Tag: Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation

Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater in Pennsylvania.

Frank Lloyd Wright buildings are smaller than you think

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Photograph of Fallingwater by Esther Westerveld from Haarlemmermeer, Nederland in 2012.
The people standing on the upper terrace in this photograph are not 7 feet tall. They are normal-sized people.
It’s the architecture that’s messing with your mind.

I’m talking about what everyone—outside of Frank Lloyd Wright homeowners—has experienced: you go to a Wright structure and it’s smaller in reality than what it looks like in photos. I do try to remember that, but it’s always a shock when I walk into any of his buildings.

Why do I always get it wrong? Former apprentice, Edgar Tafel, explained why in his book, “Apprentice to Genius”:

. . . Mr. Wright made one extensive change that affected every physical element—as well as the impressions and reactions of every person who entered the house: He changed the scale and brought it down to his own human reference. He often used to tell us. . . . , “I took the human being, at five feet eight and one-half inches tall, like myself, as the human scale. If I had been taller the scale might have been different.”1
Edgar Tafel. Years with Frank Lloyd Wright: Apprentice to Genius (1985; Dover Publications, Inc.; McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1979), 50.

Wright’s trick in his architecture

Wright apparently said a person only needs 6 inches over their heads so, since he was the “human scale”, when you enter his buildings, the ceilings would be 6 feet 2 inches tall. This creates “compression”. Then the ceilings suddenly get taller in the spaces where you are meant to linger. That creates a “release”.

The ceilings, entryways, and trim (emphasizing the horizontal) create the scale. So, when we see ceilings and doorways  in photographs, we “read” them as 7 feet tall, or taller, because that’s what we’re used to. Since we see them that tall, we read everything else as bigger.1 This element of design is one of the reasons that I like to see people in photographs of Wright buildings: because other people give you a sense of the scale (even when the people mess with the pretty architecture!<–I’m mostly joking right there).

Although, I still laugh at myself when I go to a Wright building because, yup: they’re smaller than I thought they would be.

How this trick played into Preservation work at Taliesin

Over a decade ago, while the Preservation Crew was restoring Olgivanna Lloyd Wright’s bedroom, they were planning on reconstructing some of its Wright-designed built-in furnishings.

She and her husband shared a bedroom at Taliesin until 1936, then they moved to adjoining rooms. This was probably because Wright didn’t sleep very much and was almost 30 years older than she was (so he needed even less sleep). Makes sense to me: if I want to sleep while my husband watches movies in bed, I put on my sleep mask.

So, the plan included the Preservation Crew rebuilding a set of small horizontal shelves at a mullion (you can see color photos of the rebuilt shelves below). But the Crew had a problem: no detailed drawings of the room exist. So how would they know how big the shelves should be? Now, if Taliesin had been built for a client, there would have been floor plan and elevation drawings, as well as drawings for furniture and built-ins. All of those things would have measurements. But because Taliesin was his own home (reconstructed after the second fire of 1925), he could simply tell the carpenters and builders what to build. Or he gave them sketches. However, those must have been thrown out, since no drawings existed.

My find at the Wisconsin Historical Society

Luckily at this time, I took a trip to the Wisconsin Historical Society to look at photographs in the John H. Howe collection (“Jack” had been in the Taliesin Fellowship from 1932-64 and took thousands of photographs). Two of his photographs show Olgivanna Lloyd Wright’s bedroom, which show the shelves. I emailed the photographs (one at this link) to the onsite collections manager for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. A few days later, he stopped by the office and told me that one of the photos showed a perfume bottle on one of the shelves. And, he said, “We have that perfume bottle.”

Apparently, he also showed the Preservation Crew the photograph and perfume bottle, and they used the perfume bottle to get the scale of the shelves they were going to rebuild.

You can see the rebuilt room in the photograph below, followed by a close-up of the shelves:

Photograph of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright’s bedroom. The shelves are to the right of the small chair.

Taken by user Stilfehler. Information and a larger version of this image is at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Taliesin_Interior_32.jpg
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Shelves in Olgivanna Lloyd Wright’s Bedroom. The perfume bottle, on the top shelf, is green. It’s behind an amber-colored glass jar so you can see just a little bit of it.

Taken by user Stilfehler. Information and a larger version of this image is at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Taliesin_Interior_28.jpg
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

There are other things that the Preservation Crew has done in Olgivanna Lloyd Wright’s bedroom, and on the Taliesin Estate overall, that are inventive and smart. Still, given my contribution to their work, I always liked to tell the story of the perfume bottle while giving tours through her bedroom.

OK, Keiran, that’s a cute trick. But why did he do this with the scale?

I think the full answer to the question probably requires reading Frank Lloyd Wright’s autobiography to understand his design philosophy,2 but I think he did it for at least two reasons. Firstly, he did it because it makes the space feel larger. Especially when you sit down. And, secondly, the lower scale creates more compression which, upon “release” generates feelings of surprise, drama and delight inside his homes.

First published March 19, 2021.
The image at the top of this post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. The image is available at Creative Commons, which has its licensing information and a larger version. 

1 Well, then you go, “what – so the guy never designed for people over 5’8″?” He did. For example, Louis Penfield, who commissioned Wright for a home in Ohio, was 6 feet 9 inches tall. Wright made the hallways thinner and the ceilings taller. You can rent the building overnight. It’s the only Wright building I’ve been in where everything, yes, looks as big as the pictures.

2 Or “why did he do this” requires the answer given by another former tour guide (hi again, Bryan): “Oh! Because he was a genius.”

Dam, waterfall, and hydro-house at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin

My Dam History

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In early fall 2019, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation began work on Taliesin’s dam on Wright’s estate in Wisconsin. Hopefully, they’ll finish the work in 2022. Then, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation will again fill Taliesin’s pond. Once that happens, visitors will see the waterfall running on the north side of the stream.

Those working in preservation for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation did a segment on the work in a Facebook feed in August 2020 that’s pretty cool. It included an explanation of what they were doing and why.

This recent work made me think about the historic photographs of the waterfall (like the one above) and my study of them, so that’s what my post is about today. My study of the dam led into how I approached the study of Taliesin’s history overall.

My start in the dam history

I first came across a lot of photographs (or photocopies) of the dam and waterfall that winter I worked in the Preservation Office. My work was mostly arranging photos into binders so people could find them later.

I wrote about arranging those photographs associated with Taliesin a couple of blog posts ago. Those photos included 33 of the dam/waterfall. As those features weren’t near the building at all, I worked to figure out when the photos were taken. Sometimes the photos would be postcards that had been sent, so I could get a “taken by” date on them. Other than that a lot of times I figured out things at Taliesin by a game of “spot the difference” (like those cartoons you used to see in the newspaper on Sundays).

Since I only found four photographs with dates attached to them, I figured out their dates by looking at things around them. I looked closely at the stone, the heights of trees, and the thickness of tree branches. When I finished (and so I could keep the memory of what I learned) I wrote these things down into a short document. I named it: “Preliminary research into the construction history of the Lower Dam on the Taliesin Estate”.

Or, as I called it, “My Dam History” (usually said loudly to anyone who would listen). What I put below is based on the things I learned then, and what I found out in the years since.

Wright on his dam:

Wright began construction on his home in April or May 1911 and began building the dam by the end of that year or the beginning of the next. He wrote that, aside from creating the pond,

“[T]he stream… had a great dam. A thick stone wall 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,1 up to a big stone reservoir built into the higher hill, just behind and above the hilltop garden. . . .“

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

So, because of the hydraulic ram, Taliesin had running water.

It’s also the reason why Taliesin probably didn’t have outhouses. I wrote about that in a post in August, 2021.

Early Dam photos:

A photo of the dam in its initial construction is below:

Taliesin photograph by Taylor Woolley.
© 2011 Utah State History. All Rights Reserved.

Wright’s draftsman, Taylor Woolley, took the photo in the winter of 1911-12. It shows Taliesin at the top photograph and at least one wall built for the dam/pond at the bottom. You can see photographs of the early completed waterfall if you look at the book, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin: Illustrated by Vintage Postcards, by Randolph C. Henning.

A Hydro-house Constructed for Electricity

Close to 15 years after Wright first started Taliesin, he decided to take advantage of the waterfall’s power. So, he designed and built a hydro-electric generator at the dam. This was finished in early 1926.2

The hydro-house is in the photo at the top of the page

It’s the little structure to the right of the falls in that photograph. The hydro-house was similar to Taliesin: it had the same materials and angle on the roof, and the same color plaster on the parapet like what you found on the stucco walls at the house. People made postcards showing it, which is how I got the image above. A former co-worker gave it to me after finding it in a box of postcards while he and his wife were at a county fair.

But the stucco wall that you see wasn’t at the falls for very long. Water from the falls probably sprayed the stucco wall constantly. However, the hydro-house machinery was safer under under the roof. So the generator ran more-or-less successfully for about 20 years before Wright had it taken out.

Bad photocopies made for interesting lessons:

Oh, and I forgot this: for the most part, I was looking at 3rd, 4th, 7th generation photocopies. So I had to figure out images from what were basically blotchy dots.

To give you a sense of what I was seeing, I took the scan of that dam photo above and messed with it. I changed contrast and kept making copies of it. That’s what I below. Actually the image here looks better than what I remember seeing (eventually, I got better versions of most of the images).

But, the initial poor quality of the images made me really work on my analytical side. And it taught me to stop and start looking very closely at things. It’s think:  was that one stone a little bit different than one seen in another photo? Did it look like it had a few chunks taken out of it compared to what I saw before? Is there a new stone to the left of those three stones there? Is there less plaster on the wall?

Another thing about this work (looking at stone and the size of tree branches to figure out which photograph was taken earlier or later) was trying to block out preconceived notions on what I might expect to see in an image.

The end of my work days:

I might spend the afternoon looking at three photographs, going from one to the other with a loupe (a magnifier). The office used to be a horse stable at Taliesin, and had the sound of Taliesin’s waterfall as my backdrop.

It’s helpful especially with Wright’s home, because Wright often had things drawn there that never existed; or would change things while the features were being built. Like that hydro-house: it looks really cool in that photograph but as I wrote above, the waterlogged plaster was probably coming off it within a week. Trying to clear my brain when I looked at spaces hopefully stopped me from wasting time on some theory.

In addition, the end of this process meant that at times when people (tour guides, visitors to Taliesin, architects, other Frankophiles) asked something about a room, I could walk them through it at different times (because I’d spent hours walking through the spaces in my head). I found myself on at least one occasion saying, “It doesn’t look like that now, but it used to.”

And most of these people have never been there when I answered “what did you do at work today?” with, “I looked at some stone. And figured stuff out.”

Links below:

Here are hyperlinks at the Wisconsin Historical Society of photographs showing Taliesin’s waterfall with the hydro-house, after the removal of the parapet:

https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM25845

https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM60721

https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM25573

First published February 24, 2021.
I own the postcard seen at the top of this post. I don’t know who the photographer was. They probably took the photo in 1926 or 1927.

Notes:

1 A hydraulic ram is one of the many things I’ve learned about while working at Taliesin. If you’ve ever been near a hydraulic ram you hear a constant clicking sound as the water is forced up vertically. I think about that when people talk about the sounds of Taliesin. It gets pretty darned quiet at night in the country so the hydraulic ram would have a sound, I imagine, close to the sound of the ticking of a distant clock.

2 Architectural historian Kathryn Smith wrote an article with former Wright apprentice Don Kalec on photographs taken of Taliesin, apparently by Clarence Fuermann, on three occasions. One of these is a photograph showing the hydro-house. It was published in the Journal of the Organic Architecture + Design Archives and includes over 50 archival photos.

UPDATE, April 2023:

In 2023, I wrote the post, “Wright called it the water garden“. I focused on the pond Wright created using Taliesin’s dam. Someone from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation told me that if everything went favorably, they would be able to get the pond filled back up. So, as of this time (mid-April 2023), the pond isn’t back.

Taliesin Preservation posted “Wright Called it the Water Garden” on their blog, too.