Change at Taliesin’s Hill Crown

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Looking north at Taliesin during its initial construction. Wright’s draftsman, Taylor Woolley took this photograph in 1911.¹

In today’s post I’m going to write about another change at Taliesin.

This was something I became aware of Frank-knows how many years ago.²

I probably realized it after looking through a loupe in ferreting out changes on the masonry on Taliesin’s Hill Crown—

OK, hold on:

I gotta explain that I mean by Hill Crown.

Since the word Taliesin is Welsh for “Shining Brow”, the building, according to Wright, is built “on the brow of the hill”.

That means that the Hill Crown stands above Taliesin’s living quarters

(or as I say, “house part of the house”)

,  drafting studio and most of the agricultural part of the building.

So, in the photo at the top of this post, the Hill Crown is to the right of the tower, where the trees stand. And the “house part of the house” is on the brow, on the far right.

And you can see in that photo at the top of the page that there’s no retaining wall encasing the Hill Crown. You might think there wasn’t a wall because Wright wasn’t quite done building the house, but that might not be true.

I only started thinking about when that wall around the edge of the Hill Crown was added years ago.

So, while I was

working on those chronologies about Taliesin’s spaces and rooms that I wrote about before, I decided to look at a photo from 1912 that you can see below:

You can find this photo in the issue that the Organic Architecture + Design Archives published in 2018.

Looking (plan) southwest past Taliesin’s Tea Circle in this photo, I realized that it lacked the retaining wall that’s there now.

The wall should have been about where you can see the arrow in another version of that photo:

You can see what I’m talking about if you look at another photo that shows the wall:

This photo was taken 1935-39. It was published on p. 199 in that book I recommended: At Taliesin, ed. and with commentary by Randolph C. Henning. The woman on the step is apparently Kay Schneider (later Kay Rattenbury). “Kay” joined the Taliesin Fellowship apparently when she was 17 years old and spent most of the rest of her life there (she died in 1996).

Since I noticed

that the wall wasn’t there in 1912, I tried to figure out when it did show up. First, I looked at other photos from around the same time, and then eventually found the photo by Taylor Woolley that’s at the top of this post.

Also, I tried to figure out when—or if—Wright’s plans for the wall existed.

Once I looked,

I realized I couldn’t find anything that shows the wall in the drawings for Taliesin I (1911-14). Like 1104.003, below:

And 1104.009,

or 1104.013:

 

Apprentices in the Taliesin Fellowship drew this in the early 1940s for the book, In the Nature of Materials, by Henry-Russell Hitchcock.

And lots of others I could show, but I’ll stop for now, at least with drawings.

But since I couldn’t get a clue from drawings,

I looked in Wright’s autobiography to see if he mentioned anything.

Unfortunately, he didn’t write, “So, I left part of the Hill Crown open until pushing past the cows that wandered up there got too annoying.“

Despite what illustrator Razin Khan put into his fantastic Taliesin 1 drawings.

The closest I found in his autobiography might have been this:

And so began a “shining brow” for the hill, the hill rising unbroken above to crown the exuberance of life in all these rural riches.…

Finally it was not so easy to tell where pavements and walls left off and ground began. Especially on the hill-crown which became a low-walled garden above the surrounding courts, reached by stone steps walled into the slopes….
Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography, new and revised ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 170.

So, that doesn’t give us a lot of clues about the Hill Crown in 1911, and there doesn’t seem to be anything else until after 1914.

Therefore, Taliesin II

is when you get the wall in this pretty drawing:

I wrote where you can see the retaining wall that’s included in the drawing. If you click on it, you’ll go to Jstor where I think you’ll see the wall better.

Now, if you go to Taliesin today, you’ll see that the building, or low retaining walls, form a rectangle around almost all of the Hill Crown, like what’s in this photo:

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #2501.0183.
The arrow in the photo is from when I included it in my post, “The Musical Note-Retaining Wall at Taliesin“. 

Frank Lloyd Wright’s widow, Olgivanna, made a change to the wall after her husband’s death, which I mentioned in the wide-ranging post, “The Prisoner, Taliesin, and My Sister“.

And, lastly, I put a photo below that shows more of the wall during summer:

I took this photograph on July 18, 2014.

 

First published April 20, 2025.
You can find Taylor Woolley’s photograph at the Utah Historical Society, here.

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1. I’ve put so many photos by Woolley in blog posts, that you can best find them by just going to the “search” feature in my posts when you click on “blog”. You’ll see the “search” box on the right. Or you can just look at this link for all the times I’ve “tagged” him: https://keiranmurphy.com/tag/taylor-woolley/

2. actually, for today’s post, I looked in my “Finds & Investigations” folder where I keep “unknowns” in Taliesin history. I started this folder when things occurred to me during research that I didn’t have time to pursue. The first time I wrote a note to myself to investigate this Hill Crown retaining wall?
2006.
When I saw that year, I just laughed so heartily (hardily?).