Midway Barn Archives - Keiran Murphy

Taliesin (studio) page in March 2026 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliesin_(studio)

Published in Wikipedia

Posted on 03/24/2026 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

I started this post to talk about my writing in Wikipedia, but while prepping this, I thought I’d show you things I’ve published that aren’t just here on my blog.

Last year, I mentioned in one of my posts that I was getting published in Madison magazine, with my piece on Mamah Borthwick‘s gravestone.

This link will bring you right to it.

And

The Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly also published

two things

that I wrote while I worked at Taliesin Preservation:

“An Autobiography in Wood and Stone“, in 2018, which is a nice overview of Taliesin.

And

“Preserving Taliesin from the Ground Up” p. 22-27 in the Summer 2004 issue.

the editor didn’t tell us she was publishing it without a byline. Don’t worry, it’s been almost 18 years since it was published; I’m feeling a little better.

Then, SaveWright,

—the magazine from the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy—published two of my pieces:

“Landscape at Taliesin: Carrying on the Legacy,” in the Spring 2013 issue (vol. 4, Issue 1), Unity With Nature, p. 2-4

and

“Wright’s Own Kitchens at Taliesin”² in the 2022 issue (vol. 13, no. 1), Wright on Kitchens, p. 2-5

Plus, my work appeared twice

on the Taliesin Preservation blog.

One piece that I wrote with their Communications Manager, Susan Kennedy, about Wright and Alex Jordan (the creator of the House on the Rock):

Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s House on the Brow of the Hill, and Alex Jordan’s Eclectic House on the Rock.

And they also published my post, “Wright called it the Water Garden“

that I first posted here.

Although, years ago I also worked on their website, along with another one we had just for the store.

it was a long time ago, when Flash animation still ran wild over the internets

Therefore, I had a lot of “learning by doing” experience in writing copy for items for sale in the giftshop;

Which meant a LOT OF ways to write about Wright’s Waterlilies and the Coonley Playhouse windows.²

The first time

I got paid for writing was in The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia.

(Taliesin-related, of course)

It was a good deal – they gave me about $1 per word.

You can see the article by looking on Archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/americanmidwesti0000unse/page/672/mode/2up

MY WRITING about Taliesin

is on page 672.

If you only see a portion of the book when you click the link, you can set up an account there.
It’s cool – I search for books in it all the time to confirm page numbers or publishing information. Someone has to upload one to see it and you can “check” them out for an hour at a time.

So I just read my article in the Midwest Ency. after almost 20 years. While I would probably change some things, it’s not too bad.

BUT I WROTE IN WIKIPEDIA

before all that.³

Obviously,

my first entry was about Taliesin.

The building not the half-god, jeeez

Wikipedia (hopefully for the foreseeable future) is a publication that is written, edited, and maintained mostly by volunteers.

In order to keep it going, they’ve got a strict set of rules.

I suppose you could break them all but in that case, they’d probably ban you.

IN FACT

I know someone who got banned.

But not because she was malicious. She was describing Wikipedia to her class, explaining that it can be changed by anyone, anywhere.

So,

to demonstrate this, she showed a page while under her own username and said something like, “don’t do THIS” then either deleted the text, or wrote something silly.

Even though she later reversed what she had done, they banned her.

I dunno if she ever got her account back.

And in 2017,

I added Wikipedia pages on all of the buildings on the Taliesin estate:

The Hillside School building there now
- not to mention the first Hillside building Wright tore down in 1950
Midway Barn
The Romeo and Juliet Windmill
The Porter House, Tan-y-Deri

plus the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center.

And, because of Wikipedia’s rules, I was careful to only work on the articles when I wasn’t getting paid.

So, guess what I did

in the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic?

—while everyone was trying to figure out what to do, or how to create sourdough starter —

No surprise: I went to the page on Wikipedia that has links to all of Wright’s buildings,

then clicked on each entry

and systematically corrected them.

I don’t mean that I went to the pages and said YOU’RE ALL WRONG!!~

No:

I corrected misspellings, found better hyperlinks, replaced the errant comma when the author meant to write a period… stuff like that.

And then,

I added the “Storrer number” on every entry.

“Storrer” is William Allin Storrer, Ph.D.

He wrote about all known Wright buildings and published catalogues and books on them starting in the early ’70s with The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Complete Catalog.

Storrer’s work is like those catalogues of compositions by classical musicians, like the Köchel Catalogue and Mozart.

So, I put the Storrer number for each building in those Wikipedia posts, which is also on the big list of Wright buildings you start off at. It’s on each page under “Further reading“.

I confess, though

that I agree with those who don’t like the title I made for the Taliesin page on Wikipedia: Taliesin (studio)

Because the Taliesin structure isn’t just the studio.

I probably wrote that because it was the first thing that popped into my head while setting up the page.

But since the page has existed since 2004, changing it wouldn’t be that easy.

Besides, for the most part,

I’ve left all of those pages alone.

One of the things they tell “Wikipedians” is that you have to let changes happen. Like, don’t get into an electronic tit-for-tat with someone who has dared to make a change on “YOUR” page, find them and castigate them

in bold and ALL CAPS.

PLUS,

I know things about Taliesin and the other buildings on the estate that have not been published in outside sources.

So, unless someone else writes and publishes a fact I know,

I can’t put it into Wikipedia.

Because its rules are that you can’t post “original research”. So when I know something, I search for it in other writing. Otherwise, I sit on my hands.

Well, Wikipedia doesn’t get to see my work, but you guys sure do!

Originally published March 24, 2026.
The image at the top of this post is a screenshot from the Taliesin (studio) page on Wikipedia.

Notes:

Here’s a partial list I wrote of the Coonley-Playhouse-window-design appearance, c. 2005:

On a t-shirt, an umbrella, a deck of cards (not including the special “Bridge Set”!), a wood screen that cost $220, a high-ball glass, cotton throw, table runner, placemats, a notepad, travel clock, nightlight, mug, a couple of scarves, a fricking WALL STENCIL, a $154.00-framed-tile, coasters, a set of children’s plateware, stitch kits, TWO different picture frames, cocktail napkins, a tumbler glass, sh–busloads of neckties (in tan, slate, and red – just this time around), a rollerball pen, giftwrap, a baseball cap, a pen holder….

I received the offer to write the article after I’d mused to the Senior Director of Preservation and Collections at Fallingwater about the kitchen at Taliesin West. I think I’ll explore my ideas on that in another post. Later: on April 18, I published “The Kitchen at Taliesin West.
and I know publishing in Wikipedia isn’t being accepted and peer-reviewed; but it’s still “Preservation by Distribution“.

Photograph by Mat Kauten at Taliesin in 1944. Property of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

Gertrude Kerbis – an architect because of Taliesin

Posted on 08/10/2023 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Photographer (and apprentice) Mat Kauten took this photograph looking at Taliesin’s Garden Room in 1944. I think Gertrude Kerbis might have seen Taliesin at the same time of year that Kauten took his photographs.

Here’s the story: a while ago, I received an email from Elizabeth Blasius, an architectural historian and co-founder of Preservation Futures.¹

Blasius had questions about a memory that award-winning architect Gertrude Kerbis spoke about on a couple of occasions. Kerbis talked about some obscure things relating to Taliesin, so Blasius had asked people she knew who might know the answer. So, of course she went to someone in the Wrightworld.

she’s in Chicago, a place filled with Frankophiles.

Eric Rogers, Events and Communications Manager at the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, gave her my name and contact info.

Her questions, and my answer, are what this post is about.

In part because they let me do one of my favorite things: walk around Taliesin in the past.

Kerbis was not an apprentice in the Taliesin Fellowship and apparently never met Frank Lloyd Wright.

But

circa 1945, she had an encounter with Taliesin that changed her life.

Blasius wrote and told me that while Kerbis was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she:

[R]ead a Life magazine article about Frank Lloyd Wright. She was fascinated with his work, and discovered that Taliesin was not far from Madison.

She then hitchhiked to Spring Green, and found herself on the grounds of Taliesin.

FYI: Spring Green is around 45 miles (72 km) west of Madison.

When Kerbis arrived at Taliesin, no one was there. Still, she walked all around it, and looked in through its windows.

At one point

she heard steps behind her, turned around and there was a white peacock in “full flutter”.

Sounds like the peacock was standing its ground; I doubt it thought she was a mate.

After the peacock incident

Kerbis realized it was late. Since she’d hitchhiked all the way out there, she decided to hunker down and stay at Taliesin.

She said that, luckily, she found an open window into a bathroom and climbed in! Then she spent the night in one of the bedrooms. While she never mentioned what her bedroom was like, she found a record player and played Beethoven.

Blasius told me that “next morning she had decided to become an architect.”

Blasius was of course curious about this. I would be, too:

How the hell could she walk around all over the place and not see anyone? She stayed overnight, so it’s not like the Wrights had just gone out for dinner.
And were there really peacocks at Taliesin?

Her email made my day.

It was a puzzle with all these pieces that I knew.

So, yes: what Blasius relayed to me made total sense.

First off:

Kerbis didn’t see anyone at Taliesin that day because, after the late 1930s, Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship picked up and left Wisconsin every fall. Therefore, the Wrights and the community of men and women working and living with them migrated to Taliesin West in Arizona. They would settle at T-West, and continue living in their community and working on Wright’s architectural commissions until the following spring.

Secondly:

Kerbis, while walking around Taliesin, saw “floor-to-ceiling” windows at Taliesin according to Blasius.

This also made sense to me.

Since Wright no longer lived in Wisconsin during the winter, he opened up the rooms and put glass into more walls

like I wrote about here and here.

I pictured where Kerbis would have walked around and seen through those windows, like into the room at the top of this post. And in the photo below by famous photographer Ezra Stoller:

Photograph in the book, Masters of Modern Architecture, by John Peter (Bonanza Books, New York, 1958), 47. I showed this photo in my post, “In Return for the Use of the Tractor“.

There’s a black rectangle to the right of the birch trees that’s really a floor-to-ceiling picture window. And the French doors on the left look into the Taliesin Drafting Studio.

As for peacocks:

I knew that some lived at Taliesin. I never heard they were white, but I’ve seen at least one photo of one. And that’s below:

Taliesin apprentice Douglas Lockwood took this photo at Taliesin sometime after World War II. The peacock is on the left under the roof outside the Hill Wing apartments.

Was Taliesin totally abandoned every year?

No. While most of the Fellowship went to Arizona, some apprentices stayed in Wisconsin for the winter. They took care of the animals and watched over all the buildings. Their work paid their tuition.

If there were people, why didn’t Gertrude see anybody?

Members of the Fellowship didn’t live at the Taliesin residence in the winter. They inhabited Midway Barn. It’s on the Taliesin estate and is less than half a mile away from Taliesin. But you can’t see Taliesin from Midway.

Kerbis and the bathroom:

Is that true?

Yes, it is. If you were a thin enough.

There’s one place in the building where you could see a bathroom from the outside, with a window that’s large enough to crawl through (for a petite person). There’s another bathroom you could see a little bit, although I don’t think you could crawl into it through the window. But both of them are on the ground floor of Taliesin.

I couldn’t find good photos of either bathroom area. But a good plan of that floor is at ARTSTOR. I’ll show a version of the drawing below with arrows pointing out the bathrooms:

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). Drawing #2501.024.

This drawing was executed 1936-39. Wright changed a few things on this floor by the time Kerbis came to Taliesin in 1945. But the two bathrooms were and are still where the arrows are pointing. The bathroom on the right has a really, really, small window, so I don’t know if that would have been open when Kerbis was walking around.

While there are two bathrooms, I think only a diminutive person could crawl through into the bathroom on the left.

BY THE WAY you scoundrels: in my 25 years, I never saw those windows open at Taliesin so don’t get any ideas.

The next day when she woke up

Gertrude decided she was going to be an architect.

She tells the story in this video about her.

She starts talking about her experience at Taliesin around 3 minutes in.

More on Gertrude Kerbis:

Here’s the blog post that Blasius wrote about Gertrude Kerbis’s career. Kerbis was remarkable. My thanks to Elizabeth Blasius for asking me questions. It was fun figuring it out.

Posted August 11, 2023
The photograph at the top of this post is in The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

1. Preservation Futures “is a Chicago-based firm exploring the future of historic preservation through research, action, and design.”

Daylight photograph in the Arizona desert with a waxing moon.

Reading Correspondence, 2021

Posted on 12/19/2021 | by keiran

Reading Time: 4 minutes

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

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

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

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

Architectural Driving Tour

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

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

So I made an appointment

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

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

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

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

As well as the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles.

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

In other words,

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

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

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

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

The greatest find:

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

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

Or possibly,

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

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

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

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

Here’s a crop from the drawing, below:

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

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

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

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

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

¹ November 8, 1920.