historic research Archives

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.

Comparisons of Taliesin drawings showing changes over time. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, New York, Columbia University)

The Three Taliesins

Posted on 07/22/2025 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

You are looking at floor plans of Taliesin showing the areas around the bedrooms for Olgivanna and Frank Lloyd Wright. Her bedroom is number 30 and his is number 33. I think it’s cool that in 1911 those numbers are just hanging out there in space and the building just keeps getting bigger.

I’m going to explain where they come from in today’s post.

Taliesin I is the building from 1911-14, ending at the first fire
Taliesin II is the building from 1914-25, between the two fires
and Taliesin III is the building from 1925-until his death

Even though one wing of the building was destroyed in the 2 fires, we stick to calling them Taliesin I, II, and III. Although some scholars

say that’s incorrect, because ONLY the living quarters were destroyed.

But really:

it’s all Frank’s fault.

Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright used those terms in 1932 in An Autobiography while clawing his way out of obscurity.

Although I don’t think that Wright ever said in the car: “Oh, yes, Olgivanna – drive us back to Taliesin III after I pick up my Holstein-hide jacket in Dodgeville.”

I don’t think Wright commonly referred to his wife as Olgivanna

(even though that’s what she was known as, opposed to “Olga”)

— he might have called her “Mother“

but, really: the whole reason I made up Wright’s comment was so I could show him wearing the Holstein-cow-hide jacket:

Wright in Taliesin in the late 1920s.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

Back to the 3 Taliesins:

Wright first called his house Taliesin I

when he wrote about the lead-up to finding out about the fire at Taliesin in 1914:

In the fall of 1913 Young Ed Waller’s head got outside the idea of the Chicago Midway Gardens and he set to work. First on me, one day when I had come in from the workshop, not in order, at Taliesin I.

Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 178.

and II

when he wrote about deciding to rebuild after Taliesin’s 1914 fire:

Anguish would not leave Taliesin until action for renewal began. Again, and at once, all that had been in motion before at the will of the architect was set in motion. Steadily, again, stone by stone, board by board, Taliesin the II began to rise from Taliesin the first.
An Autobiography, 192.

And gives us Taliesin III later

while writing about Taliesin’s second devastating fire in 1925 that happened 100 years ago on April 20:

A few days later clearing away the debris to reconstruct I picked up partly calcined marble heads of the Tang-dynasty,… Sung soft-clay sculpture and gorgeous Ming pottery turned to the color of bronze by the intensity of the blaze. The sacrificial offerings to—whatever Gods may be.

And I put these fragments aside to weave them into the masonry—the fabric of Taliesin III that now—already in mind—was to stand in place of Taliesin II. And I went to work.

An Autobiography, 260.

Conveniently,

the fires go hand-in-hand with those simple dates I mentioned last year when writing about the Wrights’ wedding anniversary on August 25.

The fires are something solid I can use to mark a change at Taliesin.

As opposed to Wright’s tendency to change things constantly at his home.

However,

The structure changed as Wright’s life and economics changed, or for such seemingly trivial reasons as preparation for a magazine article

an example of one such change was one he made preparing for a photograph in an insert in 1951 Architectural Forum magazine. Apparently, Wright expanded his bedroom for that photo.

The photo was taken by Ezra Stoller. His firm, ESTO, keeps a tight hold on his photographs, so I linked to a .pdf of the that issue from Architectural Forum. The insert, showing lots of Wright spaces, starts after page 71.

The photo caption says in part that the “beautiful room” you see in the photo was “not there six months ago.”

Or as significant as beginning a winter home (Taliesin West).

This undergirds the idea of Taliesin as change.

So, even if there had been no fires and Wright was flush with money (and skilled craftspeople all of those years), he would have made extensive changes to the structure, as he did to his residence in Oak Park, Illinois, and Scottsdale, Arizona.

For instance,

The Baraboo Weekly News on April 30, 1925— while talking about Wright’s rebuilding following Taliesin’s second fire—described changes he had made “last summer”:

Start Work to Rebuilt Wright Bungalow Soon

The clearing away of debris of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin… has been completed and workmen will begin this week to rebuild the parts of the bungalow destroyed by the fire. The work of reconstruction will be in charge of W. C. Schwanke of Spring Green who had charge of extensive improvements and additions last year. An addition of four rooms and a large balcony which was built last summer was part of the building consumed by the flames.

Online at Chronicling America from the Library of Congress, here.

The rooms might be two rooms on two floors, but I don’t know about the balcony. We might find out by looking at a photo in the National Library of Australia:

Black and white photograph showing the exterior of Taliesin's living quarters. — From the Eric Milton Nicholls Coll. at the National Library of Australia

You’re looking at the Taliesin’s living quarters c. 1924. Mr. Wright’s Bedroom now starts on the far right.
Speaking of “other” Taliesins, I showed this photo in my post, “Taliesin II: The Forgotten Middle Child of Taliesin“.

The different Taliesins in drawings:

When I study Taliesin, one of the things to do is take two or three electronic drawings that I trust, cut up parts of them, then compare them over time.

At the top of this page is one of my sequences showing the areas of the Wrights’ bedrooms in Taliesin I, II, and III. I once again put that below:

The consistent features I used were the chimney on the left; and the horizontal line that ends in a “key” design. Despite the fires and expansions, those two features have stayed somewhat the same. I used a several gray and black rectangles to establish consistent lines so you can see how things moved in Taliesin 1, Taliesin 2, and Taliesin 3.

Sometimes figuring out the building this way helped the Taliesin Preservation crew figure out why the building was doing one thing or another.

The building’s so variable and imperfect that Wright’s sentence about its early design sometimes goes through my head: “It was intensely human, I believe.”¹

First published on July 22, 2025.

You can find the three Taliesin floor plans I used online at JStor. Here’s the link to the one for Taliesin 1, c. 1912, for Taliesin 2, c. 1915-20, and for Taliesin 3, c. 1936.

Note:

1. An Autobiography, p. 176.

Stone Entry Gates on Highway 23

Posted on 06/05/2025 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Photo taken in 1955 by Maynard Parker for House Beautiful magazine. It wasn’t published at that time, but you can find it on p. 4-5 in the book At Taliesin; and in the book Working with Mr. Wright, p. 8-9.

Are not the original entry gates to Taliesin.

That’s what I’m going to explain in my post today.

You can see the gates I’m talking about without being on a Taliesin tour. They’re just off the road, and Wright’s estate mostly surrounds you. In the photo at the top of this post, the gates are under the clump of fir trees by Highway 23.

I took the photo below that shows the stone gates today:

One of my close-ups is in the slideshow you see on my homepage. I took this and other photos while: trying to come to terms with losing my job; and my husband was gently persuading me to develop the domain name keiranmurphy.com that he’d reserved for me.

I gave a presentation a couple of weeks ago and was reminded that many people think that those stone gates are “the original entry” to Taliesin.

No, they aren’t.

Let’s get it out of the way and confirm that the original entrance gates to Taliesin are by Taliesin’s waterfall.¹

In 1911, Wright’s draftsman, Taylor Woolley, took the picture of those original gates on County Road C surrounded by its stonemasons:

This photo is published in Building Taliesin: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home of Love and Loss by Ron McCrea (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, Madison, Wisconsin), 2012, p. 102 (fig. 96). It’s now out of print, but you can get it from other sites online.

So, why do people think the gates on Highway 23—about half a mile away from Taliesin—are “the original”?

Long story:

You’re not surprised, are you?

In the 1980s,

the Taliesin Fellowship was in charge of giving tours at both Taliesins. Wright’s widow, Olgivanna, decided to employ guides in Wisconsin instead of just using architectural apprentices.

The tours usually only went to Hillside, the hub of the architecture firm, Taliesin Associated Architects founded upon Wright’s death.

They didn’t have regular Taliesin House tours because Olgivanna lived in Taliesin’s Living Quarters, while the rest of the Fellowship lived elsewhere in the building.

So, with brand new guides,

Fellowship members relied on each other

to gather the information needed for a tour, while apprentices also taught new guides.

Everyone went with what they knew, and apparently the story that rose to the top was that those Highway 23 gates were “the original”.

That’s what I learned in 1994 when I started in tours.

Tours then (like today), started by leaving the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center on a shuttle bus and driving down the highway.

Since we drove to Hillside for tours around a dozen times a day, we all learned to point out things on the right as we drove by, including the stone entry gates.

as a result, I’ll probably be able to confidently reach my left arm out while saying, “And, to your right…” to the end of my days

Although I don’t think I’ll be able to do this while walking backwards anymore.

I didn’t question

the history of the stone gates until the winter I worked in the Preservation Office.

When I wrote “My Dam History“and discovered Raymond Trowbridge’s photographs.

And saw the gates weren’t in a plan with Taliesin published in 1913 in Western Architect magazine:

You can see this in “The Story of Taliesin: Wright’s First Natural House,” by Neil Levine in Taliesin 1911-1914, Wright Studies, v. 1.²

Plus,

The office also had Plat maps. One from 1915 showed that Wright’s brother-in-law, Andrew Porter, owned the land where the gates are now:

Someone in the office used a green highlighter on the properties owned by Wright or his relatives. Frank Lloyd Wright’s land is on the edge of the number 3 in “30”.

You can see Porter’s land under Wright’s. If the stone gates were there in 1915, would be roughly to the right of the “R” in Porter.

So the gates weren’t there in 1915.

Or after Wright bought the land (c. 1920), because he was busy with the Imperial Hotel in Japan.

And after this, he was working in California.

Then there was Taliesin’s 1925 fire, and all the problems with his second wife.

Because of all of that and more, by the late 1920s he was pretty poor.

Hey! I made a rhyme!

And in May 1928, the Bank of Wisconsin foreclosed on Taliesin.

Still,

that’s gonna help us get closer to understanding the gates.

In July 1928

Wright buys Taliesin back with the newly created “Frank Lloyd Wright, Inc.”

A lot of people banded together and bought shares in Wright’s future, thinking that it would all be ok.
while I wrote last year that “Wright Was Not a Shyster“, still… none of them knew the Great Depression was coming up.

Wright moves back home and writes to stalwart (not always by his choosing) Darwin Martin: longtime friend, client, and benefactor.

In the letter

Wright wrote that the highway was newly re-done and he was planning on building a road to it.³

Unfortunately,

the b—–d didn’t write “I’m calling one of my stonemasons to build some nice gates on the highway.”

But I think we’ve got proof he was building a road in 1928 because of a letter in early November to the Capital City Culver Co.⁴ He ordered several long, wide pipes. It seems logical that they could be used when constructing a road over the creek that runs through his property.

The creek that fills the pond, and creates the waterfall which, again, as of May 27 2025 is back at Taliesin!

So, with the road constructed in 1928-29, the stone gates were built.

This seems likely given a photograph of the gates taken by a photographer named Gilman Lane, from Chicago:

This photograph by Gilman Lane is courtesy of the Oak Park Public Library Special Collections, Oak Park, Illinois.

We don’t have an exact date, but it was taken 1930-33, based on Lane’s other work. And the young pine trees behind the gates show, I think, that they were newly constructed.

And you can see “Taliesin” carved onto the stone. That was done by Wright-apprentice Abrom “Abe” Dombar. Abe was in the Fellowship from 1932-35.

First published June 5, 2025.
The photo at the top of this post can be found on this webpage: https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll5/id/10262

Notes

AS OF THE LAST WEEK OF MAY 2025, THE POND- AND WATERFALL ARE BACK AT TALIESIN!
Publishing info: editor, Narciso Menocal (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1992).
This is MICROFICHE ID #L003C04, which is in the collection of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).
This is MICROFICHE ID #C003D03, written November 1, 1928 from the Capital City Culvert Co. regarding for several culverts they were sending to Wright. Also in the collection of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives.

Sepia studio photograph of a young boy next to a table with a vase. From the Wisconsin Historical Society - Wright collection, 1869-1968. Image ID: 31680

Frank Lloyd Wright birth and birthplace

Posted on 06/01/2024 | by keiran

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Theodore Farrington took this photograph of a young Frank Wright in Macgregor, Iowa. The Wrights lived there from 1871 until 1873.

As June 8 approaches, it’s time for

the annual performance of:

“When and Where was Frank Lloyd Wright born”

So, I’ve got you covered on “when”. I wrote about that several years ago in this very little electronic space: “Keiran: Don’t Try to Correct the Internet“

The short story is that he was born in 1867

or to make the SEO happy (with active verbs), I’ll write, “Anna Lloyd Wright gave birth to her son Frank in…”

And you can read the post to learn more.

But the other question is:

Where was he born?

Well, we definitely know it was in Wisconsin.

The location of the piece of ground on which he was born though? That’s where things get tricky.

First of all, there’s no birth certificate

(so I can’t even tell you if he was born Frank Lloyd Wright; or Frank Lincoln Wright, which biographer Brendan Gill put forth in his Wright biography¹ and while it’s logical, there’s no written proof; thanks, Gill)

You see, when Frank Lloyd Wright was born on June 8, his father, William C. Wright, was working as a minister in Richland Center, 20 miles (32 km) from Spring Green. And the Wrights lived on Church Street in RC, which makes some conclude that Wright was born in the house on that street.

That would seem logical except:

Twylah Kepler, Richland Center historian, told the Chicago Tribune in the year 2000 that shortly after Wright’s birth, Wm. Wright performed a funeral service in Bear Valley, 14 miles (22.5 km) from Richland Center, for someone in his congregation. Since Anna was heavily pregnant at that time, it seems likely she stayed near her husband.

And fortunately for the Wrights, Wm. Wright’s former in-laws, the Holcombs, already lived in Bear Valley. In addition, historian Jack Holzhueter explained to me that it makes sense that Anna would have been ensconced in the house of the in-laws. Since Wm. Wright had the three children from his first (deceased) wife, Permelia, the in-laws could have taken care of the children, and Anna, during her “lying-in” (after all, it was her first child, and they were family).

On the other hand,

The late Wright historian William Marlin wrote that he discovered Wright was born on Church Street. This is part of the article in the Chicago Tribune in 2000:

Marlin wrote a long letter about this birthplace research to Margaret Scott, the resident Richland Center historian at the time. Both have since died.

Marlin told Scott his research led him to believe the home on Church Street is the most likely birthplace, and outlined why in several pages. He… said only new evidence would answer the question for sure.

Jack Holzhueter,… said Marlin’s letter prompted more research into the Church Street house. Instead of bolstering the possibility the town finally had its birthplace, that research cast new doubt on the site.

“I don’t know that we will ever find a Rosetta Stone,” Holzhueter said.²

Marlin died in 1994. His work on Wright’s biography was one of those things I came across that taught me a lot.

I didn’t learn from what Marlin wrote; I’ve never seen that. But I’ve seen the photographs he collected.

See

Marlin had been writing a highly anticipated biography on Wright. So he gathered hundreds of photos. And for reasons I don’t know, his photos came through the Preservation Office at Taliesin about 30 years ago.

I also don’t know how long Marlin had been working on his book, but he had collected copies of dozens of photographs from:
• the Pedro E. Guerrero Archives,
• Wisconsin Historical Society,
• Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives,
• the Capital Times,
• and others I’ve never figured out.

Eventually I grew to hate Marlin while working on figuring out the photographs. While they showed only things at Taliesin, they came with no organization, and I had no idea what time frame or even space that I was looking at.

What happened, I think, is that the origin of the images (which I’m sure he kept somewhere) was separated from the key to them.

Although, the information on where he got the images might have just been kept in his head.

In that case, yeah I do blame him.

At least he wasn’t that guy with hundreds of millions of dollars in bitcoin that he can’t get to because he lost the password

So the photos from Marlin were good because they made me look at the details to figure out things on my own.

Like I wrote in “My Dam History” where a winter of staring at bad xeroxes of Taliesin taught me to closely look at photos.

For information

on the puzzle about Wright’s birthplace, read “Frank Lloyd Wright Was Born Here” from the Chicago Tribune published on May 25 2000.

Posted: June 1, 2024
The Wisconsin Historical Society has the photograph at the top of this page, here.

Notes:

1. Brendan Gill. Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright (G P Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1987), 25.
2. as an aside, Jack apparently likes referring to the Rosetta Stone when discussing Wrightiana. He said the same thing when The Album of early Taliesin photographs was auctioned in 2005.

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.

Looking west in the Taliesin Drafting Studio toward Wright's vault, with his desk at the lower right.

DON’T TOUCH THAT STONE

Posted on 09/25/2022 | by keiran

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Looking west in the Drafting Studio that Wright used at Taliesin until World War II (after that he used it as an office). His desk is on the right-hand side. If you look at the ascending stairs, you see two lines: one that is horizontal, and another that’s vertical. These are remnants from a change that occurred at the stone.

As I wrote in “I looked at stone“, the masonry used in Taliesin’s piers, walls, and floors often holds evidence of the building changes. So this post is going to be about two changes at Taliesin that are also visible in its stone. In this case, both of these can be seen in Taliesin’s Drafting Studio.

So, what are these changes?

Evidence of one change is on the west side of the room, and evidence of one is by the room’s doorway. I’ll write about the evidence seen in the stone because I hope they will stay there.¹ Particularly because one of the changes is the only sign that something was there when Wright was alive. So I really hope no one touches it. That change is by the door on the east wall of the Drafting Studio.

First, though

There’s a sign of a change that stands on the outside of Taliesin’s vault that I want to talk about. That change can be seen in the photo at the top of this post, which shows the vault on the room’s west side. It’s by the steps that go up to the top of the vault.

Vault? wth are you talking about: I don’t see a metal door on this “vault” you’re talking about. You’re hallucinating.

Oh, sorry [she says to her cranky-alter-ego]: the stone you see is around a bank vault that is on the edge of the room. In Taliesin’s studio you’re looking at the back of the vault. You get into the vault through a bank door on the other side. btw: The steps don’t bring you into the vault.

Wright didn’t plan on using the top of the vault, because most of the vault was originally outside.

Ok, I’m getting ahead of myself

Let’s go back to the lines on the stone.

The change on the stone is the two lines to the right of the steps: a horizontal line and a vertical line:

I took this photo in March 2004.

There aren’t any known photos or drawings that show the room’s configuration in the area to show exactly what wall caused those lines. But the lines would have been created in the ‘teens to the early ’20s. Looking at the lines though, I think they were made because a plaster wall/walls terminated at that spot on the vault.

Hold on – I’ll take you back in Taliesin’s history:

The photo below was taken when Wright first built the studio in 1911. So the vault wasn’t there. But you get a sense of how the west side of the room ended and that might help to visualize what terminated in the vault that was added later.

At the time the photo was taken, the studio was a rectangular room with a gable roof. The side of the room where the vault will eventually show up is on the right hand side in this one photo from the Taliesin I era. That photo was taken by Wright’s draftsman, Taylor Woolley:

Woolley took this 1911 photo looking west in the Taliesin drafting studio. When the room was finished, Wright put the drafting tables to Wooley’s left, as well as where he was standing, and behind him (you can see the other view of the studio in this photo). The two men in the background of this photo are unidentified.

Can you tell us what we’re seeing?

From what I can figure, Taylor Woolley was standing about where the lamp is in the photograph at the top of this post. You can see the building is close to being finished, because of the trim on the ceiling, but there’s still more that’s laid on the table in the foreground.

Wright scholar, Sidney Robinson, pointed out that the vault was probably built by 1913.² That’s because there’s a drawing that was published that year that shows it. It’s drawing number 1403.011. If you click the link go to see the drawing online, they tell you it’s a 1914 drawing. But they’re wrong. The drawing was published in Western Architect 1913.²

And, oh sh*t – that means I’ve got to use a fricking drawing to try to prove something, and I’m always like, “don’t trust the drawings“…. OK: Let’s say we CAN’T prove that the damned vault was there in 1913, but it showed up in a PHOTO at least.

Standing on the top of Taliesin’s Living Room roof by its chimney, looking west. Taliesin’s Drafting Studio is to the left of the arrow, the vault under the arrow, and Wright’s private office to the right of the arrow. I know this was published in Frank Lloyd Wright: Man In Possession of His Earth, which was put out by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in 1962, so that’s who I think owns the photo, but I’m not sure.

Based on details, this photo was taken between 1918-1921. Wright expanded the studio before Taliesin’s second fire, and so the vault was then inside.

ANYHOW,

The marks on the stone outside of the Vault come from its changes. Luckily the marks have stayed there, unmolested.

Additionally,

on the opposite side of this room, there’s another mark on the stone. This is on the stone column you walk by when you enter the studio. Here’s the room today. I put an arrow pointing at the column:

Looking east in Taliesin’s Drafting Studio. The column is where the Preservation Crew found a window during Taliesin’s Save America’s Treasures project in 2003-04.
Photograph by “Stilfehler”, on Wikimedia.org.

That column has a red and white vertical line you can see. It shows up in the photo I took below:

Looking east in the Taliesin Drafting Studio.

That red and white line is there because there a built-in radiator cover terminated at the column for decades. You can see that radiator in the studio back in to the Taliesin II era. Here’s a photo from 1917-18 that shows it:

This photograph is a postcard that Wright’s sister Maginel gave to Edgar Tafel. The photo is published in the book, About Wright: An Album of Recollections by Those Who Knew Frank Lloyd Wright, ed. Edgar Tafel. Looking east in the Taliesin Drafting Studio. The black arrow is pointing at the radiator cover.

The radiator cover shows up in photographs throughout Wright’s life.

Yet

the photos also show he changed it. Originally, the radiator was perpendicular to the stone column. Then he moved the radiator from perpendicular to, to parallel to, the east wall.

But he kept what looks like the first cover. Maybe he made it into a little cabinet. Because a little door, with a handle, appears on the old radiator cover in several photos from the mid-1950s. These are at the Wisconsin Historical Society, like this one below:

Photograph looking (plan) southeast at the Monona Terrace model. Taken in 1955. — Photograph by George H. Stein (1913-2004). At the Wisconsin Historical Society, Image ID #29226.

Photograph by George Stein. Stein took the photo in December 1955. Looking southeast in Taliesin’s Drafting Studio.

You can see the part of the old cover with the door and door handle next to the Monona Terrace model. And to the right of the cover, you see the top of the radiator, against the east wall. The photo taken in the ’50s. So, maybe the radiator cover that’s in the 1917-18 photo from Tafel’s book has been turned into a cabinet, maybe? As near as I can figure out, the former radiator cover (that became a cabinet?) was there when Wright died.

Or I think it was there.

That’s because I came across a photo of it years ago that showed the radiator cover, and the cabinet. The Chicago Tribune published that photo in 1962 [that’s (W)right, after his death], I bought it on Ebay³ and it’s below:

Looking east in the Taliesin Drafting Studio in 1962. The photo shows the radiator and Wright’s Asian art works.

There’s a note on the back of the photo saying “September 20, 1962”.

At some point that entire built-in was removed, along with that radiator. And the floor in this area, where the radiator had been, must have been removed/replaced, so you can’t see a sign that the piping was there. So the physical evidence on the floor is gone. And the only thing that remains (as far as I know and can remember from my time at Taliesin) is what’s on the stone column.

So, before I end this post, I’ll put in this request to those who might work on or restore the Taliesin Drafting Studio: don’t touch that stone!

First published, September 25, 2022.
I took the photograph at the top of this post in 2005…. And, despite what some might think, YES, he used that lamp on the desk!

Notes:

1 Not that I think people will chuck things out at Taliesin willy nilly, but sometimes stuff happens.

2 I don’t know where Wright got the vault itself. It’s fireproofed and must be heavy, but I never got the chance to do the research on where Wright acquired it.

3 Although I should say that Bruce Pfeiffer was wrong, since he’s the one who dated the drawings. Anyway, the drawing appears in the article was “Taliesin, the home of Frank Lloyd Wright, and a study of the owner,” by Charles Robert Ashbee, Western Architect, 19 (February 1913), 16-19.

4 There’s got to be some joke about historians prowling Ebay for things related to their obsessions.

Looking (plan) northeast at the Entry Foyer at Taliesin.

Found Floor

Posted on 06/04/2022 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

I took this photo looking (plan) northeast towards Taliesin Entry Foyer after we found a floor during a project. Read about it below.

I have written that I need to be careful about what I think happened at Taliesin, because I’ve been wrong on things.

This post shows an example of something I got wrong.

It’s related to a floor. It’s the floor at the top of this post, but not one you usually see.

To start with, in 2003, right after I became the Taliesin historian, I was asked to write a history of all of the rooms in the living quarters of Taliesin. It was during the drainage project at Taliesin in 2003-04 funded in part by Save America’s Treasures.¹

I wrote here before about how we found a window at Taliesin during that project.

Specifically, I had to start with one room that was going to be impacted by Save America’s Treasures work.

That room is Taliesin’s Entry Foyer

It, or its area, has existed in Taliesin’s floor plan since Wright started Taliesin in 1911 and the “SAT”s project was going to be putting drainage in, or just outside of, that room.

So, yeah: might as well figure out the history of the space.

Just to be clear: it’s not that Wright didn’t draw anything for Taliesin. He just didn’t always follow his own drawings.

Anyway, studying this room had its own issues. In part because there aren’t a lot of photographs inside the space. In part, also, because for years there was a low stucco wall hiding the outside of the room.

You can see the wall in my post “When did Taliesin get it front door?”

Regardless, to figure the room’s history in the summer of 2003, I looked at Taliesin drawings that I could more-or-less trust.

One of them,

is a Taliesin II drawing (Taliesin II is c. 1914-1925). It shows the Entry Foyer with a stone floor. I put a cropped version of it below with the Entry Foyer outlined in red:

Taliesin's Entry Foyer seen in drawing #1403.015 — The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

The drawing shows the room with the stucco wall outside. I think he put the wall there to help keep the gravel dust from the drive getting into the house.

If you walked behind the stucco wall to the door into Taliesin, you walked down two steps, walk a few steps north (toward the kitchen), then took a right and walked up two steps to get into that door inside.

Then in 1925, Taliesin’s second fire happens. That fire (like the fire of 1914) destroyed Taliesin’s living quarters down to the stone.

So, Wright built again.

And because he made this into a private courtyard, he took the stucco wall away.

(I wrote about this in my post, “Wall at Taliesin’s Garden Court”)

After that, you came from the Garden Court, right up to the main level of the Living Quarters. There aren’t a lot of photos around from this time. But looking at what I could find, and whatever drawings there were, I figured that those stone steps in the Taliesin II drawing (if they’d ever existed), were destroyed by Wright when he was rebuilding.

So, I dutifully wrote my conclusion in my history on the Entry Foyer.

Be Careful What You Write

So, it’s September of 2003, and Taliesin’s Save America’s Treasures project is going on. Its plans called for taking out half the stone floor out in the Entry Foyer.

The plan was: put concrete footings under where that floor goes, and insert drainage to get the water down the hill.

They took out the stone floor, and removed the bedding sand under it. That day, the Taliesin Estate manager came in around noon and said to me,

“Um, Keiran… they found something”

“What – they found a bike?”

There was a rumor we might find a bicycle (or car) that had been thrown down the hill.²

“No…” and he started telling me it was something big.

I hopped in my car, went over to Taliesin and saw what they found:

a flagstone floor.

The floor that appears in the photograph at the top of this page.

I remember walking around on it and at one point jumping up and down. The floor that I had only ever seen in a drawing, which I didn’t think existed anymore, was right under my feet!

I probably also thought, “never – NEVER – say ANYTHING at Taliesin existed, or not, before you have absolute proof!”

Here’s a photo from that time, looking north on the floor:

The photo above is looking north in the space. The wall in the background is the same wall that’s in my post, “I Looked at Stone“.

The newly found floor in the photograph above is dark gray. The newly found floor is dark gray because the stone was wet.

I did say this Save America’s Treasures project at Taliesin was a drainage project, right?

Evidently, the stone was wet because water was coming from Taliesin’s Hill Crown. Made me surprised that the floor didn’t suffer more from frost heaving in Wisconsin winters.

Another photo I took at that time is below. It shows some of the Taliesin II stone steps:

I probably crawled all over the floor looking for red stones—those are stones affected by fire, like I wrote in “I Looked at Stone”. Here’s another closeup showing the stones. You can see pink/red and what looks like soot:

Looking (plan) east. My handheld camera bag gives a sense of scale.

I talked to the stonemason from the project’s contractor about the floor. He said the mortar between the flagstones was concrete. He thought that if the original mortar had been lime, it would have been burned off. Then Wright’s would have replaced it with the concrete. I guess he was right because Wright covered this floor soon afterward during Taliesin’s reconstruction.

Two months after the floor,

we found the window just outside of Wright’s drafting studio. There’s more, but for the rest of that year into the next spring, the Preservation Crew and the contractor slowly rebuilt things, put in new stone and put back the gardens.³ A Preservation Crew member had taken out the doors from the Entry Foyer, completely restored them, and put them back, too. A ribbon cutting marking the end of the project took place in May. I took a photograph a couple of days before the ribbon cutting. That photo is below:

You’re seeing Taliesin’s Entry Foyer, with the flagstone floor put back in (the found floor is underneath).

First published June 4, 2022.

Notes:

1. It’s a bit more complicated, but in essence this is the gist.

2. By the way: no, we didn’t find anything like that in Taliesin’s Garden Court or on the hill. Nor any bicycle, car, unicycle, or radio.

3. The Preservation Crew at that time was at Taliesin Preservation. Now they’re at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

Black and white photograph of dormitory room at Taliesin

Oh my Frank – I was wrong!

Posted on 05/06/2022 | by keiran

Reading Time: 6 minutes

A bed in a room at Taliesin. I’ll explain more in the post below.

About what? About a photograph.

But, while I’ve been wrong sometimes about things with Taliesin, I haven’t usually communicated those things to other people.

In this case, I was wrong about a photograph I put in a post of mine from last year: “Preservation by Distribution“. While I’ve taken the misidentified photo out of that post, in today’s post, I’ll explain what the photo really shows, and how I figured out I was wrong.

Let me explain:

The top of today’s post has the same photo I got wrong. I originally showed the photo in “Preservation by Distribution”. That post is about a generous gift from two women whose aunt, Lucretia Nelson, was an apprentice in the Taliesin Fellowship.

(read about the gift from the women, and their aunt, in the “Preservation by Distribution” post).

The women gave us copies of letters that Nelson wrote to her parents. In one of the letters, Nelson described a change that was going to happen under her room. When I wrote “Preservation by Distribution”, I thought the change Nelson wrote about was going to happen on the outside of the room that’s in the photograph.

But I was wrong. Not about the change; just about the photograph.

That is:

everything that I learned from what Nelson described remains unchanged. All I got wrong was the room that I thought photo showed. I think I figured this out yesterday.

But since learning I was wrong, it’s taking me a little while to re-think the space. Because

I’d been mistaken for 18 years.

I got this wrong in 2004.

And, since discovering my mistake, I corrected the “Preservation by Distribution” post. But, still –

18 years!!

Ok, fine. Then what room are we seeing in that photo?

The photograph appears to show a bedroom a couple of rooms to the west of Taliesin’s Drafting Studio. I only started to figure this out

2 days ago,

when I was thinking about writing a new post. While I didn’t look at the photo above, I looked at photos by George Kastner, an architect and draftsman who worked for Wright in 1928-29. Kastner came to Taliesin in November, 1928 and took photographs there in that month, and in December.

If you’d like to read about Kastner, The Organic Architecture + Design Archives¹ published a journal issue on some of his collection in 2019.
The article is by Randolph C. Henning, and it’s published in Volume 7, Number 3.

Regardless, here’s the Kastner photo that got this started:

This photo shows Kastner’s room at Taliesin, which had a bay window (on the right):

Looking (plan) southeast. Room was later the bedroom of William Wesley Peters. — Photograph by architect, George Kastner. Taken November 28, 1928.
Courtesy, Brian A. Spencer, Architect.

Photograph taken on November 28, 1928. By architect George Kastner. Courtesy of Brian A. Spencer, Architect. Looking (plan) east/southeast in what later became the bedroom of Wright’s son-in-law, architect Wes Peters.

Although I’d never seen this room before, I knew right where this was: I was looking at part of a former carriage house at Taliesin that Wright turned into a bedroom.

Like I wrote in my post, “Guest Quarters“, Wright wanted to make Taliesin an attractive place to stay, so he converted spaces into bedrooms.

The bay window on the bedroom faced Taliesin’s Middle Court.²

I looked at another photograph of the room by Kastner. You can see it’s the same room, because of the night table that’s on the right. It has the same lamp. And the same screen is against the wall:

Looking (plan) northeast. Room later became the bedroom of William Wesley Peters. — Photograph by architect, George Kastner. Taken December 17, 1928.
Courtesy, Brian A. Spencer, Architect.

So: there’s the screen that you see in the photo at the top of this page, and the desk with the lamp that you see in the last photo. Looking east/northeast.

So looking at these two images made me realize that I was wrong about the room in the photo at the top of this post.

Because

the room I thought was in the photograph had the same Japanese screen, but never had bay windows. So, I mentally searched for Taliesin’s rooms that had bay windows at one time. And I looked for drawings to show me the windows in the rooms.

I double- checked, and I think I found the best floor plan of Taliesin with the bay windows. It was was drawn in 1924, and I put it below.

Since the room I wanted to show is pretty small, I thought I’d show the whole plan to give you an idea of what I’m trying to show. What you see is the floor plan for several courtyards in the Taliesin complex:

Drawing of Taliesin published in Wendingen magazine in 1924, 1925. — Originally published in *Wendingen* Magazine, 1924, 1925.
Published in the book, *The Life-Work of the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright*, by Frank Lloyd Wright, H. Th. Wijdeveld, ed. (Santpoort, Holland: C. A. Mees, 1925).
Location of original drawing unknown.

I’m going to show a detail from the lower right hand side of the drawing. That’s below, with the courtyard labelled “Mid-Way”.

Detail of Taliesin drawing published in Wendingen magazine in 1924, 1925. — Originally published in *Wendingen* Magazine, 1924, 1925.
Then the magazine issues were published as a book, *The Life-Work of the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright*, by Frank Lloyd Wright, H. Th. Wijdeveld, ed. (Santpoort, Holland: C. A. Mees, 1925).
Location of original drawing unknown.

The drawing, published in 1925, has an archival number of 1403.023. But those who put the magazine (then book) together didn’t return the original drawing. So, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation gave it a number, but didn’t have the drawing.

The bay window in the photo was next to the door of the “STUDENTS BED ROOM” in the drawing.

The room has two small windows on the wall opposite of the bay windows. I think the photo is showing the window on the left in the room.

And, fortunately,

George Kastner took another photo that’s really helpful to figuring this out. This is an exterior photo that shows that wall with the two windows. That photo is below. I added an arrow to the photo so you can see where the window is:

Looking (plan) southwest at N facade of Taliesin. — Photograph by architect, George Kastner. Taken December 19, 1928.
Courtesy, Brian A. Spencer, Architect.

Looking (plan) west/southwest at the north façade of Taliesin. I put the arrow into the photograph to show which window I think is showing in the photograph at the top of this post.

What happened to this room?

So, this area was always used by apprentices in the Taliesin Fellowship after Wright and his wife, Olgivanna, started it in 1932. Apprentices in the Fellowship lived in the bedrooms. Later, Wright had the apprentices add three more windows on the wall with the two windows.³

The final changes were made before Wes Peters, his wife, Svetlana, and their son moved in there in 1943. Apparently at that time they—the Fellowship as a whole, or just Peters and his wife—removed the bay windows.

Today, it’s still a bedroom.

First published May 6, 2022
The image above is at the Wisconsin Historical Society on this page.

Notes:

1 Their website is: https://www.oadarchives.com/. As of early May, the site administrators were having problems with it, but I’ll take this notice off when the site’s working again.

2 Here’s where I always wanted to “correct” some guides and staff at Taliesin Preservation. Starting around 2005, guides, drivers, and other staff members began referring to a tour drop-off area as the “Middle Court”. I think that’s because this area’s right near Taliesin’s “Lower Court”. So, that’s on your left, and there’s a courtyard in front of you. But that courtyard was known (in drawings) as the Upper Court. The Middle Court was called that because it’s between two courtyards.

3 The windows are in a drawing published in the January 1938 issue of Architectural Forum magazine.

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

Another find at Hillside

Posted on 02/19/2022 | by keiran

Reading Time: 6 minutes

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

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

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

What was this find?

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

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

How this was found out:

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

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

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

The draftsman who drew it:

That was Rudolph Schindler (1887-1953), an Austrian-born American architect who worked under Wright in the United States and Japan from February 1918 to August 1921.²

Schindler’s version is interesting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luckily I wasn’t alone on this project, because

Anne was ultimately proven right:

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a book by a former Hillside teacher:

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

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

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

Then,

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

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

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

Then, lo and behold,

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

And, finally,

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

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

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

BOOYAH!

Originally posted, February 19, 2022.

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

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

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

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

Looking south in the Hillside Drafting Studio

Hillside Drafting Studio flooring

Posted on 10/08/2021 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

Uh… not yet

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

Wait – what? Why not?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To illustrate the “wafer cookie” look

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

I took this photograph.

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

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

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

I took this closeup of the mezzanine flooring.

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

However:

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

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

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

Where the flooring comes from:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Correspondence between Wright and Evans Products Co.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once more

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

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

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

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

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

More Changes at Taliesin’s Old Dining Room:

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

But (2),

Back to the subject, Keiran:

HOWEVER,

This dining room

By the way, you can read

Notes

Back to the 3 Taliesins:

Wright first called his house Taliesin I

and II

And gives us Taliesin III later

Conveniently,

However,

This undergirds the idea of Taliesin as change.

For instance,

The different Taliesins in drawings:

Note:

No, they aren’t.

Long story:

In the 1980s,

Fellowship members relied on each other

I didn’t question

Plus,

Still,

In July 1928

In the letter

Unfortunately,

Notes

the annual performance of:

Where was he born?

On the other hand,

See

For information

Notes:

Start at the start:

The story behind this:

Along with

To give you a sense of things:

Plus three letters to Franklin from Keith McCutcheon.

I read the letters once or twice.

Keith sent poetry in the first letter, too:

“Taliesin: The home of Frank Lloyd Wright”:

Franklin didn’t respond

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

Here’s what stood out to me about this:

I know this because

A few days later:

Notes:

So, what are these changes?

First, though

Ok, I’m getting ahead of myself

Hold on – I’ll take you back in Taliesin’s history:

Can you tell us what we’re seeing?

ANYHOW,

Additionally,

Yet

Or I think it was there.

Notes:

This post shows an example of something I got wrong.

That room is Taliesin’s Entry Foyer

One of them,

So, Wright built again.

Be Careful What You Write

“Um, Keiran… they found something”

a flagstone floor.

I did say this Save America’s Treasures project at Taliesin was a drainage project, right?

Two months after the floor,

Notes:

Let me explain:

That is:

I’d been mistaken for 18 years.

Ok, fine. Then what room are we seeing in that photo?

2 days ago,

Regardless, here’s the Kastner photo that got this started:

Next

Because

And, fortunately,

What happened to this room?

Notes: