Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives

Photograph taken July 2019 by Michael Pipher. Used with permission.

The Guest Wing at Taliesin

Posted on 06/01/2026 | by keiran

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Photo looking at Taliesin taken in 2019 by Michael Pipher. My post today is going to be about the Guest Wing, or the ground floor in the photo, beneath the level of the house with the bands of windows.

I’m late.

I’ve been caught up in another post because I’ve been looking for something “perfect” to write. Which led to more delays

and

that common procrastination path.

So, instead of continuing to get more anxious, I decided just to write what came to mind last night.

Therefore, today’s post will be about the Guest Wing at Taliesin.

Although I’ve written a few posts related to it:

The room in the Guest Wing I successfully identified in a photograph (the Blue Room, rm. 20¹): https://keiranmurphy.com/what-i-did-one-time-before-christmas/
How future architect Gertrude Kerbis snuck into the Guest Wing one night in the 1940s: https://keiranmurphy.com/gertrude-kerbis-architect-because-of-taliesin/
And the abandoned stairway there: https://keiranmurphy.com/the-abandoned-stairway-at-taliesin/

But nothing about the area itself.

Personal history:

A couple of people lived there in 1994 when I first started at Taliesin:

A secretary for the School of Architecture; and Heloise Christa (a sculptor and member of the Taliesin Fellowship). Another apprentice I knew lived there one summer, in 1996.

By that time, Heloise had settled permanently at Taliesin West.

Are you gonna tell us wth the Guest Wing is?

Oh, sorry: it’s the floor underneath Frank Lloyd Wright’s personal living quarters.

Here’s a drawing from JSTOR that I manipulated to highlight it:

This drawing #2501.066.

Why is it called that?

dunno. I think it’s been called that for awhile, because Curtis Besinger (one of Wright’s former apprentices at Taliesin 1939-55), referred to the Guest Wing in his book, Working With Mr. Wright: What It Was Like.

In the “Spring and Summer 1942” chapter, he wrote:

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, and the only access to the guest wing had become an outside path around the northeast corner of the house from a terrace below the loggia.

Besinger, 139.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So I’ll tell you

The history of the Guest Wing.

In a way: the first 14 years of its existence are easy to talk about.

Because Wright left us no floor plans and barely any sections of it until 1925.

But it’s been there since the beginning. You see it in the 1911 photo by draftsman Taylor Woolley:

Looking (plan) northwest in 1911-12. You can see this photo in my very first post.

However, at this point we really don’t know anything about the rooms there.

We can see a couple of small windows in that ground floor. Presumably, they’re for rooms? And the vertical black rectangle was presumably where to put coal.

Also,

there was a stairway down to the Guest Wing, like I showed in “The Abandoned Stairway at Taliesin” post:

Drawing #1403.013. I know the numbers “1403” might make you think this is a Taliesin II drawing, but some of those drawings show Taliesin I (and the other Taliesin numbers, 1104 and 2501, are mixed up). Bruce, the archivist, wasn’t always correct. I was told that even Bruce knew this wasn’t accurate but he figured someone else could amend it later. After all, he had tens of thousands of drawings to arrange.

But, what was also down there?

I’d think rooms under where rooms on the main floor were located. But, like I used to write as the Taliesin Historian: “as no evidence has come to light proving this, one should refrain from thinking that these existed as theorized.”

Therefore,

figuring out even how many rooms were there before 1925 can be tricky.

Although Taliesin II is a little easier because drawing 1403.014 shows two views of it:

Viewing the south facade of the Guest Wing.

Viewing the East Facade of the Guest Wing.

You can find both of these in the larger Taliesin II drawing from JStor here:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28510016

I think it’s weird, but at the time he apparently kept the smaller windows on that first floor.

Future architect/draftsman, Rudolph Schindler, lived at Taliesin in 1918 and 1920. He took photographs that are in his papers at UC-Santa Barbara.

I don’t have permission to show the photos, but I can tell you he lived in the room at Taliesin we know today as the Silver Room.

Members of the Taliesin Fellowship were asked about the names of the rooms and they didn’t know how they got them.

For instance, the Blue Room is the one I made the discovery about before Christmas years ago.

Then

Taliesin’s living quarters burned down to the stone in April 1925.

As Wright rebuilt, he finally drew plans for that floor.

I counted 7 rooms in the plan below:

Wright spent most of 1925 trying to rebuild the house; in the rebuilding, he apparently added steps to a stone landing outside so you could easily walk down.

You can see them in drawing 2501.013:

The steps are in the drawing on the left, close to the bottom.

However, after that, and until the late 1920s, he had lots of problems, including losing Taliesin.

Which was another chance for newspapers to make money off of Wright’s problems/bring up the 1914 Taliesin murders.

Headline from The Bismark Tribune newspaper on July 31, 1928 saying, “Frank Wright Love Nest Is Sold To Bank”.

Actually

I just realized I’ve never written just about the craziness in Wright’s life from 1925-29 (or up to 1932). I’m gonna have to write that up in another post.

Later: yes I did! That post on is here.

But, for Wright

soon after this, along with the help of friends, he formed Frank Lloyd Wright, Inc.

(which was NOT the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation)

I mentioned FLLW Inc. last year in my post, “Stone Entry Gates on Highway 23“

and bought Taliesin back. So, he and everyone else were able to move back in late October/early November.

Later that month, Wright was able to get draftsmen to stay at Taliesin.

One, George Kastner, took photos like the incredible one I posted in “Things I Don’t Know at Taliesin” showing workmen building the stone wall in Taliesin’s Garden Court:

But he didn’t live in the Guest Wing.²

Apparently, when they started the Fellowship, the Wrights decided they could use that floor for more than guests: it could house incoming apprentices.

This caused him to make at least one change.³

He put stone piers on the outside wall of one room. Maybe to provide light for two new rooms there.

You can see the piers in the 1937 photo from the Architectural Forum magazine issue published the next January:

The link to the magazine issue at Archive.org is here. Go past page 32 to start to see all of the work by Wright and the Fellowship.

Those piers remained until the mid-late 1950s.

To get a short version of what led to their disappearance, watch this tour of the Guest Wing by former Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation collections manager, Kyle Dockery, starting at 1:30: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2440876569537811

ALSO

on that same wall, Wright cantilevered the corner for a number of years, which I wrote about in the “Things I don’t know” post.

That cantilevered corner was less “providing apprentice housing” than “experimentation”.

For what, I’ve no idea.

And, as I wrote in my post on Taliesin’s abandoned stairway, he changed the main stairway to the outside; Kyle Dockery started his tour standing on those steps that now lead to the Guest Wing.

The same year Wright changed the steps, he added an interior closet in the Blue Room.

apparently to support something two floors above

That’s the room I found near Christmastime in this photograph:

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

Looking (plan) north in the Blue Room.

I took a photo looking north in that room in 2004. The closet, which the Pres Crew was able to remove, took up a lot of space.

The photo shows it taking up at least half the width of the room on the right:

In 2001,

work began that would lead to the restoration of the entire floor, down to the foundation and HVAC.

I wrote about this work of 2001-02 in “A Slice of Taliesin“.

That was the start.

But things couldn’t get underway because of other priorities and long-term restoration plans.

The Preservation crew knew that it would take a comprehensive approach to get it done and work could ONLY be done in the winter, because of the noise and mess.

For instance: one time the Preservation crew had to jackhammer one floor below during our tour season. I had to ask the crew to stop while we were giving a “Loving Frank” tour⁴ so the group didn’t get headaches from the diesel-engine fumes.

Get some of the nitty and gritty of the work in this preservation report .pdf from March 2011.

Therefore,

the Preservation Crew got just one of the rooms in the Guest Wing from this:

A room under the east side of Taliesin’s Living Room in November 2010

with HVAC along the way

To this:

The same room seen in the 2020 video with Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation staff

First published June 1, 2026.
Thanks to Michael Pipher for the photo at the top of this post.

Notes

And, yes I did just come up with that number off the top of my head. But don’t quiz me on the room numbers in the Hillside, Midway, or Tan-y-Deri structures.
I wrote about where he lived in the post, “On My Frank, I Was Wrong.
I don’t know whether he did this because he was thinking about the apprentices, or if he just wanted to experiment.
Luckily for all of us I can’t find the link to the description on the Wayback Machine.

Frank Lloyd Wright and presenter Hugh Downs sitting in Wright's Taliesin bedroom. Courtesy of Photofest

Where Frank Lloyd Wright was sitting when this photograph was taken

Posted on 01/09/2026 | by keiran

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Every one (like in the caption of the photo above) is wrong when they tell you that Wright was in Chicago or on a set.

p.s.: it’s Taliesin.

I know because it’s me, remember?

The photo shows presenter Hugh Downs and Wright sitting during Downs’ interview with the architect in “Conversations with Elder Wise Men” broadcast in May 1953.

In the interview, Downs comes in while Wright is sitting in a chair he’d designed for the Lloyd Lewis House¹ looking at a copy of one of his books.

I think it’s funny that they put Hugh Downs in the shorter seat, but maybe they wanted the subject of the interview to be prominent.
Or maybe Wright said, “No, I’ll stay here,” and no one was going to contradict him.

I first saw this in 2007 when the Taliesin giftshop got Frank Lloyd Wright in New York: The Plaza Years, 1954-59.²

While I worked at Taliesin, I habitually went downstairs to the store and leafed through new books to see if they had any photos taken anywhere on the estate.

Something in this photo on page 87 struck me. When I figured it out, I excitedly went up to the tour guides sitting at the reception counter.

Most at Taliesin got used to me being thrilled during my Frankophile musings. See an example under the first photo in my post “Hey Keiran Q and A“

Ok, fine. So, where the hell are they?

They’re in Wright’s bedroom. Taliesin’s hallway is to Wright’s right.

Oh, that reminds me—

The hallway’s right there because Wright didn’t have a door to his bedroom.

Members of the Taliesin Fellowship told us that he had a heavy drapery or tapestry there. We didn’t really believe it until we got a hold of this scan of Maynard Parker’s Taliesin photo for House Beautiful in 1955:

You’re looking at a crop of the photo they published in two issues of the magazine: November 1955 (p. 320) and October 1959 (p. 327).

You can see he had a door on the room when he first moved there in 1936 (see the drawing below):

But then he moved the entryway to the room and got rid of the door for some reason.

We don’t question the Genius about his choices.

Anyway,

back to the photo.

The day I found it, I knew that even if the guides couldn’t picture what I told them, I’d use locations they all knew from tours in my description to explain what they were seeing.

“When you’re at [XX-space] on [XX-tour], what I’m showing would be [behind you/to your left/where Buppo’s standing in that postcard by Pedro Guerrero, etc.]”

this is my copy of the postcard. Buppo was a standard-size poodle owned by Tom Casey and his wife, Effi.³

See where I pointed him out, below:

Edit: Oops – Buppo was actually Joe Fabris‘s dog! Joe’s in these two posts. Thanks, Jason!

In this case,

I probably said,

“Wright and Downs are sitting a few feet passed the doorway into Wright’s bedroom and before you get to the flagstone floor.“

Like this photo I took in 2005 (after we finished House Opening):

You can see the hallway beyond the post-1959 built-in next to the bed (later removed by the Preservation Crew). Wright and Downs sat close to the edge of that rug at the bottom of the photo.

After showing the staff, I marked the photo in my mind, then borrowed the book later so I could photocopy it. Once I did that, I could add it to the binders of old photos kept upstairs in the office.

What you see in the photo with Wright and Downs:

Behind Downs on the upper left is the 6-fold Japanese screen, “Street Scenes of Kyoto”.

(in my color image, it’s the photo-mural above the bed; it’ll stay there until they can bring the original back)

Next to “Street Scenes” is a cabinet that Wright designed.

The cabinet is in Ken Hedrich’s photo taken in 1937 for the issue of Architectural Forum magazine that came out the following January:

This is on page 16 of Architectural Forum. This link brings you to a .pdf of the online issue.

BTW:

the cabinet no longer exists; I’m sure it will be rebuilt and returned when the room is restored.

There are several other things to show you, so I put a crop of the photo of Wright during his interview:

On the far left, you can make out a barrel chair. That’s standing in the room at Taliesin known as the Loggia. In front of that you see vertical slats. Those were there through Wright’s lifetime, so they’ll return one day.

Then on the wall you see a mural behind Wright’s right shoulder. That’s a painting of the Taliesin estate that you can see today when you go to the Hillside Theater.

thanks to Kyle Dockery at the FLLW Foundation for helping me identify this.
Kyle told me that, today in Hillside, the painting you see behind Wright is UPSIDE DOWN.

Lastly,

the graphic you see on the right looks similar to designs Wright executed for his planned covers for Liberty magazine in the late 1920s.

Here’s

why I think people incorrectly identify this photo as Wright sitting with Downs in a Chicago studio or set.

If you look to the right of the Liberty magazine graphic, there’s the end of a movable screen that they put up on the east side of the room. Because of that, it takes away some identifying features in the photo and makes people think it’s a studio set.

Might explain why I was really confused when I first saw it.

Plus, I think they drove up from Chicago, filmed the interview and took lots of footage over the estate that you see during the interview. Then they put the film into the canister after this aired, using shorthand, and maybe mentioned the studio from where they broadcast it. The info on where it was filmed maybe got lost and everyone assumed it was filmed in the Chicago studio. Then those involved either forgot or weren’t asked later on. And it’s a good chance that those people are no longer here.

Last bit:

when you see this online, the announcer says that Wright’s in his “83^rd year”. That means it was filmed in 1952,

because the guy lied about his age made everyone think he was born in 1869, instead of 1867.

But a few places online say this was broadcast in 1958, even when all you have to do is listen to the first few minutes.

Fortunately, lots of people know this was shown the following year. So at least more people are right about that!

First published January 9, 2026.
The photograph at the top of this post is courtesy of Photofest and is printed in Frank Lloyd Wright in New York: The Plaza Years, 1954-59, by Jane King Hession, Debra Pickrel, foreword by Mike Wallace (Gibbs Smith, Layton, Utah, 2007), 87.

Notes:

I didn’t know where the chair came from. That info comes from super-Frankophile Douglas Steiner on this page at his Wright Library website.
I bought the book seeing that I’m in the acknowledgements. I don’t remember answering any questions related to it, so later asked Ms. Hession why I was there. She didn’t remember, either.
Effi conducted the performance of “O Fortuna” that I linked to in my last post, “Connections between Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hillside Theater and Unity Temple“.

Color photograph with part of Taliesin and a cedar tree on the left. Taken by Keiran Murphy during the autumn of 2013.

More Changes at Taliesin’s Old Dining Room:

Posted on 10/08/2025 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Looking (plan) east toward the old dining rooms at Taliesin. The group dining room for Wright’s apprentices was behind the French doors on the left and the tall windows to the right of the tree branches. The stone wall you can see in the background is the edge of the retaining wall of Taliesin’s Hill Crown.

I’ve been futzing over the same area in my “Taliesin book” project¹ for 2 months: describing the Taliesin Fellowship in the 1930s. That’s why in this post I’ll talk about the old Fellowship dining room.

The “futzing” is because every time I work on the book and think I’ll get through the year 1937, I end up circling around 1932-33.

My problem comes from 2 things:

(1) I’m simultaneously writing, editing, and still researching the history of the space.

researching is because that’s what I’ve done at (for) Taliesin for more than 2 decades.

But (2),

because of my history giving tours.

At that time, I was used to telling the same story about the space in different ways once, twice,

three times a lady—no, SHUT UP Keiran

and, YES,

occasionally three times a day to different groups.

Back to the subject, Keiran:

The problem with my book-writing project is that because of my history in tours I TRAINED myself for decades to EDIT every time I tried to explain the history of something; and that has spilled into my writing.

HOWEVER,

This very issue works for you right now:

because you’ll get to see two photos of Taliesin that show how Wright changed part of the building for the Taliesin Fellowship.

Particularly the old dining rooms.

I wrote about them earlier in a post, here.

First, you’ll see a photo of the area taken 1917-18:

The early Taliesin II dining room is on the right-hand side of the photograph under the hipped roof ending in the dark plaster wall perpendicular to the ground.

This photo is also in my post, “Anna To Her Son“. In that post, I talked about what’s on the LEFT-HAND side of the photo.

This dining room

most probably existed by early Taliesin II, or 1915 or so.

I believe Wright built this once he realized the dining area in Taliesin’s Living Quarters was too small for all of the workmen and draftsmen that he usually kept at Taliesin.

Additionally, he built a large kitchen there that the Fellowship would use for years.

The first black and white photo above is the dining area; the “Hill Kitchen” is at the base of the chimney.

Then, in 1932, he starts the Taliesin Fellowship.

That means there were lots of young men (and women) coming to Taliesin to learn about architecture and they needed a place to eat.

So, he made the space larger.

He provided more area by pushing out the room’s western wall and also moving it more onto the hill. You can see that part behind the tree trunk in the photo at the top of this post.

When he expanded this part of the building, he just put stone on the floor, which meant architecture apprentices had to be really hardy…,

Because us wimps in the 21th Century go, “uh, Mr. Wright? You do realize you’re building in a state where the outside temperatures in January can reach a high of 10-to-15 degrees Fahrenheit, right?… And you call yourself an architect?“

as I told you before, he did live in Wisconsin in the winter. For awhile, anyway.

But maybe he figured using stone on the floor would save money; people didn’t want to stay too long eating if they were really cold.

Still, when he expanded the room, he also changed the roof and added the chimney.

These changes show up in the photo Gilman Lane took in 1932-33, below:

You can find info on Gilman Lane on this page. When you click on the link you might be asked if it’s ok: click yes.

Looking northeast at the Hill Wing dining rooms. The photo’s date comes from other photos in the collection. For example, the chimney at the end of the building was constructed by 1933.

I put another photo by Lane in my post, “Stone Entry Gates on Highway 23“.

You can see the floor plan showing the expanded dining rooms below:

I showed part of this drawing in my post, “I Found Another Taliesin Drawing“.

The Fellowship eventually moved the main kitchen and dining room to Hillside on the south end of the Taliesin estate.

But then Wright changed these rooms in the early 1950s.

He redesigned the Fellowship dining room into a suite of rooms for his youngest daughter, Iovanna. Because of this redesign, the space has been used as a guest bedroom in the summer.²

You can see my presentation online about some of the changes Wright made to Taliesin for Iovanna through the “Wright Design Series” at Monona Terrace. My presentation, “Life is Not Monotonous at Taliesin” is available at this link. I took the title of the talk from Wright’s writing near the end of the original edition of his autobiography:

Life is not monotonous at Taliesin. The days are a continuous series of changing play and changing work.

Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 366.

By the way, you can read

my analysis on Taliesin’s kitchens in “SaveWright” magazine (which is put out by the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy).

SaveWright magazines are a benefit for their members, but the Building Conservancy puts them online later.

My essay resulted from a conversation we were having on the Publications Committee, of which I’m on. We were talking about an upcoming edition that made me think about Wright and the kitchens he designed for himself in Wisconsin and Arizona. One of the members of the committee liked my thoughts and asked me to write about Taliesin’s kitchens.³

Go to the “Wright on Kitchens” issue of SaveWright, pages 2-5.

First published October 8, 2025.
I took the photo at the top of his post in 2013.

Notes

Putting quotes around Taliesin Book looks like I’m writing a “so-called” book, which isn’t true. It’s just not as high-energy as doing a project like National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a., Nanowrimo, that I wrote about, here.
At this point, the space is still really only usable in the summer. The Preservation Office was there for a while and they were forced to put heavy plastic up on the edge of the room during the winters and everyone had to wear coats and gloves at work. They gave up and everyone moved over to the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center for a while, and I ended up working in there as the Historian.
Someday I should write my thoughts on the kitchen at Taliesin West, but I was asked to focus on the kitchen at Taliesin Wisconsin.

A drawing of the main floor of Taliesin, 1936-39. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), Number 2501.048.

The Chronologies—my detailed history of Taliesin

Posted on 12/17/2024 | by keiran

Reading Time: 6 minutes

The drawing above shows the main floor of Taliesin where Wright lived, 1936-39. This is one of my favorite Taliesin drawings. Why? Because it actually shows the space pretty much as it existed at that time.

In this case, I’m talking about Taliesin the building, not Taliesin the estate.

I mean: the UNESCO site, not the 600-acre National Historic Landmark¹

I wanted to write about that after putting up the link to a post on my LinkedIn page.

While doing that I re-read that I told you all I should “write about” my Taliesin Chronologies some time.

This was great, because

since I don’t answer “Hey Keiran” questions from Taliesin tour guides anymore,

I was looking for something new to write.

The compact version of the Chronology project is in my post, “How I Became the Historian for Taliesin“.

The longer version

involves

as I recall,

some tears and some hyperventilation.

Over 21 years ago, Taliesin Preservation (then doing Taliesin’s restoration²) was gearing up for the Save America’s Treasures project that put in comprehensive drainage at the residence in 2003-04

(that’s when we found the window).

So, in the summer of 2003 I was asked to start writing detailed histories of each space in Wright’s living quarters.

You see it in most of the photo below:

Black and white photograph from Taliesin's Hill Crown to its Living Quarters. April 1953 — Taken by Richard Braun or his brother.
Property: Taliesin Preservation, Inc.

I concluded it was best for me to tackle Taliesin one room at a time.

Because I did not intend to write a detailed explanation of what we knew about the entire floor where Wright lived after he started his home,

And then

after 56 pages or so,

write

So, in the next year….

Repeat, repeat, repeat until you got to the year 1959…

My analysis began at the southern part of this floor, with the intention of writing a history of each room to the north.

I chose this path because there were generally fewer post-1925 changes made to this wing as you go north (towards Taliesin’s living room).

I researched and wrote the complete history

Or at least I hope I did

of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bedroom and bedroom area over about 6 weeks.

I mean,

As I’ve written before, the man often didn’t write what he was doing at his house in any detail.

Or sometimes he wrote some things that we don’t necessarily find out to be true.

Like, he wrote in his autobiography that after Taliesin’s 1925 fire,

I made forty sheets of pencil studies for the building of Taliesin III.³

An Autobiography in Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings: 1930-32, volume 2. Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, introduction by Kenneth Frampton (Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York City, 1992), 303.

40 sheets? Where the hell are the 40 sheets, Frank?

There are some drawings, like the one below I originally referred to as the “crazy-making drawing”:

That hell-spawn of a drawing you see is number 2501.003 at The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). Click on the drawing to see a more humane version of it online.

However, I have never come across what appears to be 40 preparation drawings.

Still, I had to start and, fortunately, the office had black and white photographs of some of the drawings, too, which were easier on my eyes. And I could magnify them without the computer scan dissolving into only pixels.

Since my first room was where Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bedroom is today (what he used as of 1936)⁴ and looked at the entire space from 1911 onward (even before a room existed).

I’ll put an early drawing of Taliesin III below. First I’ll show the whole floor he drew in 1925, then a detail of his bedroom:

Main floor of Taliesin c. 1925. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, number 2501.001.

A detail from drawing 2501.001, in color:

The room exists in the photo below under the shed roof beneath the arrow:

George Cronin took this photograph 1929-33 while on top of Taliesin’s Hill Crown. Looking (plan) northeast.

In 1935, he built a fireplace for this room

in this photo online.

Then he took over the space a year later, and added a terrace as he made this into his personal bedroom. The photo you see in this link from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation has him sitting on the terrace with his daughters and members of the Taliesin Fellowship.

When Wright no longer lived in Wisconsin in the winter, he extended his bedroom onto the terrace in 1950, like you see below:

Photograph taken in 1957. William Blair Scott Jr Collection, OA+D Archives.

As a result of my work,

my “first go” at the detailed history of one room was over 100 pages long.

So you can see why I can walk through the rooms in my head in the past.

5 or 6 months later,

I was on the third room

(out of 10 rooms on that floor).

Then

the Executive Director⁵ came and asked me to complete the write up of the history of all of the rooms in this wing of the building

over the wing’s three floors, and totaling 20 rooms

in 10 weeks.

While listening to her, I was probably nodding. When she said I had to finish all of this in 10 weeks, I probably took on an expression of,

well,

“terror” might best explain it.

Truth is,

that led me to, an hour or two later, putting my forehead on the desk and crying.

10 WEEKS!…

I went home early.

So, that night,

I decided to throw out anything about the rest of the rooms that took place before c. 1950 and combine a few spaces.

And I did it!

In early April,

in other words, 10 weeks later,

I presented the Executive Director with 12 documents that had a total (as I recall) of 821 pages.

At least 821 is the number I remember putting in size 56+ font on my computer desktop for a couple of days after completing the work.

Then a month or two later Carol directed me to write Chronologies for the rest of Taliesin (over 100 rooms).

First published December 17, 2024.
The drawing at the top of this post, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives Number 2501.048, is available here at JSTOR.

Notes:

1. wtf, Keiran: the estate is 800 acres. So much for this “Taliesin Historian” crap!

The NHL is for the 600 acres that Wright had and was owned by the Foundation when it received NHL status. In the 1990s, the Foundation bought the neighboring 200 acres, originally owned by Wright’s Uncle Thomas. This creates a land buffer.

2. In early 2020, the site owner, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, completed what it had been doing for several years: moving all of its preservation and restoration staff from Taliesin Preservation back under its management. The two organizations still work together, but care of the NHL is again under the Foundation.

3. Note to those who are convinced that Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t refer to his home as Taliesin II or Taliesin III until Henry-Russell Hitchcock wrote In the Nature of Materials in 1942: Wright referred to his rebuilt home as Taliesin III in his autobiography first published in 1932. I know ‘coz that quote above is from my own paperback copy of it, published in 1933. Sorry – it’s just an ongoing argument in my head. Carry on.

4. Some people might think it’s weird that the Wrights eventually had two bedrooms, but I know people who also made that choice, because they sleep better.

5. I referred to Carol here when I wrote about “The Album”.

Photograph of Keith McCutcheon outside at a stone wall at Taliesin, c. 1932.

Letters from Keith McCutcheon to Franklin Porter

Posted on 06/23/2023 | by keiran

Reading Time: 6 minutes

A photograph looking (plan) northeast at, apparently, Keith McCutcheon (1904-1968) in the Garden Court of Taliesin. The stone wall to his right was built while Wright reconstructed Taliesin after its second fire. Wright removed it in 1933.

Since we are close to Gay Pride Day, I thought I would write about: an employee of Frank Lloyd Wright’s who was gay; Wright’s nephew, Franklin Porter (1910-2002); and some letters.

Start at the start:

Years ago, I was trying to get the office printer to work in the office while I was the historian at Taliesin Preservation. I went to this dusty printer and found a bit of a mess around it. I needed to remove all of its surrounding debris to figure out how to get it printing.

Near the printer there was an in-out tray,¹which had pieces of paper, including all sorts of envelopes and folders. These things had been placed there by some members of the Preservation Crew. They had worked in the room for years, using it as a stable, warm place to write reports, track their hours, or get other things done.²

After I settled things with the printer, I decided to figure out what to do with all those pieces of paper.

I’m not a stickler for “a place for everything and everything in its place”, but it does help.

When I was done, I was left with a folder of things that had belonged to Franklin Porter, Jane and Andrew Porter’s son. Jane Porter was Frank Lloyd Wright’s sister. Wright had designed Jane and Andrew’s house, Tan-y-Deri. “TYD” is across the hill from Taliesin. Below is a photograph that I took, looking from the edge of Taliesin’s Hill Crown toward Tan-y-Deri, which is under the arrow:

The story behind this:

“TYD” is on the Taliesin estate because Wright had purchased it 1955 from nephew Franklin. The preservation at TYD started over 20 years ago. And, whenever there was money and time, the Preservation Crew restored/preserved/fixed it, and preservation managers at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation worked on plans for the building’s complete restoration. Its restoration was complete in 2017. I took the photo of it, below, the next summer:

Along with

the plumbing, roofing, electricals and woodwork, the Preservation Crew fixed all of the interior plaster. And the Crew found these things years before when working in one of Tan-y-Deri’s second-floor bedrooms.

The man at the wall was the Taliesin Estate manager,³ and the photograph was taken by another member of the Preservation Crew. The crew took (and take) photographs constantly.

Pieces of paper fell down behind one of these walls. It seems these came from when Franklin Porter was probably in college. His parents lived near him where he went to college in Pennsylvania. But they kept Tan-y-Deri as a summer home, so he must have used one of the bedrooms over the years.

To give you a sense of things:

Among other things, I found a ski lift ticket:

p.s.: that picture above it not the actual ski ticket. I just put it in for “flavor”.

And a letter that Jane Porter sent her son telling him to bring his laundry home so she could wash it.

Plus three letters to Franklin from Keith McCutcheon.

McCutcheon was living not that far from Taliesin, in the village of Arena. He worked for Frank Lloyd Wright as a draftsman I think, starting in the late 1920s.

Keith met Franklin at Tan-y-Deri, after Jane Porter invited him over. It totally makes sense: Jane met Keith (working for her brother), and understood how out-of-the-way they all were (and are).

Keith wrote Franklin afterwards. And, based on what the two had said to each other that first evening, Keith suggested they write. In Keith’s first letter, dated September 5, 1932, he used a lot of adjectives. I got the real sense from the letter that Keith was smitten:

“[H]aving met so momently yet truly it most seemed I knew you – except the sound of voice, your size, and general mien…, Frankly, and I hope you like this candor, I’m rather fond of you – in truth, I like you….“

Keith expressed the desire to hear back from him.

I read the letters once or twice.

Then transcribed them⁴ and showed them later to my boyfriend. In essence, I said: “I don’t want to be judgmental, but doesn’t this sound like what someone would write to the person they were attracted to romantically?“

He agreed.

Keith sent poetry in the first letter, too:

This was a set of poems called, “Lyrics of the night: Poems of Passionate Weakness”. The first one is

“Taliesin: The home of Frank Lloyd Wright”:

Upon a rounded crest of sun warmed hill,
Not far from the Wisconsin’s riffles’ gleam,
Reclines, in cat-like stealth, a house – a dream
Crouching along the ridge as if to fill
Itself among the rocks ‘tis made of: spill
Itself unnoticed midst the trees, and seem
More as a part of Nature’s own than scheme
Of cunning mind and power of man’s will.

A rambling residence that fills the heart
With far flung dreams, and vague desire. Hush
Of countryside is here; the spring-time lush:
Summer serene, and Autumn’s golden glow,
And then it’s blanketed beneath the snow –
Each season, Life reflected played its part . . .⁵

Franklin didn’t respond

I knew this because Keith began his second letter, written over a month later, with an apology for the first one. He characterizes that first letter to Franklin as his “moment’s madness”. And, while apologizing through the rest of the letter, Keith included another poem.

Keith sent his third, and last, letter in January 1933.

In it, Keith thanked Franklin for a Christmas card that Franklin had sent, and appreciates being remembered. And he extended well wishes to Franklin’s mother.

I didn’t really know what to do with what I had read, but I put them back in their folder and figured I would deal with them the next weekday that I was at work.

Here’s what stood out to me about this:

In small-town Wisconsin in the 1930s, a man (Keith) expressed an attraction to another man.

Keith got nowhere with it.

But I think it’s possible that—in small-town Wisconsin in the 1930s—that had he wanted to, Franklin Porter could have sent a bunch of guys to Keith’s house to beat the hell out of him. But Franklin was kind enough (or cool enough) to not do that, and remembered to send Keith a Christmas card.

I did not know if the letters were overly flirty, of just expressed the desire for close male friendship. But, related or not, Keith McCutcheon was gay.

I know this because

after I did research for today’s post, I looked Keith McCutcheon up in Google. Through that, I came across this by Elisa Rolle. Rolle has been writing about gay people in small books. Her post on McCutcheon told me that McCutcheon settled in Madison, Wisconsin where he lived on the city’s “near east side” with his longtime partner, Joe Koberstein. The two are buried next to each other.

Additionally, Keith and Joe were mentioned in a write-up of We’ve Been Here All Along: Wisconsin’s Early Gay History, by R. Richard Wagner. “We’ve Been Here” was published in 2019.

A few days later:

I gave everything to the onsite collections manager for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Items from Tan-y-Deri aren’t directly connected to Frank Lloyd Wright, but the Foundation does own them, since they came from a building on the Taliesin estate. Tom (the collections manager) put everything into folders, separating them with acid-free paper. He then stored them with the other collections.

First published June 23, 2023.
The photograph of Keith McCutcheon at Taliesin is the property of Randolph C. Henning. Thanks to Henning for giving me permission to use it.

Notes:

1. oddly, while stackable trays are all over the internet, I can’t find any photos of “in-and-out” trays without stealing via a screengrab. There’s nothing at Wikipedia, or a website with free images. I really do not want Amazon.com on my a** just to get a photo of those hard, plastic, black trays. Who knew?

2. for those who work in the Hex Room at the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center: the tables in the room that end in bookcases are thanks to the Preservation Crew, who designed and built them.

3. That was Jim, who is in the article, “Wright Place, Wright Time“, by Andy Stoiber.

4. I transcribed it because it was such an unusual letter that I didn’t want to have problems recalling the letter later.

5. Thanks to Craig Jacobsen for sending me a copy of the poem.

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

Wright called it the Water Garden

Posted on 02/21/2023 | by keiran

Reading Time: 6 minutes

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

The pond at Taliesin that is.¹

UPDATE:

As of May 27, 2025, Taliesin’s pond has been refilled and the waterfall is again flowing.

Original Post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out the Facebook Live presentation

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

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

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

PRESERVATION IS HARD.

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

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

Followed by disruption of supply chains

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t talk about what you cannot see

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

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

You know what man I mean.

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

Here’s part of his writing:

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

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

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

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

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

I took this in early May 2008.

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

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

Well, don’t get mad at me.

And, YES!

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

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

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

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

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

I put a closeup photo of the upper dam below.

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

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

Understandably, that annoyed the neighbors.

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

BUT I got to add to this note in April 2025 when I saw the pond named as such on p. 90 in the book, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Neil Levine. Levine wrote, “Wright dammed the stream at the base of the hill to make a ‘water garden,’ as he called it.” Phew!

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

Looking outside in the summer the dissected boiler from Taliesin's Living Quarters.

Blue smoke at Taliesin

Posted on 09/04/2022 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

A photograph I took in 2007 while the Preservation Crew removed the boiler from Taliesin’s living quarters. Taliesin’s living room is one floor up and to the right.

Didn’t I write in here about the time there was blue smoke inside Taliesin’s Living Quarters one fall day in 1995?

[searches this blog for the words “blue” and “smoke”, but to no avail.]

I don’t mean blue smoke like decorative smoke that’s supposed to go along with cartoon Taliesin smurfs.¹ No: this blue smoke filled the living quarters one day after the heat was turned on.

So, while I don’t know the details, this post is going to be about the new heating system that was installed at Taliesin. Because it’s the first weekend of September and I remember the fact that it’s going to get cold again.

As I recall,

it happened one day in the autumn of 1995. I arrived at Taliesin’s front door with my House Tour guests and was greeted by the House Steward. She told us it might be a little chilly because they’d turned off the heat. That was because blue smoke filled the house after they turned it on that morning.

I checked online to find out what “blue smoke” coming from a heating system means. “Just Answer” told me the smoke was from an “accumulation of dust that can cause fumes.” I read that and went, “Well, sh*t – if that’s all it was, we should have just kept using the heater.”⇐and right there is why it’s best for Taliesin that I stayed in research and writing instead of MAKING MATERIAL DECISIONS ON FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S HOME.

Following the blue smoke

the Preservation Crew investigated the system. While there wasn’t a sign of imminent catastrophe, they concluded that the presence of smoke and fumes was not a matter of just getting a new “panel” and fixing things easily.

I don’t know the age of the former radiators that comprised the heating system at Taliesin’s Living Quarters, but they were old.² Maybe they didn’t date to Frank Lloyd Wright’s lifetime (he died in 1959), but, since I’m talking about Taliesin in the mid-1990s? Possibly.

Therefore,

Preservation turned off the heat inside Taliesin’s living quarters. They understood that the heat could not be turned on again until many problems were solved,

like, what I wrote about in “A Slice of Taliesin” is only a small part

and an appropriate system was researched, prepared, and acquired.

In fact, they didn’t even remove the old boiler until things veered closer to getting heat in the building.

That happened in 2007.

That’s when I took the photograph of the dismantled boiler at the top of this post.

Just so you know: NO, the boiler that was removed was not “the boiler” where Julian Carlton hid in 1914 – what the hell are you thinking?

Following this,

the only way the Taliesin Living Quarters were heated was through little space heaters placed in the rooms.

Hence, part of the reason that I’m still attuned to the question, “Did Wright ever live in Wisconsin in the winter?”
Wright had radiators from the beginning. Yet, people didn’t usually see them because the little heaters drew their attention.

Obviously, the space heaters were only plugged in/turned on when tours were going on. Which saved money and ensured that Taliesin House Stewards could monitor the devices.

Man,

I felt for the House Stewards and the tour guides when the weather was cold. I didn’t have to go to the house every day, since I hadn’t worked full-time in the tour program since 2002. But it was hard to talk about Wright’s genius in his house with little electric heaters. Although, while they didn’t make the space nice and toasty, they gave the “aura” of heat. The sense that, “Well, we’re doing the best we can.”

And so,

since Taliesin’s living quarters didn’t have heat until 2014, the building was shut down after October 31.³ In order to prepare for the winter, the tour staff moved the artifacts, rugs, and furniture into separate areas. The work by the tour staff took several days in November, and two weeks in the spring.

I mentioned “House opening” in my post, “Physical Taliesin history“.

Here’s a hint on what Taliesin’s Living Room looked like when it was almost set:

Looking (plan) northwest in Taliesin’s Living Room. Taken by me on the first day of House opening in 2006.

I confess that seeing this photograph squeezes my heart. Not in a good way. Man, I hated House opening.

Honestly,

I sometimes doubted that I’d ever see heat in Taliesin again. Not that the folks in Preservation weren’t making lists and slowly going through improvements, but I had worked there so long while things changed incrementally, and tour guides/staff still gave tours when outside temps were 40F (4.45C) the night before.

I felt like, “You don’t care about us!!!”

My alteration of a panel in a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon detailing how I felt while opening Taliesin in the spring following the removal of the boiler in Taliesin’s living quarters. I called these altered cartoons “Frank and Hobbes”.

so.

I just realized

that the managers in the Preservation Crew were speaking like the pilot on your airplane while you’re waiting to take off. You get into your seat and they tell you you’ll be leaving shortly. Then sometimes you seem to sit there interminably on the “apron” before moving. But the pilot always has a positive attitude, telling you that you will be on your way in just a moment. Even when you aren’t. I guess with the Preservation at Taliesin, the crew did enough work (over 20 years) to remove the airplane chocks, then get onto the taxiway for takeoff.

You can get some more understanding by looking at a Preservation Report first loaded onto Taliesin Preservation‘s website in 2011.

Altho,

I just looked at the Wayback machine,⁴ and they don’t have the Preservation Report. Here, you can have my copy of the issue I’m thinking of.

p.s.: these were written by Ryan Hewson. He works for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation as the Preservation Director of Taliesin (Wisconsin). He had me proofread these, which I why I had an electronic copy.

The installation of the geo-thermal system at Taliesin was summarized here. And here’s an “after” photograph from the boiler room:

If that geothermal system seems familiar, it’s because I mentioned it in, “Why Did You Have to do That, Mr. Wright?!“

To reiterate:

As I remember it, the heat was turned off in 1995,
The radiator was removed in 2007,
The geo-thermal heating system was fully installed and switched on in 2014.⁵

First published September 4, 2022.

Notes:

1 Yes, I did just spend time imagining Taliesin Blue Smurfs: Smurfs with canes, porkpie hats and capes. Did you?

2 Here’s information for those working in Preservation on the Taliesin estate: the large hole in the Hillside Theatre foyer is NOT a drain for water.

Since almost no guides were around when hot air used to come out of the vent, I’ve heard many “newer” guides (I mean, those who came after 1997) wonder out loud if that was for water.

That hole used to be a hot air vent. It worked when I first gave tours. You would walk in on a chilly day in September or October, and hot air came out of that hole. I think it helped people emotionally to know that Wright tried to make the space warm. I mean, it’s all stone and has no insulation.

3 While the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation is working on Wright’s Hillside Theater, there’s still no heat inside most of the rest of the Hillside School building.

4 Here’s my post about the Wayback Machine.

5 It wouldn’t have made sense to move things ahead of time, since Preservation was just going to have to do a bunch of work later.

Daylight photograph in the Arizona desert with a waxing moon.

Reading Correspondence, 2021

Posted on 12/19/2021 | by keiran

Reading Time: 4 minutes

A desert landscape outside of Scottsdale, Arizona. Taken December 2021.

Beating the wave of the Omicron variant of Covid-19, we went to Arizona the second week of December. We went there for the Open House at the Organic Architecture + Design Archives. The OA+D Archives was founded by people who have wanted to secure the future of information on those who practice “Organic Architecture“. So, they have assembled objects—drawings, photographs, models, etc.—particularly by those architects who worked with, or apprenticed under, Frank Lloyd Wright.

The OA+D recently acquired the Taliesin Architects collection. “TA” were members of the Taliesin Fellowship and Frank Lloyd Wright’s former apprentices. After his death in 1959, they completed his ongoing projects. This naturally led to people coming to these former Wright apprentices to design their own homes and buildings. These former apprentices incorporated the firm in 1960 and ran it until 2003. The collection has many things from the firm; basically thousands of objects.

By the way, former apprentices constructed buildings all around Spring Green, Wisconsin. This was on the Spring Green Traveler’s Guide (which has been folded into the website for the Spring Green Chamber of Commerce). Although I went to the Chamber of Commerce site through the Wayback Machine to show you the web page with the

Architectural Driving Tour

Tour guides had to learn about the Traveler’s Guide since it was the easiest handout when helping visitors figure out the area. I think I learned about it the first weekend I ever gave tours. I’ve seen guides flip automatically to the page with the Architectural Driving Tour if someone came looking for a tour after the last one had left for the day.

But the trip last week brought us close to Wright’s winter home, Taliesin West.

So I made an appointment

Not to go on a tour (I’ve taken Taliesin West tours about 10 times). I went to transcribe some of “the correspondence”. This is the correspondence from Frank Lloyd Wright’s archives. It’s over 200,000 pieces (so a postcard is one piece, and a 10-page letter is another piece). It’s to/from Wright, his family, his business associates, et al.

Over 30 years ago, all of the correspondence was photographed and put on Microfiche. Then it was indexed in a five-volume set of books. You can look for the names of people who wrote to Wright, who he wrote to, when they wrote, what building they were writing about, etc. Every piece has an index number. You want to check out that piece of writing, you write down the identification number and look for it on the piece of Microfiche.

I think even if you were the President of all Historians, you wouldn’t get a lot of chances to physically pick up the “real stuff”.

The Avery Fine Arts & Architectural Library, along with many things, has a copy of the Mircofiche. As does Taliesin West.

As well as the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles.

I first looked at the correspondence (and other things in Wright’s archive) almost 15 years ago (I wrote about it in my post about photographer, Raymond Trowbridge). And yet, looking at letters and telegrams from all these people associated with Wright / Taliesin—to discover his activities on his whole estate—is like seeing the streamers shooting out from the sun’s corona. You can’t closely see what’s going on at the sun itself; you see its outer edge and its effects.

In other words,

relatively few of the letters and telegrams deal with the actual buildings on the Taliesin estate. There just aren’t that many letters of him acquiring stone or writing down a formula for a plaster color. When he wanted something anywhere at Taliesin, he could just tell people what he wanted because he was often there.

Yet, I have dug around in ways over the years to find answers.

That’s how I found the letter where Herb Fritz offered Wright some stone “In Return for the Use of the Tractor“.

While I didn’t know what I’d find this time around, I looked for stuff related to Wright’s “Midway Barn” on the Taliesin estate.

The greatest find:

Happily, I found the only piece of correspondence that specifically related to Midway Barn! In May 1938, the Gillen Woodwork Corp shipped material for roofing, they said, on “your Midway Barn.” That 1938 date explained why the director of the Archives, the late Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, had said for years that the building was begun in 1938. But in the Frank Lloyd Wright: Complete Works, vol. 2, 1917-42 (2009), Pfeiffer wrote that Midway’s date is c. 1920.

I always hoped it was because Pfeiffer had seen my writing somewhere about Midway, in which I gave evidence that the building existed by 1920. And, thus, was persuaded by my genius. (Or perhaps something else. I don’t know, but I prefer “genius”.)

Or possibly,

Because “Bruce” took a look at a drawing they have in the Archives. It’s drawing Number 3420.005, first executed in 1920 by draftsman, Rudolph Schindler. Schindler left this at Taliesin, and, like many drawings of the estate, Wright continuously drew on it. Still, when you look at the copy at the link from ARTSTOR, you see a building right in the middle of the drawing, under the scribbles. It looks suspiciously like Midway.

Now, I don’t trust Wright’s drawings of Taliesin, because he often drew what he wanted to exist at Taliesin along with what was actually there.

I wrote about that (of course I did) in my post, “Exhibiting Patience“.

But Schindler’s original drawing appears to show what stood there in reality.

Here’s a crop from the drawing, below:

Crop of drawing 3420.005. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

Schindler’s drawing is the darkest part in the middle. Now this makes me wonder who originally wanted that structure built.

Wright, maybe, but his brother-in-law, Andrew Porter, had owned that piece of land until about a month before Shindler made the drawing.¹ And as I said, Schindler seemed to draw what actually existed. Not all of those scribbles that Wright added later.

Well, as I’ve said for years: if Wright had made it easy, I wouldn’t have a career.

Originally posted December 19, 2021.
I took the photograph at the top of the post on December 12, 2021.

¹ November 8, 1920.

Looking west in Taliesin's Garden Room. Photograph by Keiran Murphy.

Physical Taliesin history

Posted on 12/04/2021 | 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:

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:

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 19^th 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.

Broadacre City model in the Dana Gallery at Hillside

Preservation by Distribution

Posted on 11/21/2021 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The model of Broadacre City, Wright’s idea/design for decentralized living. Photo taken while the model—mentioned in the post below—was once displayed against the north wall of the Dana Gallery at the Hillside building on the Taliesin estate. Raggedkompany took this photograph in 2008/09.¹

One day over 16 years ago, a woman came in for a tour of Taliesin.

She did a kind and thoughtful thing

She brought photocopies of letters that her aunt, Lucretia Nelson, had written to her parents (this woman’s grandparents) while Nelson was in Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship in 1934. So this woman wanted to give this to someone associated with Taliesin.

Fortunately I was on hand to take these from her.

Her act caused me to name this post, “Preservation by distribution”. That is: you try to get copies of things out there, in order to help them survive.

I spoke briefly to Lucretia’s niece (Lois) before she took her tour of Taliesin. While she was on tour, I read her aunt’s letters as quickly as possible, while getting what info I could on Lucretia Nelson. It turns out that in 1934, Nelson had written an article for “At Taliesin”. These were weekly newspaper articles that the Taliesin Fellowship had written in the 1930s. So I copied that for her and had it when she came off the bus after her tour.

Architect and writer, Randolph C. Henning, collected, transcribed and edited these columns, which he put into a book. I wrote about this book in my post on books by apprentices.

That day I got Lois’s address, since I wanted to absorb some of what Lucretia Nelson had written. I felt I should give her more information once I had a some time to look things over. So when I did, I told her who Lucretia had mentioned, and pointed out an important event in Wright’s career that Nelson had written about.

I’ll talk about that further below. First of all, I should mention Lucretia and some of those people. And why she was at Taliesin.

Who was Lucretia Nelson?

Nelson (1912-1991) received a B.A. in painting at University of California-Berkeley in 1934. Apparently after graduation, she came into the Fellowship with a college friend, Sim “Bruce” Richards. Frank Lloyd Wright had seen Bruce’s work in Berkeley during a lecture and had encouraged the young man to join the Fellowship. So the two friends (Bruce and Lucretia) headed to Taliesin, where they met up with another former UC-Berkeley student, Blaine Drake (Drake had entered the Fellowship the December before).²

Lucretia was there in 1934, possibly into 1935. The men, who later became architects, stayed longer. Bruce until 1936; and Blaine until 1941. Meanwhile, Lucretia returned to UC-Berkeley, received a Master’s degree, then taught in its department of decorative arts, where she also became an administrator.

Her year in the Taliesin Fellowship was something that she often remembered and one can understand why: she was devoted to the connection between life and art, which she saw around her when in the Taliesin Fellowship.

Two things that stuck out in Lucretia’s letters:

She wrote about one change to Taliesin. It was planned for her room, and she told her parents that:

“You see it gives me instead of one small window on the north side under the deep eves [sic]… a south exposure and a wall almost entirely of windows.”*

This change is going to cause a problem.

The upcoming change altered the room. The southern wall in the room was moved further south. The that was the wall that she said would be “almost entirely of windows”. Then-apprentice, Edgar Tafel, wrote about this change for the July 4th, 1935 “At Taliesin”. He said that,

Fortunately, Taliesin is in an ever state of change. Walls are being extended and new floors are being laid to accommodate our musical friends. We are trying out the new concrete mixer – which marks a new day in our building activities

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), 139-40.

This concrete caused a problem decades later:

Unfortunately for Taliesin, this concrete work blocked a drain behind this south wall. Water going behind the wall would freeze in the winter. This created a wedge from 1935 until the early 1990s. My understanding is that the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation (the site owners) began trying to figure out this problem in the late 1980s.

By that time, the back wall (visible on tours of Taliesin) was protruding ~~seven~~ nine inches out of plumb.³ Here’s a drawing that Taliesin Preservation did before the start of the project, just to give you a sense of things:

The part people saw was to the right of the stone wall.

During the preservation work, earth was removed from the back of the wall, which was slowly pushed back into place using jacks. This made the wall once again plumb. Then two drainage systems (one behind the wall) were installed.

This big project was done the winter of 1993-94; so it was the brand new project the year I started giving tours at Taliesin.

Lucretia’s other important note:

In that same letter where she mentioned the upcoming work, Lucretia said that “a guest last week” who “has his son here” gave $1,000 for the construction of Wright’s “Broadacre City” model.

Every Frankophile (in other words, a Wrightfan) in the audience might have done a double-take at that last sentence.

The model of Broadacre City was Wright’s thought project about decentralized living (not tied to any real site). This $1,000 gave Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship the resources to construct it.

And the guest was Edgar Kaufmann, Sr.

Who was Kaufmann?

Edgar Kaufmann, Sr. was visiting Taliesin (with his wife, Liliane), because their son, Edgar, Jr., had joined the Fellowship a couple of months before. Edgar Sr. ran Kaufmann’s, a department store in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Most importantly, in less than a year, he and Liliane would receive plans for their weekend home near Pittsburgh. That home is known as Fallingwater.

Fallingwater: the building that started to put Wright back on the forefront of architecture.

Kaufmann’s $1,000 check not only meant that the architect had the money so his apprentices could build the 12 foot X 12 foot model. The money seemed to signal that Kaufmann believed in Wright’s ideas and work. And that, perhaps, he might hire Wright for that home they were thinking of building.

Originally published, November 21, 2021.
Thanks to Raggedkompany for permission to use his photograph at the top of this post.

* I changed this post on May 7, 2020 when I realized I’d incorrectly identified a photograph. I deleted the photograph here, but talked about what room it was really showing in my post “Oh my Frank – I was wrong“.

There’s an earlier version of “Preservation by Distribution”, with the mistake. It’s on the Wayback Machine, here.

**Bonus—See my post about the glorious Wayback Machine, here.

1. In 2012 the model became part of the collection of The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (Museum of Modern Art | The Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

2. In case you’re wondering: as far as I know, Lucretia was just friends with both Bruce and Blaine.

3. I corrected the number (from 7 to 9). That’s ’cause I remembered the crazy thing about that back wall: it’s 16 inches thick, so the center of gravity is 8 inches. That stuck in my head of just the insanity that is Taliesin.