Tag: Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy

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

The Restoration of Taliesin’s Drafting Studio

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

Why?

It’s a tangent.

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

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

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

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

I took this photograph in 2009.

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

The prospect became like getting heat back into the house.

So I thought

“Yeah, SURE you’re gonna do that….”

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

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

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

See Taliesin Preservation’s blog post about the project.

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

I love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I watched

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

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

So that’s why today

I will give you the shorthand version of that project.

On June 18, 1998

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

Photograph of Taliesin Tea Circle in the summer of 1994.

Photograph by Keiran Murphy.

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

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

were branded into my brain.

The tree fell on the first day of my weekend.

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

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

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

A positive observation

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

Why?

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

Its disappearance opened an unobstructed view of the building.

Back to the point:

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

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

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

When the tree fell,

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

The major restoration work

WAS NOT

in Taliesin’s Drafting Studio.

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

Not only that,

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

It looked like an office.

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

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

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

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

That wall had probably been there for over 25 years.

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

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

The Preservation office created a plan on what to do.

That first winter:

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

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

The shovel handles were too long.

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

The other work

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

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

As well as photos that Maynard Parker took in 1955:

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

You can see them at work in the photos below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additionally,

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

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

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

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

 

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

Notes:

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

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

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

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

UPDATE:

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

The Home page of SaveWright.org before the 2023 Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy conference.

2023 Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy Conference

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Next week, the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy is holding their 2023 conference. The conference will be in Minneapolis-St. Paul and its theme is “Colleagues & Clients: Women’s Roles in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture”.

Due to my connection to Taliesin and my life in the Wrightworld, they’re awarding me the “Wright Spirit Award“. So I’m going to the whole conference, which I’ve never done before!1

The WSA

“recognizes efforts of extraordinary individuals and organizations that have preserved the legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright through their tireless dedication and persistent efforts.”

I guess that means my work on these pages, too. I really like the way the tourism coordinator at Monona Terrace described me in the WSA application:

Keiran distills Wright’s original drawings, correspondence, and more than a century’s worth of historic photographs to dispel myths, confirms legends, all while placing herself—and us—within the spirit of the times. With this, she has provided assistance to not only Taliesin’s team of interpreters, but to outside researchers, students, and visitors….

It’s really nice to be noticed. I mean, aside from the tours I gave to over 11,000 people.

(and that one guy on Wikipedia who yelled at me in BOLD CAPITAL letters because I changed things on “his” Wikipedia page)

The three-day conference:

Every morning includes presentations (some panels). Then in the afternoon the Frankophiles tromp onto buses and we take off to buildings by Wright or those related to him. We’re also heading to the Minneapolis Museum of Art.

The MIA is not the building by Frank Gehry in Minnesota (the Weisman). I.e.: swoopy, shiny metal on the building’s exterior. No, it’s all classical.

On Friday, we’re going to Wright’s

  • Neils House
    • Which was on the market when the web page was put up. Then it was pulled back off. Maybe we’ll find out later.
  • Willey House
    • Which was really influenced by Nancy Willey (Malcom Willey’s wife), who followed the design really closely.

and

The Lovness Estate includes a Wright-cottage built in 1974. The conference brochure says Wright designed 4 buildings for the Lovnesses, including that cottage. Don and Virginia Lovness built it because they were seeing Wright’s buildings being destroyed. When they finished it, Wright’s son-in-law, Wes Peters, supposedly said that the newly build cottage, “had more architecture per square foot than any Wright building”.

“More architecture per square foot” is exactly what I was told Wes Peters said about Taliesin’s Guest Bedroom. So: either Wes liked bringing that phrase out from the vault; or that phrase is one of those that Wright tour guides like using. Like “the path of discovery”, “move your chair/table”, and “I was under oath”.

The conference schedule:

Every morning people give presentations on the conference theme. And in the afternoon, us Frankophiles get our box lunches, board the buses and take off for Wright and Wright-related buildings.

Here are a couple of things I’m really psyched for in the presentations.

Thursday:

Steve Sikora, co-owner of the Willey House, will talk about the house and who it was a harbinger of Wright’s design direction in the 1930s.

On Friday,

Bridget Bartal, Curatorial Fellow at Cranbrook Art Museum is presenting “(Mis)Fitting Taliesin: The Women of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship“

I’m interested in what she’ll say.

Years ago, someone did a short documentary titled, “A Girl is a Fellow Here“. That was supposedly what Wright said: the “Fellows” were members of the Taliesin Fellowship. So, with a play on words, a female apprentice in the Fellowship could literally be a “Fellow”.

I think the woman who did the documentary could have done a better job because she thought any women whose name was associated with Taliesin became an architect. Sounds cool, but it ain’t true.

Heloise Christa, in the Fellowship for decades, wasn’t an architect; she was a sculptor.

Susan Lockhart also there for decades, was a graphic designer, then later worked in wood and glass. Plus, she designed the Wright Spirit Awards.

On Saturday,

Among others, Anne Kinney is speaking in the morning session.

Her parents were Margaret and Patrick Kinney, who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright for their house. Their home is a Usonian house (Wright’s designs for moderate incomes). In the morning her father would get stone from the quarry and lay it when he got home in the afternoon.

Anne still owns the house that she grew up in. I first got to see it because my husband has worked with Anne’s nephew, who has invited us over. And I went there this summer and acted all fangirly around Anne.

Here’s a photo I took from that day:

Exterior of stone house by Frank Lloyd Wright for Patrick and Margaret Kinney in Lancaster, Wisconsin.

A photo I took outside of the Kinney House in Lancaster, Wisconsin.

Anne Kinney leaves me—literally—starstruck.

She is the Retired Deputy Center Director at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Smart people are so cool. And it’s intelligence around space and physics!! You can read her oral history here. She spoke about her background, and all of the great things she and other women have done for female colleagues in Physics.

But she also talked about growing up in the Wright-designed house,

I think that has a lot to do with why I went– why I was so attracted to mathematics and science and ultimately space, because the thing, if you see early photos of the house with these gorgeous stone walls, limestone, midwestern limestone with tons of fossils in it and at angles of 60 and 180 degrees, I mean it’s just beautiful. And it looks like a spaceship in its early incarnation.

Then

there’s the Gala on Saturday night, where I’ll receive the award.

I think we’ll have a good time. I still haven’t figured out where we’ll put the award, though.

 

First published September 23, 2023.
The image at the top of this post is a screengrab from the home page of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy’s website.

Notes:

I’ve given presentations at three conferences for the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. I wrote about the subjects I talked about at the conferences in two of my posts:

I also talked about a find at Taliesin when I did the Pecha Kucha in 2022.

1. I couldn’t afford to go. I still can’t really afford to go, but it’ll be great to see people and get an award.

1910-1911 exterior photograph on the Hillside Home School campus.

Another find at Hillside

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A photograph from 1910-1911 showing three structures on the campus of the Hillside Home School. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hillside building is on the left and behind it, with the hipped gable roof, is the dormitory for the high school boys. The third structure on the far right was known as the Home Cottage and was for the younger boys.

In my last post I wrote about finding something during the Comprehensive Hillside Chronology. Today, I’m posting about another find made during that project.

Although, I credit this find to my research and writing partner on that project, Anne Biebel (principal, Cornerstone Preservation). She made the mental connection; I only agreed after the surrounding evidence became too strong.

What was this find?

That Wright’s Hillside structure was physically attached to another building that he didn’t design. Literally: Wright connected his building to a wooden, 3-story building right behind it.

Whew – I feel better just coming out and saying that.

How this was found out:

Anne and I looked at the Hillside drawings while researching. At that moment, we weren’t looking at drawings of Wright’s Hillside structure done when Wright first built it for his aunts.

No: we were looking at another drawing, dated November 8, 1920. Wright requested it from a draftsman to show the entire Taliesin estate. We were looking at the draftsman’s copy. 1

Wright’s copy of the drawing had changes he made to it over the decades. His version is at the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library and is reproduced in b&w here. I showed a bit of it a few months ago when talking about reading correspondence about Midway Barn on the Taliesin estate.

The draftsman who drew it:

That was Rudolph Schindler (1887-1953), an Austrian-born American architect who worked under Wright in the United States and Japan from February 1918 to August 1921. 2

Schindler’s version is interesting

His drawing (in his papers at UC-Santa Barbara) seems to show the buildings as they actually existed. This, compared to Wright’s drawings, in which Wright always seemed to add those things at Taliesin that he wanted to exist.

While I won’t show you Schindler’s drawing, I’ll show you the drawing that I made from his. 3

No: this is (more or less) a good drawing, not the mess I drew you when I posted about figuring out that photograph of the Blue room at Taliesin. I tried to trace what Schindler drew.

What you see below is my rendition of the part of Schindler’s drawing that shows the campus for the Hillside Home School:

Keiran Murphy's drawing of the buildings on the old campus of the Hillside Home School in 1920.

The text in Arial font (like “Laundry…”) identifies buildings that Schindler didn’t label.

Below is that part of Schindler’s drawing that made Anne think Wright’s Hillside building was literally attached to something else.

Keiran Murphy's close-up of two buildings on the old Hillside Home School campus in 1920.

Schindler just labelled the “Hillside School Bldg”; I added “Boys Dormitory”. But the thing that intrigued Anne was the gray rectangle attached to the right side of the Boys Dormitory. She identified that as a corridor from Wright’s Hillside School building.

By the way, if you’re curious about the open rectangle between the two parts of Wright’s building: that was Schindler’s way of showing that this was a bridge connecting the Science and Arts room to the rest of the structure.

Anne sat across from me while we looked at the drawing and said with excitement that she thought that the Boys Dormitory was attached to Wright’s “Hillside School Bldg”. I totally pooh-poohed it. Besides, another drawing (an aerial, below, done in 1910 for the “Wasmuth” portfolio) doesn’t show anything around the Hillside structure:

Aerial view drawing, Frank Lloyd Wright's Hillside Home School structure.
From the J. Willard Marriott Digital Library, Rare Books collection,
The University of Utah

Luckily I wasn’t alone on this project, because

Anne was ultimately proven right:

Over the next few weeks, I kept writing and exploring, looking at drawings with a fine-toothed comb (and probably a loupe). But I noticed things this time. Like,

Check out the building section: the building keeps going on the right:

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #0216.010.The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), drawing #0216.007.

The arrow pointing down on the right-hand side is showing—not the end of the building, but—a hallway coming out of it. The hallway that doesn’t really show up in the floor plans or other drawings.

In fact, this find also explained something about the Hillside drawings: there are none of the north side of the Art and Science rooms (the Roberts Room and Dana Gallery). Those rooms are seen in sections, but no Hillside drawing shows what the outside of the building looked like on the north.

Well, I finally started to believe it. Then, I re-read something and found that this very connection was written about –

In a book by a former Hillside teacher:

Mary Ellen Chase (a writer, and educator) wrote about her life as a student and teacher in A Goodly Fellowship. From 1909-1913, the Hillside Home School was her first teaching job. She wrote,

Older boys of high school age had their own homelike dormitory near by [sic]. In 1903 this was connected with an adequate and beautiful school building of native limestone, designed and erected by Frank Lloyd Wright, the son of Anna Lloyd-Jones and a nephew of [the Aunts] Ellen and Jane.

“The Hillside Home School” chapter in A Goodly Fellowship, by Mary Ellen Chase (The Macmillan Company, New York City, 1939), 98.

Then,

we pulled all of the information together (but no photos yet) to support the theory that the gymnasium was attached to Wright’s Hillside building. And that Wright later completely destroyed this connection by the time he started his Taliesin Fellowship in 1932.

Then, early the next year, the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy put out a “Call for Papers” for its 2010 conference (in September). The conference theme was “Modifying Wright’s Buildings and Their Sites: Additions, Subtractions, Adjacencies”. After consulting with Anne, I submitted a conference proposal to give a presentation on our find (Anne was fine with me giving the presentation).

Later, she and I were asked to turn the presentation into an article for a book. So, we worked on the article, still with no photographic proof that the buildings were connected.

Then, lo and behold,

In February of 2011, an album of photographs of Hillside in 1906 appeared (also mentioned in my last post). One of them showed the Boys dormitory, with the hallway terminating into it.

And, finally,

In March or April, 2011, as Anne and I worked on the article in the book, we went to the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives. We opened a folder of photographs in the John P. Lewis collection and—SCORE!—there was a beautiful photo showing that hallway more clearly. That’s below.

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

That boy is standing just west of the Boys Dormitory and Wright’s Hillside building. The Science Room (now the Dana Gallery) is behind him.

BOOYAH!

Originally posted, February 19, 2022.

A student at the Hillside Home School (class of 1911) took the photograph at the top of this post. In 2005, her daughters, Elizabeth Weber and Margaret Deming, came into the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center to take a tour, giving us the chance to scan the photographs that their mother had taken while she was a student. I asked Elizabeth Weber’s permission to publish the photograph (which appears in the book in which Anne and I wrote the article).
See? Another example of “Preservation by Distribution“!

1. Wright scholar, Kathryn Smith, might have alerted the Preservation Crew about Schindler’s drawing, and got us a photograph of it. Why did she let us know this—and also alert us to the Taliesin photographs by Raymond Trowbridge?—Preservation by distribution.

2. Email from Kathryn Smith to me, January 8, 2021. This information came from her book, SCHINDLER HOUSE, Abrams, 2001, p. 11-16.

3. Anne and I looked at Schindler’s drawing, but I don’t know if I can show it, since it’s not been printed anywhere.

Taliesin interior. On left: by Raymond Trowbridge, 1930. On right, by Keiran Murphy 2019.

Why Did You Have to do That, Mr. Wright?!1

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Two views of the same space, 89 years apart.

Frank Lloyd Wright began his home, Taliesin (south of Spring Green, Wisconsin), in 1911 and worked on it almost continuously until he died in 1959. As researcher and historian I easily documented over 100 changes he made just to his home (that number doesn’t include the necessary construction after Taliesin’s first or second fires).

And this doesn’t count his work on the other buildings on the Taliesin estate; about which you can read at Wikipedia. If you go to the Taliesin (studio) page, there are links to the four other buildings on the estate. Yes, I did start all of the Wikipedia entries on those Taliesin estate buildings, why do you ask?

And the changes I numbered were just those that could be documented through photographs.

Taliesin is very important, yes

That’s why we call Taliesin a sketchbook. In addition, it was an experiment for the artist/architect/genius-extraordinaire [that looks like I’m being snotty, but I’m not].

I was told by someone who worked in the Wisconsin State Historic Preservation Office that when they began talking about Taliesin restoration, they didn’t want to create the Taliesin “zoo”. As they restored/preserved the building, they didn’t want to pick out what they thought were the “best” changes done there by Wright.

Their conclusion: restore Taliesin back to the last decade of the architect’s life, 1950-59. And as close to 1959 as possible/doable, combined with new technologies that wouldn’t screw up the building in the future. So that’s how, for example, Taliesin got geothermal heating and cooling.

And I agree. I fiercely want Taliesin to be as it was in Wright’s lifetime—as long as the “building envelope” is “sealed” to help the building survive long past my death.

YET

I wrote all of this because I have a confession: there are changes I really wish that guy hadn’t made to his home.

Some things that used to be at Taliesin just seem so cool. Their rarity is part of the attraction. And, yes, I love what is there today… but  sometimes I really wish he’d left well enough alone.

Look below for an example.

The first photo, taken 1926-33, shows the entry to his living quarters. The part you see under the roof is what I’m talking about. Between those three stone piers were French doors. They opened to the exterior balcony that ended at a parapet behind where that teenage boy is sitting (he’s sitting on a little bit of roofing). He added the balcony in Taliesin III (so, after the second fire). It stood one floor above today’s “front door” at Taliesin.

Postcard of Taliesin, 1926-30. Unknown photographer
Postcard property of Patrick Mahoney. Used with permission. The photograph is published in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin: Illustrated by Vintage Postcards, by Randolph C. Henning, p. 61.

Then in 1942 (approximately), Wright constructed a roof over that balcony, making it into a storage room. Former Wright apprentice / longtime Taliesin Fellowship member John DeKoven Hill called the room “the hell hole”.

The same view in the 1950s:

The next photograph shows the same part of the building, with a roof where the balcony used to be. It’s the configuration one sees today:

Photo of Taliesin 1955 taken by Maynard Parker

Maynard Parker took the photograph above in 1955 by for House Beautiful magazine. Then you click on the photo above, at the website of its owners (the Huntington Library) it’s backwards from its correct orientation.

What you see in the 1955 photo by Parker/for House Beautiful, is great, of course. But I look at archival photos, or scan what’s in my memory, comparing it to what he had before 1942 and I want to whine: “oh man – why did you do that?”

Then, here’s what I’m thinking: “grumble, grumble – sketchbook — grumble grumble… architectural genius… grumble grumble… HIS gorram house… grumble…”

But what right do I have, given the mistakes from the past?

… you can’t deny all those times in which people, with the best of intentions, completely destroyed something.

Like so many buildings by architect Louis Sullivan in Chicago

And Wright’s Larkin Building in Buffalo

Check out this from the Buffalo City Gazette shows newspaper articles talking about the building’s decline

You get the point.

FINALLY

There’s also the fact that the National Park Service, which confers “National Historic Landmark” status, is firmly against people “creating a false sense of history.” That is a hard-and-fast rule.

Besides, if Taliesin had all the things in it that I really like it would end up being a Taliesin that never actually existed.

But I can still yell at him in my head, though.

 

 

Initially published on May 4, 2021

At the top of this page are two photos. The one on the left was taken in 1930 by Raymond Trowbridge (who I’ve written about) and is at the Chicago History Museum (and online here). I took the photo on the right a couple of years ago, showing the same room. You can tell it’s the same because what remains the same in the two photographs are the ceramics in the fireplace on the left and, against the wall, the built-in bench and the radiator cover. He lowered the ceiling in 1933-34 when a bedroom/sitting room was built one floor above for his youngest daughter, Iovanna Lloyd Wright.

1 accompanied by lots of words for him that I cannot repeat in polite company.

Photograph of Taliesin's Loggia by Raymond C. Trowbridge

Raymond Trowbridge photos

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In my last post I wrote about a photograph of a wall that no longer exists at Taliesin. I wrote that the photo was taken by Raymond Trowbridge in 1930 and I’d explain it in my next post. That photograph showed the wall in the Loggia fireplace. The photograph above is by the same photographer and shows the other side of that wall. What you’re seeing is Taliesin’s Loggia. I’ll explain in this post how I (or Taliesin Preservation) got the photos and how I know they were taken in 1930.

First coming across the Trowbridge photographs:

In the winter of 1997-98 (3 years into my employment, then working seasonally at Taliesin Preservation), I had a part-time job in the preservation office working with photographs related specifically to Wright’s home (later his Taliesin estate, which includes the Hillside stucture, Romeo & Juliet windmill, Midway Barn, his sister’s home, Tan-y-deri, along with its landscape). Photographs are among the things used to help understand the history of the Taliesin estate and do restoration/preservation. The work was needed that winter because an Architectural Historian from Taliesin Preservation had apparently left his office in a bit of a mess.

So I got a job in the office  (20 hours a week through the winter). I worked through the winter to bring order to the photocopies he’d left behind. As a result, I saw some amazing images for the first time.

Taliesin Preservation becoming aware of the photographs:

13 of them had been brought to our attention by Wright scholar, Kathryn Smith. She’d come across them while doing work in Chicago, photocopied them, and sent them to us, as part of what was described to me once as “preservation by distribution“. She’d sent the images maybe in the early 1990s. And she included all of the relevant information with the photocopies: collection ID-number, the photographer (Raymond Trowbridge), and who owns them (the Chicago Historical Society, now the Chicago History Museum).

By their details, it looked like someone took them in early Taliesin III; so 1925-32. They looked like the photographer took the images before the Wrights founded the Taliesin Fellowship (in 1932). Trowbridge knew what he was doing with these images. They have wonderful composition and light balance, show the texture of Taliesin’s stucco walls, its wooden banding, and its flagstone.

In my work, I arranged these into the binders of photocopies we’d started to assemble. Then the winter ended, and I went back to my work giving tours.

My first trip to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Archives:

Almost a decade passed. I started working in historic research (along with tours), got a raise and made plans to travel before I found ways to spend it all. This took me on my first of several trips to Wright’s archives, which at that time were located in an archives building at Taliesin West, his winter home in Arizona. The archives included over 22,000 drawings, over 40,000 photographs, correspondence related to his life and his work (letters to and from family, friends, clients, and others), and many other things I’m sure I never saw. While there, I went to the archives every workday. Monday to Friday, I showed up at 8:15 a.m., took an hour for lunch, and stayed until they ended their work every night (usually a little after 6 p.m.). And, bonus, I often got to do this in winter.

Here’s a note for you:

The second time I went to the archives, I thought I would save money by going in the summer. I don’t know how hot all of Arizona gets that time of year, but going voluntarily to Scottsdale in July is not worth any money that you save. That caution on Arizona’s hot temperatures might also apply in May and definitely June, August and early September.

The first find by coincidence:

On one of my trips, I hit my research goals early in the afternoon on Friday. I remembered the name Raymond Trowbridge and went looking for correspondence with him.

The archives has nine letters between Wright and Trowbridge from 1930 to 1933. In the first letter, ID #T001E02 (written September 20, 1930), Trowbridge answered a question that Wright had written to him (that letter’s not extant). Wright had apparently asked what type of photography equipment Trowbridge  had “with me at Taliesin.”

Looking at Trowbridge’s photos, I concluded that he was probably talking about the photographic session he’d just had, in which he took the 13 images. Because the images they were definitely taken during the summer (like the one below). So that made these photos from maybe August or early September of 1930. Cool.

Photograph at Taliesin taken by Raymond Trowbridge.
Looking east at Taliesin during summer. Taliesin’s living quarters in background.

I tucked that info away in my brain. When I returned to Wisconsin, I looked at the Trowbridge photographs, and changed their dates to 1930-33.

A while later I found out more about Trowbridge:

A few years later, when I had some time in the middle of the week, I sent a comment via email “To Whom It May Concern” at the Chicago History Museum. I explained who I was and that they needed to change Trowbridge’s dates on his photos at Taliesin. They’d written that all of his photos in their collection were 1923-36,1 but those dates were wrong. I told them the dates for his images Taliesin should be 1930-33.

The next Monday, I got an email from someone in the Rights and Reproductions Department telling me that Trowbridge didn’t take photos of Taliesin.

I replied that, well actually he did. Then I explained Kathryn Smith, the collection she’d sent, and I emailed a scan of one with its ID number (this scan, seen in my blog post, “Taliesin as a Structural Experiment”, was published in the booklet “Two Lectures on Architecture” in 1931).

Good news from the Chicago History Museum:

I heard back from this person several hours later. She wrote that, oh my god, yeah! They did have these images—as glass negatives. Someone had misfiled them and my email helped them locate them properly. And she told me they’d get high resolution scans & contact me after they put them onto an online photo sharing and storage service. A day or two later I accessed and downloaded these beautiful scans.

The last stroke of luck:

Then in 2018, while putting together a presentation for the annual Frank Lloyd Building Conservancy conference, I wrote again to the Rights and Reproductions Department at the Chicago History Museum. I asked how I could get permission to use one of the images, and how much Taliesin Preservation had to pay.

Even though I wasn’t paid to speak at the conference, I’d have to work out image permissions; I hoped I didn’t have to pay, but you never know.

The told me I didn’t have to pay for or sign anything. The photographer had died 83 years before, making all of his images in the public domain. I only have to give the information you see on the images: who owns it, its archival number, and the name of the photographer. And I wrote this in the manner that they asked for (which is why the photographs give Raymond Trowbridge’s middle initial).

All of these things:

  • Kathryn Smith sending us the images (and the former staff member leaving the office in a mess);
  • finding the correspondence related to them because I had a couple of hours at Wright’s archives;
  • getting high res scans because I had some time in the winter to write to the image owner, and
  • finding out while I was setting up a lecture that they’re in the public domain

remain some of my best career-related serendipitous experiences as an adult.

First published, 1/28/2021.
Raymond C. Trowbridge took the photograph at the top of this post. It is Chicago History Museum, ICHi-89168, and is in the public domain. This is the larger version of the image on the Keiranmurphy.com website.

1. They gave the dates 1923-36 because Trowbridge became a photographer in 1923 and died in 1936 (actually, they first said 1935, but that must have been a typo, because the site now says he died in 1936).