edition), 509³

The photograph below is Olgivanna, apparently on her first visit to Taliesin:

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

She’s standing in front of the south wall of Taliesin’s Drafting Studio.

Shortly after the new year, Olgivanna moved into Taliesin with her daughter, Svetlana.

Then, just over 3 months later,

on April 20, 1925, Olgivanna, Wright, Svetlana, and a few others were eating in Taliesin’s dining room up on the hill. At that time, a fire began in Taliesin’s living quarters and would destroy them.

I wrote just about the this fire two years ago, in this post.

Olgivanna wrote about Taliesin’s 1925 fire, later published in her autobiography:

One evening while the three of us were having dinner in the little dining room up on the hill, separate from the residence, I smelled smoke. The telephone rang incessantly. The housekeeper and her husband did not bother about it and said later that they were not conscious that the smoke might spell fire. “There must be something wrong,” I said. “Don’t you think we had better find out? Frank,” I insisted, “I think we had better go down and see what is going on. The smell of smoke is growing stronger.”

We stepped out and saw Taliesin in flames. We ran down fast. The neighbors began to arrive….

They all fought the flames for hours until rain came, dousing them. Yet, while the studio and offices were untouched, the living quarters, and almost everything in them, were destroyed mostly down to stone.

Olgivanna wrote that Wright had been so concerned about stopping the fire, that he argued against people removing objects from the building. So, he sat on the hill blaming himself for all of the lost art.

Continuing her story,

Olgivanna wrote:

I moved close to him and said, “We will get more works of art. We have each other. Nothing can stop us. We will rebuild Taliesin. you will make it more beautiful now. Let us look at it as a truly fresh beginning of our life, all new. Great opportunities lie before us.” “And,” I whispered to him, “I’m going to have a baby.”

…. He put his hands around me and said, “Nothing matters but you and me – now we will be welded together.”

The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright: From Crna Cora to Taliesin; from Black Mountain to Shining Brow, compiled and edited by Maxine Fawcett-Yeske, Ph.D. and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, D.H.L. (ORO Editions, 2017), 83.

After this, there would be lots of problems in the press, and with money, and, you know, that weekend Wright spent in jail.

Helped, or created, by problems with Miriam Noel.

But according to Olgivanna, her push (and optimism) immediately after the fire helped him start to rebuild. Talk about a test by fire, man.

First published April 19, 2023.
The newspaper headline at the top of this post is from the New Britain Herald and was printed on April 21, 1925.

Notes:

1 Re: Wright as “dashing” – his widow’s peak seen in the photo below is quite respectable. It’s got a flavor of Christopher Walken:

Frank Lloyd Wright with draftsmen outside of Taliesin. — Photograph published in *Big Little Nobu. Right No Deshi Josei Kenchikuka Tsuchiura Nobuko*

Back: left to right: Kamecki Tsuchiura, Nobuko Tsuchiura, with Silva Moser behind her husband, Werner Moser.
Seated are: Frank Lloyd Wright, Erich Mendelsohn, with Richard Neutra in the front.

2. Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, new and revised ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 508. I don’t know why Wright wrote that about Blum, but it’s amusing to read.

3. You may have read about this meeting in the book by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman: The Fellowship: The Unknown Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship. And, yes, I have opinions about it.

In fact, my major opinion is that if you haven’t read it, please don’t.

Photograph on April of Taliesin in the distance. Taken by Keiran Murphy.

Buying the hill

Posted on 04/09/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 2 minutes

On April 10, 1911, Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother, Anna, purchased 31.65 acres of land in The Valley south of Spring Green, Wisconsin. The land, which cost $2,274.88, is where Wright would build the structure you see in the photo above: his home, Taliesin.

I put a copy of the warranty deed below:

Warranty deed is reproduced on page 99 in Wright Studies, volume one: Taliesin, 1911-1914, ed. Narciso Menocal.

Ostensibly, Anna bought the land so that her son could build a home for her.

Of course, it wasn’t for her. It was for himself and Mamah Borthwick. Haven’t you been paying attention?

He was building the structure there by May of 1911. We know this thanks to a note in the Weekly Home News (Spring Green’s newspaper). I wrote about this news piece in my post, “This Will Be A Nice Addition“.

The “Home News” on the purchase:

It said that Wright’s mother, “is building her home in Hillside valley, adjoining the old homestead, a little north and west of the old millsite. This will be a nice addition to the neat home in the valley.”

But Frank Lloyd Wright, of course, was eloquent about that piece of land in The Valley. On this anniversary, I will print some of his writing on the piece of land from his An Autobiography, first published in 1932.

Wright from his autobiography:

Taliesin was the name of a Welsh poet. A druid-bard or singer of songs who sang to Wales the glories of Fine Art. Literally the Welsh word means “shining brow.” Many legends cling to the name in Wales.

TALIESIN

This hill on which Taliesin now stands as “brow” was one of my favorite places when I was a boy, for pasque flowers grew there in March sun while snow still streaked the hillsides.

….

I knew well by now that no house should ever be on any hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it, so hill and house could live together each the happier for the other.

….

The world had appropriate buildings before–why not more appropriate buildings now than ever before. There must be some kind of house that would belong to that hill, as trees and the ledges of rock did; as Grandfather and Mother had belonged to it, in their sense of it all.

Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932). 170, 171.

Draftsman Taylor Woolley took photographs of Wright’s new-built home in 1911-12. They exist at the Utah Historical Society. You can find them through this link.

First published April 10, 2023.
I took the photograph at the top of this post on April 11, 2015.

Photo by Henrikke Due on Unsplash. Girl prone on ground with bored look on her face.

I was a slush pile reader

Posted on 03/27/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 4 minutes

I regret that I did not get practice in the field of professional writing while I was in college getting that degree.

I had one great writing teacher who required us to read and critique submissions by our classmates. I still remember Dennis saying that, “you will write nothing worth a damn until you are at least 30 years old.”

Although I went to the same college where the directors of Oscar-winning film, Everything Everywhere All at Once went, so that’s gotta mean something, right?

Yes, I agree it doesn’t mean anything.

But I have a degree from the same school as classmates (and old friends) who have written plays, and/or won awards, and published books. Which puts me into a great collection of people.

But in my post today, I’ll write about another learning experience: when I was a slushpile reader.

In the aughts

I worked for the online magazine, Absinthe Literary Review.

The magazine is on the Wayback Machine,

See – I use that page on the internet archive a lot.

and is also saved at LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe). That’s good, because cyber-squatting happened to the original “ALR” site. So, ALR is further protected through Preservation by Distribution.

My experiences at ALR made me felt better about my writing abilities…, and also a little bit worse. But I did find some enjoyment through the experience.

Here’s some good things I learned about getting writing rejections:

When someone writes that your submission didn’t work for their publication, it really doesn’t.

When a person says, “It’s just not right for this issue,” sometimes it actually means just that.

When they write that it was a hard choice, they honestly mean it.

The first time I read for ALR

The editors of the magazine gave me 55 entries. Out of these, I was to whittle them down and out of those, send them 5 “hopeful” submissions. With my job of picking one out of 11 entries, I really spent time on some, wondering if they went in the “possible/not possible” pile.

But first, I had to find, in those 55, which were “possible/not possible” that I would send to ALR; and which were, “OMG ABSOLUTELY NOT THAT ONE.”

That’s because some of the writing on these submissions was just, really, bad. Those that I knew, within a page, sometimes in the first paragraph, that this was not a good story.

In that case, I did not waste any of my energy writing the rejection letter. In that case, I just copied and pasted the rejection. Those rejections are the ones that stay with me.

Those in the first paragraph:

Were closely inspired by George Orwell’s novel, 1984.

Where the author intentionally spelled things incorrectly. To either amp up the feeling that this was taking place far in the future, or indicate the narrator’s lack of education.

Or a story, say, with a giant praying mantis, in which I figured out that there was going to be a giant praying mantis from the 2nd page of a 9-page story.

Stories with words we need to retire:

betwixt
tresses
- Actually, I hadn’t seen those words in 15 years, at least. But making a list of words to retire might have just been evidence that I was getting cranky.

Or this story

Which began:

“Breath of my breath, keeper of my soul. My angel and my demon. My sacrament and my damnation: Violetta.“

…. I didn’t even know what to think about that one.

Not to be hoity-toity, but that’s a cover version of the beginning of Nabokov’s Lolita.

Still, I tried to give things an honest shake. Sometimes I knew to set things aside so I could look later with fresh eyes. Although the story with the giant praying mantis? No. But I might have put the story with the word “resplendent” away for a little while before coming back to it later.

There were many levels of understanding

on whether to pass the piece back to the editor.

I sent him a .pst file with everything—including my rejections—in case there is some question at a later date from the writer. But the editor only got the complete submission on items I was sending up the chain.

The reason this made me feel worse:

When I read something (even the take-off on 1984) from someone who, in the intro letter, told me that they had previously been published.

Even multiple times!

Re-reading that, after looking at a submission that was, well, terrible, just depressed me. I thought: am I wrong? Am I dumb? Do I not have the wherewithal to submit my writing so that I could be published multiple times?

In the end I decided to just not read the intro letters until after I read the story.

It’s kind of like when I take the snacks off the counter so that I’m not tempted to cheat.

In the end, I divided the pieces sent up the chain into three:

a piece that I loved
a piece that might be something good, but I didn’t know whether it was right for the mag or not, and
almost interchangeable with the 2nd level. It’s sort of an imprecise thing…. More of a feeling.

Although when it was horrendously bad, I kept the example in my brain. Like, worse than the bastardization of Lolita. But something that still makes me laugh.

I am not alone in coming across bad writing. There is, after all, the Bulwar Lytton Fiction contest:

[P]articipants to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written. Our whimsical literary competition honors Sir Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel Paul Clifford begins with “It was a dark and stormy night.”

In the end, I really wrote this today for 2 selfish reasons.

One reason is that I want to impart this line from one writer’s submission letter. He wrote this to describe the basic plot of his story:

“Daniel falls in love with a robot—a lesbian robot!!!”

[sic]

I checked, and that line

– even in after the movie, “Her” in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an operating system –

still makes me laugh.

And the second reason I wrote:

I want to give the link to this one piece that I sent “up the chain” at ALR. It’s a short piece written by Nathan Radke, entitled “Dot“.

When I read the piece today and still enjoy it.

I’m proud of that, like I’m proud of that “B+” that Dennis McFarland gave me in the last creative writing class I took from him.

First published March 27, 2023
The photograph at the top of this post is by Henrikke Due and was published here on the site for public domain images, Unsplash.com.

Photograph of landscape around Taliesin in late winter. Grass, trees, and the building in view.

My March Madness

Posted on 03/16/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 4 minutes

I took this photograph in March 2005, showing the landscape around Taliesin. There was a work-related reason for it: I was photographing the area to see how it matched up with Taliesin in 1911. That’s because the Wisconsin Historical Society had just won the bid for “The Album” of Taliesin photos from 1911-1912 (here’s my post on The Album).

I think if I were standing at that spot today, it would be a little duller and

[as I look out the windows to confirm]

it would be cloudy. And there would be more blobs of snow. Of course, there has been (and continues to be) lots of snow on the East Coast, so I imagine that others are getting tired of the winter, too.

But what I am writing about today is not winter. I want to write about March Madness.

Not the March Madness

those in the United States know. That is, rooting for men’s and women’s college basketball teams during the NCAA championship tournaments.

No.

For me, March Madness has to do with Frank Lloyd Wright

I know that’s a surprise to my readers.¹

But at least it helps explain the photo of Taliesin that’s at the top of this page.

You see, for decades following 1994 (when I started working at Taliesin), I came to expect tour dreams in the late winter/early spring.

That is:

I would have dreams in the spring about giving tours at Taliesin.

Now, I know that for many other adults, they have dreams in which they find themself back in high school, with a bunch of stressful things happening.

Trying to get to class
Finding out that there’s a huge test that they didn’t prepare for
Or that there’s a big test in a class that they never even showed up in

- I think being naked is sometimes in there, too.

For me, however,

My stress dreams involved, ostensibly, leading tours and things all going wrong.

Although, just to get this out there: I never had a dream where I was giving a tour naked.

I had TWO FLAVORS of tour-stress dreams each spring:

1.) I was doing something wrong

Most often, I would dream that I was leading a tour and was outrageously late.

How late?

SO LATE.

Like, I would be one-and-a-half hours into leading a two-hour tour and I wasn’t near the front door. Yet–despite that fact that my dreamself knew this–I could never get the group closer to the inside of the building.

Although, we did have this one guide IRL. I’ll call him Tom. He would be so late on his tours that the bus drivers regularly left him and his group on the Taliesin Estate.

Let me tell you: all the shuttle bus drivers were really patient with guides. So, you know that someone has to be really chronometrically-challenged for bus drivers to regularly leave them.

In fact, one time Tom was left at Hillside on the south end of the Taliesin estate. When he walked out of Hillside and his shuttle bus driver wasn’t there, he just WALKED with his group to Taliesin (which is about half a mile away).²

The other dream subjects:

2.) Either staff or visitors messed with me

Most of the time, these dreams were just where visitors did things they should not do on tours.

Like, people sitting in chairs they shouldn’t sit in.³ That is: people on my tours plopping down on the original, delicate, Frank Lloyd Wright-designed “barrel” chairs (like the chairs in the foreground of the photo below) –

Frank Lloyd Wright's bedroom. Photo by Maynard Parker, Huntington Library-Parker Collection. — Maynard L. Parker, photographer. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Call Number photCL MLP 1266

At least one of my dreams included someone leaning back on one of Wright’s barrel chairs, and they almost tipped backwards. Oh, in this case, into the Chinese painting you see in Taliesin’s Guest Bedroom, below:

That photo reminds me:

one time I had a dream where a student at the School of Architecture⁴ took over the Guest Bedroom (the room in the photo). When I walked into the room with my group, the room looked like any college dorm room. There were empty food plates on the floor and posters on the walls.

There was one dream where someone on the tour was eating Doritos.

In one dream, something happened at tickets:

I was escorting my tour group onto the shuttle bus to take us all to the Taliesin estate. But the line wouldn’t stop: people just kept walking past me toward the shuttle. I went to the ticket seller to ask and she replied,

“Oh! Well 45 Japanese tourists came in, so I just put them on your tour.“

I think–hope–that in all these dream-tours I tried to keep the peace.

Instead of, you know, using foul language, a.k.a., four-letter-words.

Like this [NSFW] guy.

Amazingly,

I don’t have these dreams anymore. I dreamed almost nightly about Taliesin and giving tours in 2020, the year of Covid. So I assumed I would just keep having tour dreams.

Well, one of my last tour dreams took place in that year (2020). I wrote about this dream on a social media site:

I had a dream last night that I was taking people on a tour of Taliesin, but when I got out of the bus and started walking with these people, I could never find it. We walked through all of these marble rooms and just kept going on, thinking it was through the next door.

I can’t explain it. Hopefully I’ll dream of it again. Preferably happy dreams. And when spring finally comes to Wisconsin.

Posted originally on March 16, 2023.
I took the photograph at the top of this post in March, 2005.

Notes:

1. that was a joke.

2. To those who are reading this who I used to work with: “Tom” was there in the 1990s, so most of you never met him.

3. We had a few places where people could sit at Taliesin. Mostly in Wright’s Living Room. But, while members of the Taliesin Fellowship could sit in the chairs, we couldn’t let those on tours do so. In part because we had thousands of people coming through every tour season.

4. Formerly the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. They used to live on the Taliesin Estate in the summer.

Photographs showing "Octagon" and "Cube" at Frank Lloyd Wright's Midway Gardens. Taken from the book The Life-Work of the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Missing Wright

Posted on 03/05/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Three photographs of statues at Midway Gardens, by Frank Lloyd Wright. The statues represent “attributes of geometry”¹. The two photos on the left show the Octagon statue, and the one of the right shows “cube”. I took this photo from my copy of the “Wendingen”.

No: not missing the man, Frank Lloyd Wright.

I’m talking about missing the building designed by Wright.

in other words:

Which destroyed Wright building would you like to see?

The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy says that ONE in every FIVE buildings he designed has been destroyed.²

Therefore, some Frankophiles play the game that they imagine which destroyed Wright building they want to walk through. So, it’s a chance to visit your favorite Wright buildings IN YOUR MIND.

Although, really, unless we live there or work there, most of us only have our minds as the vehicles to visit our favorite Wright buildings.
It’s a minor compulsion. We can deal with it if we want to.³

On that question

there are those who will vote for Taliesin 1 as their favorite destroyed Wright building. That is: his home, Taliesin, from 1911-1914.

btw, you can find Taliesin I in my blog here and at this link here, among posts of mine.

But, I am not one of them.

I mean: I do not think that Taliesin I was the “best” Taliesin.

That’s because I see Taliesin as a manifestation of Wright’s mental and artistic process, from the time he started it until the last day he saw it.⁴

Although, I have thought differently about Taliesin II in the last year or so. That was partially inspired by my thinking about Taliesin’s “unfinished wing” (like I wrote in the post of that title).

So, with Taliesin out of the running, which building do I wish I could see?

Midway Gardens

I have come to this conclusion recently. That is because I am currently reading Frank Lloyd Wright, The Lost Years: 1910-1922.⁴ This book from 1993 was by author, architect and architectural historian Anthony Alofsin. He developed it from his doctoral dissertation.

My husband gave me the book as a gift, so I’ve been underlining a lot and writing notes in order to maintain an understanding of what I’ve read.

Don’t worry, I’ve been underlining in pencil, so I’m not carrying on in some sacrilegious defacement. Although, I often keep my space in books by turning down the corners of pages.
I don’t know why I perform this mutilation. I guess you’ll have to deal with it.

What was Midway Gardens?

Edward C. Waller, Jr. commissioned Wright to design Midway Gardens as an entertainment, eating and drinking establishment in Chicago. It took up one square city block and was constructed next to the Midway Plaisance park in Chicago’s South Side. Waller wanted it opened as long as possible in the Midwest, so it had a summer garden (outside), and a winter garden (inside).

Waller intended it to be a venue where people could spend an entire evening. They could eat dinner and drink, as well as dance. That’s why it had a band-shell for live music.

How it got started:

Midway Gardens came about because Edward Waller, Jr. (whose father commissioned Wright) approached Wright with an idea to create an entertainment establishment similar to the beer gardens he had seen in Germany. My research for this post told me that beer gardens emerged in Germany in the 18^th Century. The website TripSavvy says that:

Maximilian I, Bavaria’s first king, … signed a royal decree that allowed brewers to sell beer, but not food. People compromised, enjoying the best beers direct from the brewer and bringing a picnic. Thus, the tradition of the biergarten was born.
https://www.tripsavvy.com/what-to-expect-at-german-biergarten-1519627

Beer gardens were sites where the whole family could gather for hours and see friends. Waller approached Wright on this at an interesting point: Wright had been in Europe with Mamah Borthwick in 1909-1910, absorbing a lot of ideas. So, this commission came in 1913 and gave him the chance to weave these ideas into a project.

With this commission,

Wright took all he had seen and learned in Europe. He designs something massive

Drawing from The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), drawing 1401.087.

The drawing above is most of the winter garden.

and all-encompassing

Drawing from The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), drawing 1401.156.

I mean: the drawing above shows both a ticket counter and cigar booth. Totally out of control, man!

Midway also had:

Light fixtures, stained glass designs, and a mural called “City by the Sea”.

He also designed these geometric concrete blocks suggesting movement that were veneered on the building’s exterior:

Additionally, he designed concrete figures embodying the spirit of architecture, and platonic shapes (which, if you didn’t know, were also just fine to look at). Two of these statues are in the three photos at the top of this post.

And then there were the vertical concrete figures known as “Sprites”, which people still really like.

One appears in the photo below, taken at Taliesin West. When I went to study there, I often took tours after working all week. I took the photo below while on one of them. It shows one of the sprites outside of the Garden Room at Taliesin West:

The sprites at Taliesin West are painted, like you see above. Several guides on my Taliesin West tours told the story that Wright had the sprites there, and that his daughter, Iovanna, went to him and said, “Daddy, I want to paint the statues,” and the paint on the Taliesin West spites is the result.

This story, in my opinion, might fall under what I call “the telephone game of tour guiding.”

I don’t know when the sprites came to Taliesin West, but I was told Wright bought the land in Feb. 1938. That would mean that Iovanna was 12 years old. “Daddy, I want to paint the statues” makes her sound like she was 5. So, I believe the story might be conflated a little bit. On the other hand, there were plenty of children growing up at T-West so maybe that’s what happened.
/Frankophile out

Wright also designed the restaurant’s plates, beer steins, and cigarette holders. This artifact page in at Steinerag.com/flw/index.htm has a great selection of them.⁵

Midway, in short, was awesome

A whole lotta gesamtkunstwerk goin on.

I mean:

it was a total work of art.

I don’t speak or read German; but, like some German words, it crams a lot of meaning into one word.

This is a video of a pretty cool model of Midway Gardens in the program known as SketchUp. It’s a 3-D modeling program and takes you all around the building so you can see the size of it and how it all relates together.

And Douglas Steiner (of Steinerag) wrote on the Midway Gardens design, below:

There are many classic Wright details. The basic material[s] are brick and patterned concrete blocks. There are cantilevered and trellised roof overhangs and cantilevered balconies, decoratively designed metal fascia cornices. Horizontal lines, columns, hidden entries, horizontal rows of leaded glass windows and rows of leaded glass doors that open outward, vases, light trees, pedestal bases and sculptures, many, many sculptures.

Steiner copyright from 2008.

Unfortunately, fate killed it.

First of all:

Its grand opening was June 27, 1914.

That was the day before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Which led to World War I.

Those of you who have read me for awhile know I have an interest in World War I. In part because I believe it’s “the Worst Mistake We’ve Ever Made as a Species“.

Additionally, Wright and his son, John, were finishing up one of the building’s murals when they found out about the fire (and murders) at Taliesin. This did not seem to effect business at Midway Gardens, but was/is a really sad note/coincidence.

Then, there were money problems.

Even I know that restaurants can bleed money.

But, while the first two summer seasons went well, there were still bills from before the establishment opened. In 1916, Edelweiss Brewery bought Midway Gardens, and it became the “Edelweiss Gardens.”

The Gardens limped through World War I, but finally,

there was Prohibition.

While overall I think it was a good thing that we in the United States kicked our habit of drinking,

you know, like drinking a liter of hard liquor a day,

it sentenced Midway Gardens to history.

Here’s Wright in his autobiography regarding the Gardens’ downfall:

…. And then the “affliction” fell. The Nation went dry.

That was the final blow….

[T]he Midway Gardens sunk to the level of the “beer-garden” without the beer….

“They” painted the chaste white concrete sculpture in more irrelevant gaudy colors, stenciled more cheap ornament on top of the integral ornament, wrecked the line and mass of the whole—until all semblance of the original harmony utterly vanished. Yes, a distinguished woman dragged down to the level of the prostitute is now its true parallel.
Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 187.

However:

even though fate doomed Midway Gardens from the start, what Wright designed is still glorious. Even if only in our minds.

Here are some resources:

And a great page on Midway Gardens from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

And the link to Frank Lloyd Wright and Midway Gardens, the book by Paul Kruty.

First published on March 5, 2023.
I took this photo from The Life-Work of the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1965; Santpoort, Holland: C. A. Mees, 1925), by Frank Lloyd Wright, H. Th. Wijdeveld, ed.
The “Life-Work” is the book publication of seven issues of Wendingen magazine that were published in 1924-25. Wendingen magazine was published in the Netherlands from 1918-32. Because of the link to the magazine, people refer to it as “the Wendingen”.

Notes:

1 Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 1910-1922: A Study of Influence, by Anthony Alofsin (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992), 143.

2 The Building Conservancy determined that number in the late 1980s. Since then, with a few exceptions, they’ve successfully splashed daylight on endangered Wright buildings.

3 Nooo – after all, I can sleep without my blanket.

4 Not that there aren’t Taliesin details I’d like to see, along with those things I really wish he had not changed (as I wrote about here).

5 Douglas Steiner writes these pages. Sometimes I’ll check on items because he explains things really well.

Color photograph of Taliesin structure during the summer. By Keiran Murphy.

Wright called it the Water Garden

Posted on 02/21/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Looking west at the Taliesin residence in September 2005. I took this because I figured I should have at least one nice photo of Taliesin and the pond.

The pond at Taliesin that is.¹

Wright created this pond by building a dam on the north side of the Lowery Creek in 1911-1912.

Here is a photo when the dam was being built. I showed it before in my post, “Did Taliesin have outhouses?“

Wright spoke about the dam after that disastrous “press conference” he gave on Christmas 1911 (that’s in “What’s the oldest part of Taliesin, Part I“). Here’s the part where the dam and pond are mentioned in the press:

There is to be a fountain in the courtyard, and flowers. To the south, on a sun bathed slope, there is to be a vineyard. At the foot of the steep slope in front there is a dam in process of construction that will back up several acres of water as a pond for wild fowl.

Chicago Daily Tribune, December 26, 1911, “Spend Christmas Making ‘Defense’ of ‘Spiritual Hegira.’”

The inlet for the pond, Lowery Creek, starts several miles south. Then it flows over the waterfall and into the Wisconsin River.

Find out more about the creek, and what’s done to protect this waterway at the Lowery Creek Watershed Initiative.

Except, at the moment, there is no waterfall, because there’s a creek but no pond.

In fact, the pond hasn’t been there since late 2019.

It will be back! But it had to be drawn down due to an inspection and repair work required by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Check out the Facebook Live presentation

from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation on the work from the summer of 2020.

It’s 26 minutes long. Staff from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation talk about the project, why it was being done, and the particulars on what they’re doing. I think the original hope was to inspect the dam and do repairs for a completion by the end of 2021.

It’s 2023 and while things are looking up, the fact that the pond isn’t back reinforces the fact that

PRESERVATION IS HARD.

Unfortunately, we’re only reminded of that when things get, well… hard. I mean, you try to get things done carefully and in a timely matter, but there are times when things interrupt the best-laid plans.

However, in this case there’s also the fact that work at the pond bumped up against a worldwide pandemic,

Followed by disruption of supply chains

which you can see in a “This Old House” segment.

In case, you know, you’ve gratefully thrown experience about supply chain problems into the memory hole.

No, not THAT memory hole. I’m talking about the place where my memories of cold Wisconsin winters go every year.

Now, if you’ve been on a tour as of 2020, your guide maybe mentioned the pond, or the waterfall at the Taliesin dam.

But I don’t know. After all, one of the rules of tour guiding is

Don’t talk about what you cannot see

Therefore, I really should show photos then of what I’m talking about. That’s part of why you’re here, after all.

So, I need to bring back The Man when talking about the pond.

You know what man I mean.

While building Taliesin in 1911-1912 Wright decided to build the dam on the north end of the creek. He envisioned the pond as part of his long-range landscaping.

Here’s part of his writing:

A great curved stone-walled seat enclosed the space just beneath them and stone pavement stepped down to a spring or fountain that welled up into a pool at the center of the circle. Each court had its fountain and the winding stream below had a great dam. A thick stone wall was thrown across it, to make a pond at the very foot of the hill, and raise the water in the Valley to within sight from Taliesin. The water below the falls thus made, was sent, by hydraulic ram, up to a big stone reservoir built into the higher hill, just behind and above the hilltop garden, to come down again into the fountains and go on down to the vegetable gardens on the slopes below the house.

Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 173.

Wright’s writing conjures the image of a Japanese Woodblock print:

Ono Waterfall on the Kisokaidō (Kisokaidō Ono no bakufu), from the series “A Tour of Waterfalls in Various Provinces (Shokoku taki meguri)”
Artist: Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, Tokyo (Edo) 1760–1849 Tokyo (Edo)). Date: ca. 1833
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City: Henry L. Phillips Collection, Bequest of Henry L. Phillips, 1939. Accession Number: JP2925. Public domain

Now, as for the pond, there’s my photo at the top of this post, and here’s a link to one taken in 1955 by photographer, Maynard Parker. The photo below is one I took from Wright’s bedroom terrace:

I took this in early May 2008.

And, since I’ve already written about the dam that’s there now, I should give you info on the dam that used to be there.

What?! There’s Another Damn Dam that we’ve got to know about?!

Well, don’t get mad at me.

And, YES!

For several decades, the Taliesin estate had two dams. There was the lower dam, which still exists. But, in the late 1940s, he added an upper dam, south of the current one. This dam was smaller. I don’t know why Wright decided to add it. It was a pretty cool looking.

Here are two photos showing the upper dam. In the black and white one, you see it to the right of the entrance road:

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), 2501.1246.

This photo was taken by Douglas Lockwood when he was an apprentice in the Taliesin Fellowship. You can see the road that I pointed out. This was also taken from Wright’s bedroom terrace.

You’d be standing near the spot of the photographer in my post, “History of Native Americans in the Valley“.

I put a closeup photo of the upper dam below.

Apprentice Mark Heyman took this in the 1950s. The flags you can see in the photo’s background make me think he took the photo while a summer party was taking place at Taliesin:

While the little dam was neat, it caused flooding upstream.

Understandably, that annoyed the neighbors.

In fact, neighbor Thomas King wrote in late October, 1945 letting those at Taliesin know that the dam wasn’t appreciated. He asked “if it was your intention” to live with neighbors that had over two feet of water in their cellar because of that dam.²

The upper dam was removed late 1960-early 1970s. Luckily for the neighbors, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation cannot rebuild it.

As for the pond, it looks like it may come back in the year 2023. Because, while the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation repaired everything around the dam, you can’t tell what will happen. It’s looking good, but you don’t know.

Originally posted February 21, 2023.
I took the photograph at the top of this page in 2005.

Notes

1 I was told that Wright called it the Watergarden, but I couldn’t find the evidence to that while writing this post. He didn’t write “watergarden” in any document by him I transcribed. So, I didn’t find the term by searching for the word.

2 The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). FICHEID: K066D06. Letter from Thomas King to William Wesley Peters, 10/25/1945.

Black and white photograph of John and Marybud Lautner outside at Taliesin, 1933-34. By Hank Schubart.

Taliesin Kitties

Posted on 02/08/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Photograph of future architect (then apprentice) John Lautner (1911-1994) and wife Mary Faustina Roberts Lautner (“Marybud”, 1913-1995) standing at the southwest corner of Taliesin’s hill crown. Behind them is the chimney that served the dining rooms of the Taliesin Fellowship and the Wrights. I wrote about this space, here. The photo was taken by apprentice and later architect, Hank Schubart (1916-1998).

This is going to be a cat-themed post. But it does have a connection to Frank Lloyd Wright, I swear!

Let me explain….

Here are my cats, Wes and Gene:

This is a photo of them lying on the kitchen floor. My husband says they’re competing in the synchronized cat napping nationals.

Now, the names “Wes” and “Gene” are related to Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin. But I was not completely in charge of them being named Wes and Gene.

— well, ok, yes, actually, I was, since I was the one who first decided to name them that.

However —

I was not the person who focused my attention on names related to Taliesin.

You see,

in 2015, 5 kittens showed up on the Taliesin estate. Cats aren’t there all the time, but they do (and can) show up. Sometimes they are owned by residents at Taliesin. Or, sometimes they take up residence. At least one of these cats became internationally famous.

In fact,

anyone who took a tour at Taliesin starting in the late 1990s up to the twenty-teens met this cat. She was a long-haired calico named Sherpa.

Sherpa laying on a stone wall outside of the old Taliesin Fellowship dining room (it functions currently as an office and sometimes a guest room).

Sherpa appeared in the Taliesin tour program in the late 1990s. She lived at the Hillside structure and had one litter of kittens that delighted visitors.

the summer at Hillside with Sherpa and her kittens meant lots of real-time lessons on working with animals. There was no way you could talk about Wright’s history or ideas when there were 3 or 4 adorable kittens playing and jumping over each other on the deck at the edge of Hillside’s dining room (a photo of the deck is in a photo at Flickr, here).

After the season’s end, Sherpa was caught and spayed. By this time, she already walked in front of several tours at Taliesin, so she was given the name Sherpa. Since the Taliesin estate was basically her home, she settled in closer to the Taliesin building and began to “lead tours” there.¹

That was because she knew where the guides went on tours, so she would walk ahead of the guides and group.

She appeared on a magazine cover

after a group of Japanese architects took a tour. They were as delighted by Sherpa as by the architecture. So one photo they took of her ended up on the cover of a magazine, below:

Back to Wes and Gene:

I hadn’t known about the kittens until I mentioned the desire for cats to a coworker at Taliesin Preservation. I was searching for a home, and having cats was on the agenda. Then she asked, “did you hear about the Taliesin kittens?”

The kindle of five domestic shorthaired kittens had arrived in late spring. They were big enough to make themselves known to the students at the School of Architecture, who were then in session and living at Wright’s Hillside building.

Since they appeared on the Taliesin estate, my coworker, the students, and staff at the local vet clinic knew them as the “Taliesin kittens”. As I had already decided I wanted two male kittens, it took me less than 10 minutes to come up with the names Wes and Gene.

PLEASE NOTE: I decided immediately that I was NOT going to name them Frank and Lloyd, or Lloyd and Wright.

No, I’m not a cat lady! I’m just a Frankophile!

While I have not written on my blog about Wright’s son-in-law and engineer, Wes Peters, I did write about Gene Masselink last year.

Are they worthy of their names?

Wes is a little like Wes Peters, because he’s really big. But, while I love the guy, Gene is not worthy of the memory of Eugene Masselink.

And how did Wright feel about cats?

I don’t know.

In fact, I don’t know how Wright felt about domesticated animals overall. Except for horses. He long admired them and rode them as long as he was able. The photograph below is Wright on a horse outside of the Hillside school building.² The photo was taken in the 1950s.

Photograph of Wright on a horse to the east of the Assembly Hall at the Hillside Home School. Olgivanna Lloyd Wright stands on the right and apprentice, Joe Fabris, is wearing the t-shirt.

However, there is the doghouse:

That’s right: in 1956, 12-year-old Jim Berger wrote Frank Lloyd Wright. He was the son of clients Robert and Gloria Berger, who built their Wright house in San Anselmo, California. Jim asked Wright to design a home for their dog, Eddie. Jim would pay for the plans and materials through money he earned on his paper route. This link from the Smithsonian Magazine shows you the whole story, and Jim’s initial letter to Wright.

In addition,

Olgivanna Lloyd Wright liked dogs and you can find photos online of the Wrights sitting together outside at Taliesin West with her dog, Casanova. Casanova appears with Frank Lloyd Wright in the Garden Room (the living room) at Taliesin West. They’re on the webpage, “Five stylish men with dogs“.

First published February 8, 2023.
The photograph at the top of this post was taken by Hank Schubart and is in The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). Hank Schubert collection, 6501.0140.

Notes:

1 We used to do a 1 mile, all exterior Walking Tour. Sherpa would show up when we were with our groups on the road below Taliesin, and walk in front of us to Hillside. She would hang out at Hillside until the Walking tour came by in the afternoon. Then she would lead the later tour back to Taliesin, where the tours began.

2 This link shows you 94-year-old Joe Fabris at Wright’s Price Tower in Bartlesville, OK. It gives you a nice overview of that space. Joe is seen speaking to the Price Tower curator of Collections and Exhibitions (Hi, Scott!).

The number "42" on a black background. By Mark Konig at https://unsplash.com/photos/fbKMKNVJjwo

Things I learned at Taliesin

Posted on 01/20/2023 | by admin

Reading Time: 6 minutes

To know why the top of the post says the number “42”, read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.

I know these things –

through my work at as the Taliesin historian, when I worked in the Taliesin tour program, and/or I answered weekly questions in the “Hey Keiran” feature. You’ll see a variety of things here. Remember –

Frank Lloyd Wright wrote:

“I like the company of a number of clever and plausible eclectics”¹

and this is an eclectic list:

The Wisconsin state bird

is the American Robin.

Wisconsin’s state flower

is the Wood Violet

Nakoma and Nakomis are the parents of the fictional character, Hiawatha² (from Longfellow‘s “The Song of Hiawatha“)

Frank Lloyd Wright designed statues of them for an unbuilt project in Madison. Then he reproduced the statues in small sizes.

He put statues of Nakoma and Nakomis both inside his Hillside structure, and in Taliesin.

Even though Wright was wrong on the gender. In Longfellow’s poem, Hiwawatha’s mother being is NOKOMIS. Wright made his father Nakomis.

Some photos of the statues are below:

In the Assembly Hall at Hillside

There is a smaller version of Nakoma, as seen in a video tour on-line:

I took this screen grab from a video tour I did in 2009. Taliesin Preservation put online thanks to producer/editor, Claudia Looze.

And a smaller pair of them are at Taliesin:

You can see the small versions in Taliesin’s living room on the light deck. The photo below shows them in 1955:

This is an unpublished photograph of the set that photographer Maynard Parker took in 1955 for the November issue of the magazine, House Beautiful.

More things I’ve learned:

Bats are considered good luck in China

Bats—literally, living, sleeping bats—used to hang on wooden carvings inside Taliesin

They snoozed all day, so these bats didn’t start my screamy-phobia of them, like I posted about.

Yes, bats eat mosquitoes.

I learned that barn swallows eat mosquitoes, too

Mosquitoes can get very bad at Taliesin, and barn swallows fly around Taliesin all summer. Preservation Crew member, Kevin Dodds, took a photo of baby barn swallows in their nest. He gave me permission to post it below:

The swallows are in a little mud nest at Taliesin. You might see swallows early in the summer on a 2-hour House Tour or the 4-hour Estate tour.
This photograph shows the nest under the roof near Taliesin’s ice house. Permission for photo from Dodds.

More information I learned:

Frank Lloyd Wright’s life taught me the definition of the “Mann Act“⁴

The Mann Act “criminalizes the transportation of any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” [here’s a link on it from Cornell Law school] It was designed to stop human trafficking, but was also used by women whose husband’s abandoned them for other women. So, Wright’s second wife, Miriam, tried to use it on Wright in 1926 after he fled Wisconsin for Minnesota with his future wife, Olgivanna.

Plus, he was almost being arrested for it in the 1910s.

I know the date of Japan’s Great Kanto earthquake.

I’m sure plenty of other people know about it.
It mostly destroyed Tokyo on September 1, 1923.
But I know it because of Frank Lloyd Wright. His Imperial Hotel in Tokyo was supposed to see its grand opening that very day. The fact that the building survived made Wright world-famous.

I know what a “Quit Claim deed” is

Chief architect of Taliesin Associated Architects and Wright’s son-in-law, Wes Peters, bought up the Taliesin estate one or two times, then sold it back to Wright for $1 in a Quit Claim deed.

I probably first read this in the biography on Wright by Meryle Secrest.

The definition of the word “jocund”

That’s in a poem stanza in the fireplace at the Hillside Assembly Hall. This is footage of me speaking in front of that fireplace. I don’t know if I talk about the poem that’s carved into its mantle. The stanza of the poem is from “Elegy Written in a County Churchyard” by poet Thomas Gray.

Here that stanza:

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,

Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;

How jocund did they drive their team afield!

How bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Oh, and 1 more thing about this poem:

It taught me that “glebe” means “ground“.

I know what a hydraulic ram is

I think I covered this in my post, “My Dam History“. My photo from that post is below:

Dam, waterfall, and hydro-house at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin — Photograph taken 1926-27 of the hydro-house on the Taliesin estate. Photographer unknown. Taken from a postcard owned by Keiran Murphy

John Michel Montgolfier invented the hydraulic ram.

and he and his brother invented the hot air balloon.

My knowledge on the second fact didn’t come from Taliesin. I know it because another Taliesin guide told me (hi, Nath!).

I know the name of the last king of Iraq:

King Faisal II.

He commissioned Wright to design an opera house in the capital city of Baghdad. The reason the commission never went further is because he was overthrown in 1958.

A Balalaika is a Russian, stringed instrument.

I know that because it sits in Taliesin’s living room at its “music corner”

Speaking of Russia,

They created the samovar. A is a tall, decorative metal container that holds water for boiling. One sits just outside of Taliesin’s living room. Here’s a photo showing it at Taliesin, taken in 2018:

The samovar is on the table in the foreground.

Ideally, chicken coops face south.

I know that because there were chicken coops at Taliesin that were later turned into dorm rooms. A couple of people on tour told me about chicken coops, and once you hear this, it makes sense. That way the chickens get the most light. So, yes: the chicken coops at Taliesin face south.

You can see the drawing showing the chicken coops below. It’s also in my post “Unfinished wing” (read that post and you’ll know why “Hog Pens” is highlighted in the drawing below).

Wendingen Magazine published the drawing in its issues devoted to Wright in 1924 and 1925.
Then the magazine issues were published as a book, The Life-Work of the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, by Frank Lloyd Wright, H. Th. Wijdeveld, ed. (Santpoort, Holland: C. A. Mees, 1925).

An oar lock on a Venetian gondola is officially called a Forcole.

I know that because there’s an oar lock in Wright’s bedroom that was a gift from students in Venice. Here’s another photo by Maynard Parker that shows it by the east wall. It’s the wooden piece that looks like sculpture:

Photograph of Wright’s bedroom in 1955 by Maynard Parker. Published in House Beautiful magazine, November 1955, 308.³

Ok, that’s it for now.

Published January 20, 2023.
The photograph at the top of this post is by Mark Konig from https://unsplash.com/photos/fbKMKNVJjwo

Edit: June 4, 2023:

Ice houses are quite ancient.

The construction of one was detailed in a Cuneiform tablet in c. 1780 BCE. Read Wikipedia’s post about ice houses to find out about this.

I read this because I was researching the ice house at Taliesin.

Notes:

1 An Autobiography, by Frank Lloyd Wright (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 343.

2 There was a man named Hiawatha in the history of the Iroquois Nation, but he’s completely different than Longfellow’s Hiawatha.

3 House Beautiful magazine published this photo again in its October, 1959 issue, 232.

4 Even before Eliot Spitzer’s prostitute scandal in 2008.