Tag: Architectural Forum

Black and white photograph showing a bedroom with a terrace outside of the door. Taken by Ken Hedrich for Architectural Forum magazine.

The Bedroom at Taliesin that Frank Lloyd Wright Used

Posted on | by keiran
Reading Time: 6 minutes

Photograph by Ken Hedrich looking (plan) southeast in Frank Lloyd Wright’s bedroom in 1937.

Otherwise known as “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bedroom” or “Mr. Wright’s Bedroom”, but the Internet is sometimes Persnickety About Apostrophes (and some people are persnickety about calling him “Mr. Wright”1).

I’ll be talking about the bedroom at Taliesin he used after 1936.2

I decided to write this post

after I read a memory from former Wright apprentice, Kelly Oliver.

Kelly turned 100 years old on July 26

and Taliesin Preservation talked about him in their Facebook page:

One of Kelly’s favorite memories of Frank Lloyd Wright happened during construction of Wright’s bedroom wing at Taliesin. When apprentices stopped hammering because Wright wanted to nap, his response surprised everyone:

“No, keep working. Construction is music to my ears.”

That Taliesin Preservation post on Facebook is here: https://www.facebook.com/taliesinwi/posts/pfbid0ipVj2ra3cmNxDd1ABDh5o4baD2aXxkAxtS8RxD3FrCUHnoVafkKYAn9QyRakMH4el

                        OR ON Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DbQjhNVHYh1/

That’s a wonderful memory, but

more than that

it provides me new information on Wright’s expansion of the room.

We found out years ago that 1950 was the year Wright expanded it to its current footprint, like you see in this photo I took in 2006:

Photograph by Keiran Murphy looking at Frank Lloyd Wright's study area after opening the season tours at Taliesin.

I took this at the end of one of our yearly House Openings.

It’s one of those “truth hiding in plain sight” moments at Taliesin: the January 1951 issue of Architectural Forum magazine had lots of photographs by Ezra Stoller, including one of Wright sitting at the desk in his bedroom the previous fall. The caption under the photo says,

“…. This beautiful room, where Wright works surrounded by the serene art of the East that he loves, was not here six months ago….”

Hence, we know the year the change was made.

But in one of those tour-guiding rumors that seemingly comes from nowhere, guides said apprentices expanded his bedroom in about three weeks while Wright was away.

In fact, I remember trying to write the answer to a guide in one of my weekly Hey Keiran! articles.

As a matter of fact, I just looked at my copy of the “Hey Keirans” and discovered that someone had asked me about this…

TWENTY. YEARS. AGO.

Give me a moment to remind myself that, in 2006, I wasn’t 28 years old.

At that time, I looked at my sources, and told the guides what Wright’s former apprentice Curtis Besinger said in Working With Mr. Wright: that the architect began enlarging his bedroom after returning from England in July of that year.

But nothing showed that apprentices expanded the room while Wright was in England.

Therefore, Kelly’s statement

establishes that apprentices did not expand Wright’s bedroom “while he was out of the country.”

Okay, fine:

Keiran: you keep talking about it, but where is the damned photo you started off talking about?

Well,

due to issues of copyright, fair use, 

and that dealing with Ezra Stoller’s firm flips me out

I’ll give you the link to the online copy of the very magazine that Stoller took his photos for. Architectural Forum January 1951 is available here: https://www.usmodernist.org/AF/AF-1951-01.pdf

The photographs of Wright’s work start on PAGE 74.

The issue shows photos and drawings of many buildings Wright was constructing in both color and black & white.

THE PHOTO OF WRIGHT AT HIS DESK IS on page p. 108.

But what did the apprentices do on this project?

They expanded the existing roof over Wright’s bedroom, and built mullions and windows on three sides over the terrace that had been built in 1936, and added stone planters in and out of the room. 

A photo of the smaller bedroom from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation is below:

Black and white photograph looking at terrace and roofs. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

The Foundation published this in a number of places including on p. 147 of Wright’s book An American Architecture. His bedroom ended under the roofs on the right. 

I published a photo showing the other side of the room in my post, “Behold the Wayback Machine“:

Looking from Taliesin's Hill Crown to its living quarters, 1937-1943.

This photo is on p. 310 of the book, Wisconsin: A Guide to the Badger State. It was written in the Works Projects Administration and was published in 1941. The Wisconsin Historical Society published the photo on their website.3

Wright’s bedroom at that time was in front, and to the left of, the chimney on the right. 

A couple of photos were taken inside the room

in 1937 by young photographer Ken Hedrich of Hedrich-Blessing photographers in Chicago. Those photos  were for an issue of Architectural Forum devoted to Wright’s work. Here’s an interior looking southwest in Wright’s Bedroom:

Black and white photograph showing Frank Lloyd Wright's bedroom with fire in fireplace. Photographed by Ken Hedrich in 1937. In the Chicago History Museum, Hedrich Blessing collection, HB-04414-B.

I previously published this in “Where Frank Lloyd Wright was sitting when this photograph was taken“.

The other photograph Ken Hedrich took in Wright’s Bedroom is at the top of this post.

Interestingly,

Hedrich’s work with Wright was one of those times in which the architect made a career (or two): Wright pulled Ken and William, his brother at the firm, to do a lot of the photography for that issue. Ken photographed Taliesin and other buildings within driving distance of southern Wisconsin; William went to Pennsylvania to that new building Wright was completing, which the architect had named Fallingwater.

a copy of the 1937 (or ’47) Architectural Forum might be like a secret handshake among Frankophiles. After I complained to someone how expensive a copy of that magazine from 1937 was, I got a deal at Abebooks.com because one page was ripped. I didn’t care: I just wanted the photos!

Of course, now you can just see them at Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/sim_architectural-forum_1938-01_68_1_0. If you check it out, you’ll also see one of those photos of Wright with a cigarette in his mouth.

The floor plan from that Architectural Forum shows the smaller bedroom:

Floor plan showing part of the main floor at Taliesin. Executed for the January 1938 Architectural Forum magazine.

Nice thing

about the AF floor plan is that they included the rendering of flagstone. So you can see a larger fraction of the flooring in the bedroom was wood, making it easier to keep the space heated. Then in late 1937, Wright found the land in Arizona where he started Taliesin West and would usually spend his winters there later on.

The drawing has “MASTER” for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bedroom and “MISTRESS” for Olgivanna Lloyd Wright’s Bedroom. The Wrights did share a bedroom until 1936, then moved to these rooms, which had formerly been for guests. I’ve been told they changed this because he slept little, so it was easier for her.

OH: and as for the physical part of their life together – 

WE WEREN’T ASKING YOU THAT, KEIRAN

oh, you weren’t, but once when someone asked me about that on a tour I told them, “Wright said you couldn’t separate his life from his work, and he was very passionate about his work.”

 

 

First published August 6, 2026.
The photo at the top of this post was taken by Ken Hedrich and comes from Architectural Forum, January 1938, volume 68, number 1, p. 16. The image is in the Chicago History Museum-Hedrich Blessing collection here: https://images.chicagohistory.org/groupitem/2806/ 

Notes:

  1. Many people referred to them as Mr. Wright or Mrs. Wright, which was drilled into me when I started giving tours. It seemed odd until I remembered that most of the apprentices were in their 20s when they came to live with a man old enough to be their grandfather, and in a time in which people referred to elders as “Mr.”, “Mrs.” and “Miss”. In fact, that’s what I was taught and still refer to older adults that I met as a child by those titles. But OTOH, working in tours brought us up against people who made fun of the Fellowship, and of us, for saying that. Ah, well: haters gonna hate. 
  2. Before that, the Wrights shared the bedroom that’s now the Guest Bedroom. A photo from when they shared the bedroom is below:
Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin bedroom, 1927-28
Published in Frank Lloyd Wright Selected Houses, v. 2: Taliesin. p. 56.

this image is also in my post about my “Hey Keiran!” feature.

  1. Here’s an example of some Frankophile sh-… enanigans: I read the entry on that photo on the WHS website, then found and bought the book it came from. It wasn’t that expensive because who wants a book about traveling in Wisconsin in 1941?
Photograph by Keiran Murphy, September 1, 2003.

The Abandoned Stairway at Taliesin

Posted on | by keiran
Reading Time: 6 minutes

I was working on my Taliesin Book1 and thought up another change at Taliesin I should write about.

So today I’m going to write about what you see in the photo at the top of this post.

The photo shows

a stairway that used to take you from Taliesin’s Guest Wing (the first floor) up to its main floor, where the Wrights lived. If you popped through the black rectangle in the photo, you’d be in Taliesin’s Entry Foyer (below), about where the black outline is on the floor.2

Interior of Taliesin, looking toward Entry Foyer. Photograph by Keiran Murphy, September 3, 2003.

Finding that stairway was always a wild moment for people. To start with, you’d be on the first floor (which most tour guides aren’t casually allowed into), and be poking around the rooms (by invitation of course).

On the side of the hallway opposite the rooms, about halfway down, you’d see wooden doors covering up an alcove. If you opened them you’d see a couple of steps on one side, and a door-frame with no door. Beyond that, you’d see a stairway that leads nowhere.

This stairway is really old. It might go back to 1911. But if not, part of it definitely goes back to Taliesin II.

In 1911:

to get to these stairs, you’d walk outside to where the kitchen is, and take a right near the current “front door”.

See this post on how to get to the front door in early Taliesin.

I put a drawing from Wright’s archives below and drew a blue line on the drawing to show you how you’d walk there Taliesin’s Porte-Cochere:

Detail, Taliesin floor plan. June 1911. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1104.003.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1104.003.

So, if you walked into Taliesin at that time, you could go through that door, take a step or two, and there was a descending stairway to your right. That was the only way to Taliesin’s first floor for years.  

There aren’t any floor plans for Taliesin’s first floor, but you can see the steps in a section drawing I added below:

Taliesin section. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1403.013.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). This is a detail from drawing #1403.013. “1403” refers to Taliesin 2 (1914-1925), but this is Taliesin 1 (1911-14). In the right-hand side of the drawing, you can see plaster in the terrace above the stone foundation. That’s a T1 trait. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, the late curator of Wright’s archives, didn’t know this and thought for other reasons that this was T2. He had to know a lot about thousands of Frank Lloyd Wright drawings; while I only have to know what’s on the Taliesin estate.

After the first and second fires at Taliesin, Wright kept the steps in the same place. Following Taliesin’s 1925 fire, Wright expanded the descending stairway by about 4 inches.

You could tell that by looking at the stone:

Seven steps on this stairway (from the top down) are red, showing where the fire touched.3 Then there’s a break line on the left, and these yellow steps are undamaged.

The last time

the stairway appeared in that spot in a drawing was the January 1938 edition of Architectural Forum magazine. Here it is, below:

Detail of floor plan of Taliesin published in the January 1938 edition of Architectural Forum magazine. Following page 4.

Taliesin’s living room is on the left and Frank Lloyd Wright’s bedroom is on the right (“Master”). Apprentices executed the drawing in the fall of 1937. 

If you click

on the link for the Architectural Forum magazine ABOVE, it takes you to the copy of that magazine issue at ARCHIVE.ORG.

when you get there, the floor plan of Taliesin starts after page 4.

It’s kind of dark, but still: it ROCKS.

BACK TO

what I was talking about:

You don’t see those steps today because Wright changed them

starting in 1939.

Here’s what Taliesin Fellow Curtis Besinger wrote about it in his book, Working With Mr. Wright:

Toward the end of the summer [of 1942] Mr. Wright completed a change in the way one entered the guest wing below the house, a change which he had begun in the fall of 1939 when he had had the inside stair closed….

He had a stair built that was outside but under the cover of the roof connecting the house to the studio. This change in the entrance to the guest wing seemed to be in anticipation of the fact that the Fellowship, reduced in numbers, would all be living at Taliesin during the coming winter.

Curtis Besinger. Working with Mr. Wright: What It Was Like (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1995), 139.

Luckily, his 1939 change appears in a drawing in the book, In the Nature of Materials, 1887-1941: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Henry-Russell Hitchcock:

Detail of Taliesin floor plan, figure 271, from the book, In the Nature of Materials, 1887-1941: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Apprentices in the Taliesin Fellowship also executed this drawing not currently in Wright’s archives. This drawing is in the book, In the Nature of Materials, figure 271.

But those steps are no longer there, either.

Besinger explained the move in the same passage as above:

Of course this entrance was changed again several years later. It was made into an entrance that was more gracious, less steep, and better lighted.

Besinger, Working with Mr. Wright, 139.

They’re under the roof you see in the 1955 photo by Maynard Parker:

Black and white photograph taken at Taliesin in 1955. Maynard Parker, photographer. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 1266-016n.

You can see this view if you take a 2-hour Taliesin House tour, or the 4-hour Estate tour.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen

a photo from when the steps were in front of the Taliesin kitchen

(the “Little Kitchen”).

But, like many things at Taliesin, while Wright changed stuff, evidence of it was usually left behind.

We found this out during Taliesin’s Save America’s Treasures project in 2003-04. The contracted masons were taking the stone out of Taliesin’s Breezeway and it was like, lookey here!

Before:

Exterior of Taliesin, taken early in the work for Taliesin's Save America's Treasures drainage project from 2003-04. Photograph by Keiran Murphy, October 20, 2003.

Looking in Taliesin’s Breezeway at the door to the “Little Kitchen”.

And after:

Taken in Taliesin's Breezeway on November 17, 2003 during Taliesin's Save America's Treasures projecft. Arrow pointing at discovered change.

The Breezeway again. You can see to the edge of what’s been removed, where the top of the steps were revealed.

I’ve written about the SAT’s project before. With the found window, and the found floor—and other things—I should write that down sometime.4

Last thing:

those steps under the main floor are one of those things by Wright that you will only (mostly) be able to experience in your mind.

Because

they are now inaccessible.

The climate control work that the Preservation Crew has done included finding spaces where they could add chases for machinery to adequately heat and cool the building.

In fact, when staff and I went down to the Guest Wing in 2018 to see their work, I asked the Director of Preservation at Taliesin if we could still see them.

He opened the door to the alcove and, on one edge, you could see maybe 4 inches [10.16 cm].

STILL:

I showed a drawing with the steps in my posts about the night that future architect Gertrude Kerbis spent at Taliesin; and when I identified an old photo of the “Blue Room”.

First published November 1, 2024
I took this photo the first day I was taking photographs related to Taliesin’s SAT’s project.

Notes:

  1. It’s a continual project that I hope to finish one day.
  2. It was right next to where we found that floor in 2003 during Taliesin’s Save America’s Treasures project. I wrote about that in 2022.
  3. Read my “I Looked at Stone” post to find out why they’re red.
  4. I’ll put it into a book entitled, “That’s Not a Crack, That’s a Change: Adventures in Preserving Taliesin”.
Photograph by Clarence Fuermann, 1926-28 of Frank Lloyd Wright's bedroom (now Taliesin's Guest Bedroom). Showing bed, furniture, and a door on the right to the terrace.

Another Taliesin mystery that I missed:

Posted on | by keiran
Reading Time: 6 minutes

I know you think I know everything

at least if I listen to my mom and oldest sister

But,

this post is where I come clean about something I missed about the history of Taliesin.

it’s only one thing in the pile of things that I know I have missed

and I say that and you don’t believe me1

But I’m not being modest. I say I don’t know everything because I’ve seen it happen.

For example:

In my post “A room at Taliesin“, I wrote how when I look at drawings I try to “wipe my mind of preconceptions”, which I put a note “2” on.

What was note 2?

Regarding missing things, I wrote:

“… 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.“

I don’t feel like doing penance, but it is Lent

And while I’m not a practicing Catholic, I grew up with it. Remember the ashes on my forehead in my post, “Dune, by Frank Herbert“.

So, let’s do this

For years I worked as the historian at Taliesin.

In addition to answering questions for the public and guides, I tried to figure out the history of the spaces in hopes that I could help the Preservation Crew working on the buildings.

            I always felt lucky that I got to do this

When I didn’t have projects, I researched and wrote about the history of specific rooms, with the possibility of these things being of assistance when projects arose.

A big write-up was the “Slice” of Taliesin that I figured out.

In fact, all of this work was part of my chronologies listed for my Wright Spirit Award.

At the top of the list

Was my research about the rooms on Taliesin’s main floor.

the ones you see on Taliesin tours

One of these rooms

Was originally Frank Lloyd Wright’s personal bedroom. The photo of it while he and his wife slept there is at the top of this page.

The Wrights moved out of the room into their own bedrooms in 1936.2

How to we know this?

Fortunately, this information came out in an “At Taliesin” article. The article by apprentice Noverre Musson published on March 12, 1937 says in part that,

Last summer saw quite a bit of this seasonal growth….

            … [T]he opposite end of the house was found to be unsatisfactory in some ways.  This wing which is passed first by the entrance drive had always turned its back on the approach but now sprouted a new branch to meet all arrivals.  It took the form of a cantilever terrace high in the air commanding a magnificent view of the valley and provides outdoor sunny living space as complement to a sunny new bedroom, also developed from an old one, for Mr. Wright.

At Taliesin: Newspaper Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 1934-1937, edited and with commentary by Randolph C. Henning (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1991), p. 246.

Wright built the terrace for his new bedroom (seen in this post c. 1950), which he’d formerly used as a guest bedroom. His wife took the room next to it (you can see her room down the page in this post of mine).

Their former bedroom remained the Guest Bedroom throughout their lives (and beyond). You can see how he changed the room when you compare the photo at the top of this post with the one below taken by Ken Hedrich in 1937:

Photograph of Taliesin's Guest Bedroom taken by Ken Hedrich. Taken in 1937 Has a bed, chairs, furnishings, and a wooden door. Fire in the fireplace.

Looking northeast in Taliesin’s Guest Bedroom.3 If you walked through the door you would be in the alcove off Taliesin’s Living Room.

The photo also shows the underside of the room’s “loft”, like you see in this photo:

Photograph of the Guest Bedroom at Taliesin. Taken by Keiran Murphy.I took this photograph in 2006. I first put this photo in my post, “My March Madness“

When I first started giving tours in 1994, the north side of the Guest Bedroom had drywall so I didn’t think about anything immediately around the fireplace or that north wall. In the winter of ’95-’96, the Preservation Crew worked in this room to fix a leak.

Probably due to Wright’s experimentation and changes over time, the north side of the room had (possibly still has) a leak. They work on it, then water finds its way in through another avenue and makes its way back to leaking. In fact it was leaking in this photograph taken by someone on a House tour in 2018:

A photograph looking north in Taliesin's Guest Bedroom taken while on a tour. Includes the bed, several seats, and lamps. Has masonry in view. Photograph by Stilfehler.

But leaks are not what this post is about.

The thing I should have known (but didn’t) existed in the wall to the right of the leak. It’s a window that was found by the Preservation Crew on December 14, 2017. Taliesin’s Director of Preservation, Ryan Hewson (from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation) excitedly discusses this find on this video, here.

HERE’S THE THING:

I only knew it was there when,

            thank Frank,

John Jensen, then on the Preservation Crew, uncovered it.

Now, to be honest, the window was covered up after Wright’s death in 1959. This is what it looked like when I first started giving tours in 1994:

Photograph by Yukio Futagawa showing the corner of the Guest Bedroom in Taliesin. Has with beige walls, light fixtures and a mirror.

After her husband’s death, Olgivanna probably wanted to make the Guest Bedroom more private. Having that open window (and French doors opening to the Loggia on the south) makes the space very light.

And it makes it difficult to sleep if there’s anyone else in the Taliesin living quarters.

Still,

I should have known. After all, I’d studied Taliesin for years and knew I had to “clean” out my preconceptions. Yet I had only seen the window in photos after John Jensen uncovered it.

And I have to say that had John not been careful he could have damaged the window and its frame.

The window you can see in Ken Hedrich’s photo from 1937 should have alerted me. But I let myself think the the light was reflecting off of something else.

Maynard Parker took a photograph in 1955 and the lighting he used cast shadows so you can only see a window shade to the left of the fireplace:

Photograph of Taliesin's Guest Bedroom taken by Maynard Parker in 1955. Has a bed, furniture, and a view out of the French doors. In Huntington Hartford Library--Maynard Parker collection, 1266-047n.

This isn’t even the first time I’ve shown things I’ve overlooked.

Here was the post I wrote about the found window at Taliesin, and how I realized I hadn’t noticed a drawing of it for years. Of course it could also be that I mostly worked by myself.

Which led to a lot of great discoveries, but, probably, oversight.

 

 

First published March 2, 2024.
 Clarence Fuermann, of the firm, Henry Fuermann  Sons took the photograph at the top of this post c. 1926-28. It’s been published in a variety of places including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Selected Houses, volume 2. You can see it in the Journal of the Organic Architecture + Design Archives, here.

Notes:

  1. Again: that’s really directed at my mom and my oldest sister. 
  2. they got separate bedrooms probably because he slept less than she did. I’ve seen one photo of their bedroom when they shared it and the room has a drafting table in it. Makes sense, but if I were Olgivanna after awhile I’d be all right sleeping in my own bedroom after living with someone who would wake up and start drafting in the early-morning hours.
  3. I hear this was also called the “Big Guest Bedroom”.
Exterior Taliesin photograph by Richard Vesey from 1957. In the Wisconsin Historical Society - Vesey Collection.

Taliesin West inspiration

Posted on | by keiran
Reading Time: 6 minutes

Looking (plan) southeast from the Taliesin Hill Crown toward the Plunge Pool terrace, with Wright’s newly-expanded bedroom on the left. Most of the landscape you see in the distance is the Taliesin estate.

I think something that Wright did at Taliesin West (in Arizona) inspired him in a change he made at Taliesin (in Wisconsin). That change was within the work as he expanded his bedroom in 1950.

Expanded?

Yes: here’s a quick and dirty history of the room:

It was originally constructed in 1925, then became his bedroom in 1936.

(he probably did some more changes at that time, but I haven’t figured them out yet)

And, in 1950 he expanded his bedroom to its current configuration (that one sees on tours). That change was accomplished by further building out the room onto the existing stone terrace that he had initially constructed in 1936.1

While Wright himself didn’t specifically say this, the change was apparently made for a photograph. That’s because Architectural Forum magazine was doing a piece on Wright that included an insert on Taliesin.

I like to say that Wright was “sprucing up the house” for the photo.

The photo shows Wright sitting at his desk in the bedroom and was taken in the fall of 1950 by Ezra Stoller and published in the January 1951 issue.

(Since the firm that Stoller founded, ESTO, is specific about people using their images

[like, I wouldn’t be surprised if they came after my ass for showing the photo even if I linked to their org, and even if followed “fair use” ]

so I’m not gonna show it here. But you can find that issue of Architectural Forum online. That issue is scanned & reproduced here.
It’s a 190 MB pdf [Portable Document Format], to give you a sense of how long it would take to download.  

Anyway, that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

I’m here to talk about other changes he made at the same time around his bedroom.

That’s because I was lying in bed a couple of nights ago when it occurred to me that the changes that Wright made in 1950 right outside of his bedroom were influenced by the spatial arrangements he had used at his winter home, Taliesin West.

I do some of my best Taliesin thinking at night. Unfortunately, I often forget a lot of what I think about,2 but on this occasion, I got out of bed and wrote it down.

So on this post, I’m going to explain that.

Here’s part of what Wright wrote in his autobiography in 1943 about Taliesin West:

Taliesin West is a look over the rim of the world….
There was lots of room so we took it…. The plans were inspired by the character and beauty of that wonderful site. Just imagine what it would be like on top of the world looking over the universe at sunrise or at sunset with clear sky in between…. It was a new world to us and cleared the slate of the pastoral loveliness of our place in Southern Wisconsin. Instead came an esthetic, even ascetic, idealization of space, of breadth and height and of strange firm forms, a sweep that was a spiritual cathartic for Time if indeed Time continued to exist.

Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, new and revised ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 453.

In fact, Wright changed a lot of things at Taliesin based on his winters in the Arizona desert. Only some of those things took place in the 1940s, like what I wrote in the post, “In Return for the Use of the Tractor“, he took advantage of the fact that he didn’t have to deal with Wisconsin winters anymore.

However, I hadn’t thought about changes that he made to the vistas around Taliesin due to what he’d observed in Arizona.

Not until that recent night.

Part of what I’ve noticed at Taliesin West (and I’m not alone) that he was using the exteriors of the structures to point your eyes to certain places. I think that’s part of being on the “rim of the world.”

So, while I laid in bed I remembered how, when one is in Wisconsin, the terrace outside of his bedroom (changed when he did things in 1950) gives you views that frame the nature around it that kind of look like what he did at Taliesin West.

Summer photograph of Wright's bedroom and terrace taken in 1957. Property: Scott Architectural Library

Courtesy, Scott Architectural Archives. Taken during the Spring Green Centennial of 1957. On that summer day, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship opened up the Taliesin estate to “locals” and let them walk around all over. The photograph shows Wright’s newly-expanded bedroom on the left, with the hills across the highway (HWY 23) in the distance. By the time this photograph was taken, Wright and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation owned almost everything that can be seen.

Compare to the photograph below that I took at Taliesin West early one morning in February 2007. Wright’s office is to the left, with steps leading to an upper level, with the McDowell Mountains in the background.

Keiran Murphy's exterior photograph of Taliesin West taken on February 15, 2007.

Compare the photo above to the Taliesin photo at the top of this post.

See? Pool—Steps—Hills

Moreover, about the photo at the top of this post:

I was confused about the puddles on the terrace (around and behind the Buddha) until I saw the photo from the Wisconsin Historical Society, below:

Property: Wisconsin Historical Society - Vesey collection
Wisconsin Historical Society – Vesey Collection, WHi-64877.

You can see the stream of water, the white vertical line from the pool, and in front of the balcony. The puddle on the flagstones is in the foreground from that little fountain. It’s to the right of the metal Buddha in the middle of the photograph.

It you were standing at that spot then turned around, you’d see the landscape and fields just south of the Taliesin structure.

You see Tan-y-deri,

another building on the estate. That’s the house that Wright designed for his sister, Jane. The photograph below was taken toward Tan-y-deri by Janet Caligiuri Brach. She took it on Sunday, April 24, 2022 while on a tour:

Photograph taken April 24, 2022. Taken on Frank Lloyd Wright's Bedroom terrace at Taliesin.

Photo by Janet Caligiuri Brach. Used with permission.

Taken at the edge of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bedroom Terrace, looking (plan) south. At the mid-point is the tower. This is the Romeo and Juliet Windmill. Tan-y-deri stands to the lower right of “R&J”.

Oh, and before I go:

Here’s something else from Taliesin West that Wright brought to Taliesin in 1950. That terrace with the pool (called “the Plunge Pool Terrace”) ends with the same kind of masonry that’s used at Taliesin West.

This was a dry concrete that the apprentices put into forms, with the limestone facing out. They put newspaper or other things over the stone, so when they took away the forms, you could still see the rock.

You can see this masonry in another Taliesin West photograph of mine, that I showed in, “Taliesin is in Wisconsin“

I can show this type of masonry in a photo of the terrace that I took in 2005, below:

Taken by Keiran Murphy on May 17, 2005.

Looking (plan) northwest at the edge of the Plunge Pool Terrace with the that’s inspired by Taliesin West. This terrace was also apparently executed in 1950.

Published June 18, 2022.
The photograph at the top of this post is from the Wisconsin Historical Society – Vesey Collection, WHi-64841. Click here to get to their page with the image.

Notes:

  1. Since it’s been awhile since I wrote this, I’ll add it again: when I write, “he/Wright constructed this-or-that”, or “he/Wright expanded this-or-that”, what I mean is that he was designing or directing the work. His apprentices in the Taliesin Fellowship were doing the physical work. 
  2. That’s why my husband wants to get me something to write on at night.
Looking west in Taliesin's Garden Room. Photograph by Keiran Murphy.

Physical Taliesin history

Posted on | by keiran
Reading Time: 6 minutes

Looking (plan) west in Taliesin’s Garden Room. Everything you see in the room (except for the plant and thermometer) was designed or owned by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright, re-use

I thought about this yesterday when seeing a link to a video through Taliesin Preservation’s Facebook page. Their link went to a video put up by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation (the Taliesin Estate owner) a couple of years ago. The video was about Frank Lloyd Wright and recycling. In the piece, two staff members from the Foundation sit in Taliesin’s living room talking about Wright’s reuse of materials at his home.

My post today will be about another time I noticed that Wright reused materials at Taliesin.

Now, one of the things staff from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation points out is a music chair of Wright’s design in Taliesin’s living room. The sign was plywood, and Wright used this and other signs in his buildings to go along with his models.

And, if you take a tour at Taliesin (tours start on the weekends in April), you see there’s this chair with a cushion tipped up, showing that the seat of the music chair is made from scrap from an old sign. I put a photograph below of a sign, that I took from one of my old magazines.

At the time the magazine was published (Architectural Forum in 1938), people took tours given by Wright’s architectural apprentices. The photograph below shows one of the rooms people went through, with signs and some models.

By the way: you still go through this room on Taliesin tours. It’s in the Hillside building and you see it on Taliesin’s Estate tour and the Highlights tour.

The font on the sign in the background above, that says “A New Freedom”, is the same font as that on the chair:

Photograph by Roy Peterson from p. 18 of the January 1938 Architectural Forum magazine issue devoted to Wright.Photographer: Roy Peterson.
1938 Architectural Forum magazine, January 1938, volume 68, number 1, 18.

Getting back to what I thought of:

That talk (between Ryan and Jeff) from the Foundation reminded me about something else that was reused inside Taliesin. I found it while cleaning the furniture before tours.

Prepping for tours:

See, back in the olden days, before the start of every tour season, staff from Taliesin tours would clean and arrange everything at Hillside and Taliesin. In addition to the buildings not being used on tours for 6 months, the tour space of both buildings (except for Wright’s drafting studio at Taliesin) were not heated.

It’s not that Wright didn’t know enough not to heat his Wisconsin buildings —

I wrote about that in the post, “Did Wright Ever Live in Wisconsin in the winter?“

no: these tour spaces weren’t heated because the mechanical systems had broken down after decades of use.

As a result of no building heat,

after the end of the tour season (on Halloween at that time), everything had to be broken down (or rolled up), stored, or moved. Then, before the beginning of the tour season (May 1 at that time) everything was cleaned and moved back. “Opening” took place in April.

Since the Taliesin tour space is now heated, tours go through the Taliesin residence on the weekends in November and April before completely shutting down (Wisconsin winters, you know).

“Closing” took 3 days or so. Opening the buildings took longer. That’s because everything (furniture, floors, doors, windows, and all horizontal surfaces) had to be washed by hand.

Oh yes: I killed a lot of spiders during my years of Opening the House. I apologized to them while squishing them and hope I don’t have to pay for that in my next life.

This work was done in spaces that, in April, were in the low 50sF (about 10-16C). Sounds pleasant, but not when the air, windows, and walls have soaked up the winter cold, and you’re sitting on stone floors that are colder than 50F.

Sometimes on nice days in mid-April, we’d open up the windows and doors to bring in warmer air.

Back to cleaning:

One April day, I was cleaning in a room known as the Garden Room. The Garden Room is in the photograph at the top of this post.

The Garden Room was initially added in 1943 and expanded 1950-52. A drawing of the room shows which part I’m talking about. It’s drawing #2501.051 (the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives; Museum of Modern Art | the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

A drawing:

I’ve taken a crop of the drawing and wrote where in the room I was cleaning:

Drawing 2501.051 cropped. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (the Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architecturel & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives #2501.051. Note that this drawing has been cropped.

I was lying on the stone floor cleaning the underside of the bookshelves, which I pointed to in the drawing above. The photograph at the top of this page shows the shelf that I was lying under.

While was working, I saw this dark mark on the underside of the shelf.

What I saw:

I don’t have a photograph, but my illustration below is basically a drawing of the shape I saw:

It took me a moment or two to realize what it was. I was seeing a burn mark from an iron. Someone had been ironing, put the iron down, got distracted and left this mark. Later on, the piece of wood was turned over and re-used as the bookshelf.

The “sad” iron

Writing this post made me look up information on irons.1 It appears that, given the solid dark color, that this was from a “sad” iron. The “sad” iron was the solid metal iron that wasn’t plugged in (“sad” is Old English for “solid”).

According to what I read online, irons have been around for millennia and they started to become electrified in the 19th century. And, while the “first electric iron was invented in 1882”, for decades,

… most regions of the United States didn’t have electricity, and those that did, only had it only at night for lighting. Earl Richardson in Ontario, Canada, was the first to convince the local electric company to run electricity on Tuesday, ironing day. However, a good number of women, particularly in rural areas that were late getting electricity, held onto their sad irons well into the 1950s.

https://www.collectorsweekly.com/tools-and-hardware/sad-and-flat-irons

Given how Taliesin, by the early 1950s, was no longer getting electricity from the Taliesin dam,2 electricity still might have been spotty. So it’s possible that members of the Taliesin Fellowship had the older type of iron on hand for consistent use in ironing. Or maybe the burn mark happened decades earlier, and this was a piece of wood that had been saved for any future need.

As a note:

I hope you enjoy yourself if you ever take a tour at Taliesin. 

BUT

do NOT get on the floor on your hands and knees looking for the burn mark from the iron.

It’s on the underside of the shelf and, aside from alarming everyone around you, you’ll have to get back up off the ground, without leaning on any of the original Frank Lloyd Wright-designed furniture in the room.

 

Originally posted, December 4, 2021.
I took this photograph at the top of the post on May 26, 2006.

1 I should try to remember all the things I’ve learned while working around Taliesin. The “sad” iron is one of them. I’ve also learned what the Wisconsin state bird is (the Robin, natch); about the flooding of the Seine River in Paris in 1910 (written about by Wright in his autobiography); the history of Unitarian Universalism (the religion of Wright’s Welsh family); and what “Sloyd” is (his aunts used it in their Hillside Home School).

And that’s just off the top of my head.

WAIT: I did! Here’s the link to my post “Things I Learned at Taliesin“.

2 Not that electricity from Taliesin’s hydroelectric plant at the dam was good or consistent. Lights went out a lot, and apparently if someone ran the saw on the western end of the building, the lights would flicker in Taliesin’s living quarters on the opposite end of the building, over 300 feet away.

Looking south in the Hillside Drafting Studio

Hillside Drafting Studio flooring

Posted on | by keiran
Reading Time: 5 minutes

Looking south in the Hillside Drafting Studio, with its flooring.
The black and white photograph on the right shows the V.C. Morris Gift Shop, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in San Francisco (currently a men’s clothing store).

In this post, I am diving into the flooring at the Hillside Drafting Studio on Wright’s Taliesin Estate. I wrote about Hillside here. Hillside’s Drafting Studio, added in the 1930s, is 5,000 sq feet of space (1,524 m2). The Hillside Studio became Wright’s main studio in Wisconsin after the Taliesin Fellowship completed it.

There was one real point of curiosity about the studio’s flooring, which has pinstripes. This post concentrates on that flooring.

As I wrote before in my Hillside post, the Taliesin Fellowship apprentices, in the 1930s, wrote about working on the studio. Here, in the September 5, 1937 “At Taliesin”1 article, an apprentice writes that:

“…. Two months of continual and concentrated group activity by the Fellowship should announce the fact that our principal workroom – an abstract forest in oak timber and sandstone – is in order.  Then watch our dust!”2

Uh… not yet

The Fellowship, and Wright, only started using the studio full-time in 1939.

Wait – what? Why not?

Well, the structure had been built, but it didn’t have a finished floor. You can see a photograph of the unfinished floor in a photo below. It was taken in 1937 by Ken Hedrich for the magazine, Architectural Forum. Its January 1938 edition concentrated on Wright.

Ken photographed the Taliesin estate, while his brother, Bill Hedrich, went to Pennsylvania and took the first, famous, photograph of Fallingwater (the house over the waterfall).3

While Bill photographed elsewhere, Ken photographed all over the Taliesin estate. His work included the Hillside Studio and you can see the state of it in the fall of 1937:

Looking north in the Hillside Drafting Studio
Photograph taken by Ken Hedrich of the firm Hedrich-Blessing.

1938 Architectural Forum magazine issue: January 1938, volume 68, number 1, 18.

This photograph looks north in the Hillside Drafting Studio. Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship did not yet use the studio, because the room did not have its finished flooring.

When you walk into the studio today you see a wooden, waxed flooring, that has pinstripes. These pinstripes were not painted on the floor surface. What one sees is the veneered wood on its side. It’s as if you are seeing the edge of a wafer cookie.

To illustrate the “wafer cookie” look

I’ll show a photograph of the edge of some of the flooring:

The edge of the laminated flooring at Wright's Hillside studio in Wisconsin

I took this photograph.

Wright only used this type of flooring in one other place: on the mezzanine in “Wingspread“. That’s the name of a house he designed in Wisconsin for Herbert Johnson. Here are some of my pictures from that:

I took this photograph by the grand fireplace at Wingspread. Most of the people in this photograph worked in the Taliesin tour program.

The photograph below is the flooring of the mezzanine that matches what’s at the Hillside studio.

I took this closeup of the mezzanine flooring.

I don’t know Wright’s thoughts on the flooring.

However:

I know where it came from, when it was installed in the Hillside studio, and when Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship started studio operations in there.

That’s all because of someone else’s work.  

We know the month they moved to the Hillside Drafting Studio because of Kenneth B. Lockhart (1914-1994). He arrived in the Taliesin Fellowship in 1939. The Administrator of Historic Studies of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation interviewed Lockhart several times. In their May 5, 1988 interview, “Kenn” [sic] said that he arrived as an apprentice right after Wright and the Fellowship moved to the Hillside studio in July, 1939.

Where the flooring comes from:

That flooring caused curiosity for years. Where did it come from? And Herbert Johnson’s name floated around in the tour program in relation to that flooring. Did Johnson give the flooring to Wright? Was the flooring first planned for Wingspread? Was the flooring “overdraft” from Wingspread?

The answer to questions one and three, by the way, is NO

Yet, the question on how Wright got the flooring still had to be answered. And it was, by the Administrator of Historic Studies. In 1992, Indira tracked down its history. She started her task by asking former architectural Wright apprentice, Edgar Tafel.

Tafel had worked on the Johnson Wax World Headquarters, also commissioned by Herbert Johnson.

This is the same Edgar Tafel who wrote Apprentice to Genius.

Tafel told Indira that he thought of a connection between the Evans Products Co. and Frank Lloyd Wright. With that in mind, she went looking in Wright’s correspondence.  

Correspondence between Wright and Evans Products Co.

There are 8 letters between that business and Wright (or his secretary, Gene Masselink).

The first letter (E030C06) was written on March 15, 1940. Their records indicate that they shipped flooring to Wright on November 28, 1938, but hadn’t yet been paid (the bill was $400.00).

Wright replied (E03D01) on March 22, 1940. He wrote that he appreciated their patience regarding the “laminated flooring in our draughting [sic] room.”

And he wrote that it had been difficult getting paid by clients. Yet, the flooring has been doing “good work for you – as well as for us” as at least a hundred people go through the buildings during the summer and have admired the “beauty and durability of the floor.”

Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a record that Wright ever paid the Evans Products Co.

One of the last letters from the Evans Product Co. was written on September 26, 1941. This is #E033E05. The author (apparently a secretary), began by noting how so many things had changed since that day they shipped the flooring to Wright on November 28, 1938.

They emphasized how Europe (then at war) had changed very much since that day. Then, they ended the letter noting that “there will always be an England” but (I’m paraphrasing here) they hoped that there would not always be a $400 outstanding debt from Frank Lloyd Wright to the Evans Products Co.!

Once more

I found this information in 2009 while working at Wright’s archives (then at Taliesin West in Arizona). I had spent months working on the history of Hillside with architectural historian, Anne Biebel (the principal of Cornerstone Preservation). And I finally answered where that flooring came from; which Indira had discovered it 17 years before!

Published October 8, 2021
I took the photograph at the top of this page on August 26, 2009.

1 “At Taliesin” was the name of weekly articles published by Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship in the 1930s. They were found, transcribed and edited by Randolph C. Henning. He published them in a book in the early 1990s. I recommended the book here and wrote about it in my post, “Books by Apprentices“

2 Randolph C. Henning, ed. and with commentary. At Taliesin: Newspaper Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 1934-1937 (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1991), 273.

3 Not that you’ve never heard of Fallingwater, but it’s a big world out there on the World Wide Web. So, what the hell!

Exterior of Fellowship dining room, summer.

Old Dining Room

Posted on | by keiran
Reading Time: 5 minutes

The photograph above shows the dining room areas, first built before 1920, then used by the Wrights and the Taliesin Fellowship. The area dining rooms were on the left, with the kitchen located behind the tower on the right.

I have had the goal of figuring out the history of Frank Lloyd Wright’s home, Taliesin, for awhile. Well, a lot. It’s almost like it’s, I dunno, a career or something.

And, I’ve written about figuring out Taliesin’s history in this blog here, and here, and a few more places.

Regardless, come along with me while I talk about how I figured out something because of photographs and what others wrote.

The old Fellowship dining room at Taliesin is a simple example.

That’s the dining room Wright was exiting in 1925 when he saw that his home was on fire:

… [O]ne evening at twilight as the lightning of an approaching lightning storm was playing and the wind rising I came down from the evening meal in the little detached dining room on the hill-top to the dwelling on the court below to find smoke pouring out of my bedroom. Again—there it was—Fire!

Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, in Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings: 1930-32, volume 2. Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, introduction by Kenneth Frampton (1992; Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York City, 1992), 294.

Below is a photo from the Wisconsin Historical Society, taken prior to that day:

Taliesin dining area and Hill Tower, summer. 1920-22.
Wisconsin Historical Society. See image online here:
https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM38788

The door he was coming out of was to the left of the stone pier. You can’t see the door because it’s behind all of that foliage.
https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM38788

There’s a tree coming out of the roof on the left hand side of the photograph. That tree was there for close to a decade (don’t worry: the tree didn’t stand inside a room).

Continuing on Taliesin’s history

Taliesin’s second fire happens in 1925, then, after ups and downs in his career over the next seven years, Frank Lloyd Wright and his wife, Olgivanna, founded the Taliesin Fellowship in 1932. The apprentices in the Fellowship did a lot of work at Taliesin in the 1930s so they could have places to live and eat.

(I wrote about one of them, Edgar Tafel, and his book, Apprentice to Genius, in this post).

Here are the changes in the dining room in the 1930s:

Eventually, the main Fellowship dining room was at Hillside. But, in those early Fellowship years, while the group still ate at Taliesin, Wright added a chimney with two fireplaces to the existing dining room. Abe Dombar, then a Taliesin Fellowship apprentice (along with his brother Bennie; they both became architects) mentioned this in his “At Taliesin” article on March 23, 1934:

….  Additions were made… and the little dining room soon grew to be the big dining room.  The apprentices that were there helped to make it grow.  The low ceiling of the old dining room now projected out into the new part to form a deck….

And then they built a corner fireplace on the far side by the windows.

At Taliesin: Newspaper Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 1934-1937. Edited and with commentary by Randolph C. Henning (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1991), 30.

The chimney mentioned in Dombar’s article is seen in an aerial photograph from the Wisconsin Historical Society, below:

Aerial of Taliesin in summer, 1932-33. Cropped.
Owner: Wisconsin Historical Society. Available at: https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM38757

The chimney stands on the far left-hand side of the photograph, to the left of the tree.
Wisconsin Historical Society, ID 38757. The image is online here.

Then, in 1936, Wright invited young photographer, Edmund Teske, to live at Taliesin as the Fellowship photographer. Teske’s photos also show the tree.

In 1937, photos were taken for Architectural Forum mag

On preparation for an issue of that magazine devoted to his work, that fall, Wright dispatched young photographers Bill and Ken Hedrich (of the photography firm, Hedrich-Blessing) to photograph Taliesin and his other recent work. This magazine issue was released the next January. Among other things, that issue of Architectural Forum included unique photographs from the Taliesin estate, as well as the Johnson Wax world headquarters, and that little Wright building known as “Fallingwater”.

During his session, Ken Hedrich took a distant photograph of Taliesin, which showed the building without that tree in the roof. I don’t have that one to show, but here‘s a photograph Ken took on a roof looking over a courtyard with the dining room in the background. It ends at the chimney, and has no tree through the roof.

So, I’m figuring this stuff out: “Ok, the chimney’s built, then the tree is eliminated. Got it.”

Around that time, I grabbed another piece of writing. This is the book, Working With Mr. Wright: What It Was Like, by Curtis Besinger. He wrote about his years in the Taliesin Fellowship (1939-43; 1946-55).

Besinger on a change to the dining room in 1939:

He was involved in this during his first fall in the Fellowship:

I was also involved in one other construction project that fall, a remodeling of the Taliesin dining room…,

One morning, having finished his breakfast in the nearby little dining room, Mr. Wright1 came into the Fellowship dining room and announced that he wanted to put a clerestory in the ceiling to let more light as well as the morning sun into the room…. He directed some people to start knocking off the plaster on the ceiling along the east side of the ridge…. He made a rough drawing to indicate how he wanted the clerestory built….

Curtis Besinger. Working with Mr. Wright: What It Was Like (1995; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England), 26.

Even though he wrote his memoir years after his time at Taliesin, I trust Besinger’s memory on when this construction took place. That earliest experience at Taliesin makes a strong impression.

Here’s the conclusion to this information:

By looking at things written contemporaneously (as well as in memoirs), and by using definitively dated photographs (the Teske and Hedrich-Blessing photos), I was able to figure out when the chimney was built (1932-33); then when the tree disappeared (1936-37); then when the clerestory was constructed (1939).

In my nonstop refining of the dates of Taliesin’s changes, I looked at all the photocopies, took a pencil, and re-dated them accordingly. Figuring out these photographs has helped me to figure out changes; and on the other hand, figuring out changes has helped me figure out photographs.

First published, August 21, 2021.

The image at the top of this post is published online at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Taliesin_Exterior_21.jpg. The image is licensed under the Creative Commons  Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

1 While it’s slowly changing, people who knew him and worked with him referred to him as Mr. Wright. I was taught that specifically when I started giving tours. But, as I was completing grad school at that time, I carried the lesson on referring to an artist. First introduce them by their full name and thereafter just use their last names. I tried to call him “Frank Lloyd Wright” otherwise, but I can’t guarantee it.