Tag: Miriam Noel Wright

B&W photograph taken October 21 1926 showing Frank Lloyd Wright being arrested outside of cabin in MN. Public domain image from Hennepin County Library.

Craziness in Frank Lloyd Wright’s life 1925-28

Posted on | by keiran
Reading Time: 7 minutes

Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1926 arrest in Minnesota. Photograph from Hennepin County Library. 

Since I mentioned it in my last post, today I’m going to write about Wright’s life in the late 1920s, which included lots of lawyering, more $$ problems than usual for Wright, and a weekend in jail.

It’s funny because I can tell you so much about the history of Taliesin, like what all of the rooms looked like through time and where/if photos of them exist.

BUT

After all this time, I’m still fuzzy on what the hell was going on in Wright’s personal life from late 1925 until around the time he married the third Mrs. Wright in 1928.

Usually,

my thoughts are that this time included jail, a bank foreclosure, and he was in Taliesin/maybe NOT in Taliesin, and somewhere in there he started his autobiography…?

Not to mention Frank Lloyd Wright, Inc., but when was that founded? 1926? ’27?

Regardless

I’m going to write what I found in several places, and primarily in Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography by Meryle Secrest.

Because she was the first biographer able to use the 5-volume index to the Taliesin correspondence1 with information on where you can find any of the 200,000 pieces correspondence on microfiche in Wright’s archives. So this made her research much easier.

As a result, I’ll selectively add page numbers from Secrest’s bio with my info. 

Let’s start with

late 1925:

Wright spent most of the year rebuilding Taliesin’s living quarters after they burned in April.

  • December 3: Olgivanna, her daughter Svetlana, and Frank Lloyd Wright went to Chicago [hiding from Wright’s second wife, Miriam] so Olgivanna could give birth to her and Wright’s daughter, Iovanna, at a hospital in peace.

Several days later, the troop left for Hollis, New Jersey and the home of Olgivanna’s brother and sister-in-law (Vlademar and Sophia Hinzenberg) where they could spend Christmas. [Secrest, 320, 324]

1926:

  • After more time in New Jersey, the 4 went to Puerto Rico for about a month.

They went because Olgivanna needed rest and recovery. Puerto Rico (a U.S. Territory) has tropical weather and Wright had less fear about bringing her off the mainland and back through national checkpoints. [Secrest, 325]

  • They were back in Wisconsin by Feb. when Wright went to a hearing in Madison related to divorce proceedings with Miriam. [Secrest, 323]
  • For most of the summer, they were all back at Taliesin:

Olgivanna is holding Iovanna in the Garden Court at Taliesin in the summer of 1926. The photo was printed in Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright by Brendan Gill, 291. The photo was owned by Elizabeth Wright Ingraham (architect and Wright’s granddaughter through his second son, John). 

Legal, financial, and heated confrontations continued between Wright and Miriam Noel Wright and on

June 3

Miriam tried to get into Taliesin,

            After all, she was his wife and Taliesin was community property.

But she was barred from coming in through Taliesin’s gates.

You can see the gates on the right-hand side of the drawing below. One gate is by the “Lower Dam” and one is off of the straight “County Road” across from the “Horse Pasture”: 

Black and white map of the Taliesin estate drawn from memory by John H. Howe.

Jack Howe, head draftsman in the Taliesin Fellowship, drew it. You’ll also find it in my post recommending the book, At Taliesin. 

Miriam tried to get in for 2 more days, leading Spring Green’s newspaper (The Weekly Home News) to note this in its edition on

June 10, 1926:

….

            Mrs. Wright is evidently a sick woman and as such is deserving of more consideration than was shown her by a syndicate of scandalmongering newspapers in staging the spectacular attempt which she made, probably at their instigation.

….

The Home News also let Wright publish a 700-plus-word explanation and apology to his neighbors. I’ve got a post where this is printed, but

FIRST –

we’ve got to move along in the chronology.

In late August

Wright takes the group to Minnesota, right before the Bank of Wisconsin announces foreclosure on Taliesin. [Secrest, 328]

They stayed at a cabin on Lake Minnetonka where Wright started writing his autobiography. [Secrest, 329] But no one knew where they were; not just Miriam, but ALSO, Vlademar Hinzenberg, Svetlana’s father.

Until the police tracked them down there on October 21. The photo at the top of today’s post captures his arrest outside of the cabin. 

Initially all 4 (including the baby) went to jail for a night, but then Wright stayed for the weekend. [Secrest, 330]

I wrote about this in my post, “Frank Lloyd Wright Violated the Mann Act“. That post includes Wright’s June 10th explanation/apology to the folks of Spring Green I mentioned above.

In his letter to his neighbors, he said it would all hopefully be better in “a year or two”.

He also wrote in it that, “I want to mind my own business and not be subject to public question if I can manage it.”

Which I maintain sounds like what’s on a deranged motivational poster:

Photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright by Edward Steichen, Bequest of Edward Steichen. Located in the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

After

he got out of jail, he had the idea of incorporating himself. [Secrest 333, 335]

Sure: people could buy stock in his future, then he could take the money, pay bills, and start to get back to work at Taliesin.

But remember what I’ve said: with Wright, there’s a difference between the ideal and the reality.

Onward!

1927:

January:

Before the corporation was set up, Wright put a bunch of his Japanese woodblock prints up for auction in NYC to make some bucks.

Unfortunately, while Wright hoped to make $100,000, the auction only netted $36,975. And that went back to the auction house, which had lent Wright money 2 years before.2 [You can read the whole print saga at Secrest, 334-36.]

February:

ANOTHER FIRE!

It wasn’t major, but it happened in Taliesin’s studio on February 22 (Wright wasn’t there). The Home News wrote in the February 24 edition that his workmen noticed “flames leaping from the roof of the studio” and fortunately the Spring Green fire department put the fire out. It was probably an electrical fire and caused around $3,500 in damage. 

May:

Wright retained lawyer Philip La Follette3 to negotiate a “year’s grace” on the foreclosure with the Bank of Wisconsin. [Secrest, 337]

By that time, things were going forward with Frank Lloyd Wright, Incorporated.

NOT the same thing as the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

He sold stock on his possible future earnings for $100 a share.

Who bought 74 shares?

FLLW’s bestie, Darwin D. Martin

thanks, DD!

Brendan Gill put an image of Martin’s share in Many Masks, 300:

Stock certificate for Frank Lloyd Wright Inc. Property: University Archives, SUNY-Buffalo.

The corporation made things with the Bank of Wisconsin better, allowing for the possibility of him getting back into his house.

BUT

the negotiations with Miriam precluded him living at Taliesin with Olgivanna.

Instead, the four lived at Tan-y-Deri, the house he designed for his sister visible from his home [Secrest, 338]. 

It’s in the photo below, under the arrow. The photo is taken from Taliesin’s Hill Crown. I posted it in my post, “Letters from Keith McCutcheon to Franklin Porter“:

Exterior photograph from Taliesin toward the Porter house, "Tanyderi". Photo by Keiran Murphy.

Interesting that I remembered the photo, looked for it and realized that I touched on gay liberation in the other post. Plus, it so happens that I’m writing this at the end of June near a day important for gay rights: the Stonewall Riots of 1969.4

On August 26

Wright and his second wife divorced.

At the end of 1927,

Wright left for Phoenix to act as a consultant on the Arizona Biltmore hotel.

1928:

After 3 months, he, Milanoff and the children moved to La Jolla, California.

Things with his finances weren’t copacetic, though, because

on July 30,

Taliesin was sold at auction to the Bank of Wisconsin for $25,000.

Meryle Secrest wrote that for the following 2 months,

[Philip La Follette] was negotiating to buy Taliesin back. The bank had added on all kinds of extra charges,… but LaFollette whittled that down to $40,000 and arranged for a new mortgage of $25,000…. The corporation was reorganized under the new name of Wright, Inc. [Secrest 342]

And, in good news, 

Wright and Olgivanna got married on August 25.

Wedding announcement for Frank and Olgivanna Lloyd Wright 1928 wedding. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (THe Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

Soon afterward, Wright got the news that the negotiations were letting them back into Taliesin. He wrote about it at the end of Book Two in his autobiography: 

Finally in September a compromise was effected. A telegram from Mr. and Mrs. Martin reached us at La Jolla—”Taliesin is open for your return.” After all the harrowing circumstances of nearly four years past, words that set us all madly rejoicing.

Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 293.

 

 

Originally published on June 23, 2026. 
The photo on the top of this post has no copyright and is from Hennepin County Library. It is published at this page:
https://digitalcollections.hclib.org/digital/collection/MplsPhotos/id/11707/

Notes:

  1. The force behind “The Index”, Anthony Alofsin, published his speech on his reasoning for it in the .pdf available here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58eac1d237c5819161af4699/t/5fbe82119b1ed03538b06a82/1606320658054/Frank+Lloyd+Wright+and+His+Taliesin+Correspondence-+A+History+11-22-20.pdf.
  2. While the print sale sucked for Wright, it was fantastic for the Chazen Museum of Art at UW-Madison. Professor Edward Burr Van Vleck purchased 5,000 prints during the auction, of which “several thousand” remain and were donated by his son. This info appears in Julia Meech’s book, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan: The Architect’s Other Passion, (Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York City, 2001), 16. I saw some of the prints when I was in grad school there.
  3. Son of Fighting Bob.
  4. If it sounds odd that I bring this up in a post about Wright, you might not realize I wrote my Thesis on a gay male artist named David Wojnarowicz.
First page of the Feature Section in the Washington Herald newspaper, on November 28, 1915. Includes drawings, letters, and photograph of the face of Miriam Noel.

What about the second wife?

Posted on | by keiran
Reading Time: 7 minutes

Yah: what about Wright’s second wife? That’s who I’ll write about today.

Years ago, a group of coworkers and I performed a comedy sketch for a friend who was leaving Taliesin Preservation. At one point in the sketch, we voiced common questions that folks ask when they take a tour. Among them were “how tall was he?” and “why are all the ceilings so low?”

[which is simply hi-larious lemme tell you]

But my favorite made-up question was from the co-worker who said the title of today’s blog post. I found it such a brilliant, off-hand “joke for the world’s smallest audience”.

But that begs the question: what about Frank Lloyd Wright’s second wife?

Those in the Wrightworld know

She wasn’t Mamah

Wright and Borthwick never married.

That was in part because Wright’s first wife wouldn’t grant him a divorce. I think that Wright would have married Mamah, despite the fact that he spoke a lot at that time about changing roles of marriage and women, due to their reading of Swedish feminist, Ellen Key. Key promoted the concept that women should not be the property of their husbands.

Yet, he understood at that time that he needed to place Mamah “under my protection” (as he said) at Taliesin.

The woman of the couple “living in sin”

would be in a terrible position to earn a living. The Dodgeville Chronicle newspaper reported in its January 5, 1912 article that Wright told them:

“The only circumstance which is the basis for the statement that I eloped with another man’s wife or deserted a wife or abandoned my children will be found in the fact that I neglected to inform the newspapers of Chicago of my intentions and the arrangements which had been made honestly with all who had any right to be consulted.” 

No: Wright’s second wife was Maude “Miriam” Noel.

While I touched on her once before, I will be writing about her in this post. That’s because her birthday is May 9 (she was born in 1869).1

She was born Miriam Hicks in a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee, and took the last name of Noel after her marriage to Emil Noel. They might have married when Miriam was 15.2 The two of them moved to Chicago, where Miriam had their three children. Miriam and Emil later divorced.3

She went to Paris in the first decade of the 20th century,4 and became a sculptress (although nothing of her work survives). Apparently, she left Europe at the start of World War I to return to Chicago and live with her daughter, Norma.5 Now, WWI starts in full force by early August, 1914, and the fire and murders at Taliesin happened on August 15. Noel read about the murders, which recapped Wright’s personal scandals (etc. etc., plus ça change).

The papers, then, were inundated with the stories of the lives lost at Taliesin.

While Wright wrote years later in his autobiography that he destroyed piles of sympathy letters, he did read some of those sent to him. That’s because, while he was receiving too many sympathy letters to count, there were still business correspondence that he had to attend to.

So, Wright instructed his draftsmen in Chicago to go through the letters and contact him with anything of importance. Apparently, one of the men thought he would be cheered by this letter of sympathy that said that, as an artist who had suffered loss, she understood where he was. Wright received the letter in December, 1914.

The architect acknowledged it, so Noel wrote another one. According to biographer, Finis Farr, in the second letter, Noel suggested they meet:

[A] few days later Miriam Noel sat opposite Wright’s desk…. He saw a woman who was no ordinary person, and who retained much of what had evidently been great youthful beauty. Richly dressed, with a sealskin cape, she had a pale complexion contrasting with her heavy dark red hair….

“How do you like me?” Miriam Noel asked.

“I’ve never seen anyone remotely resembling you,” said Wright.6

Wright was in a very delicate spot.

Years later, regarding his mourning for Mamah, he wrote that,

A horrible loneliness began to clutch me, but I longed for no one I ever loved or that I had ever known. My mother was deeply hurt by my refusal to have her with me. My children—I had welcomed them always—but I did not want them now. They had been so faithfully kind in my extremity. I shall never forget.

But strange faces were best and I walked among them.

I do not understand this any better now than I did then. But so it was. Months went by, but they might have been, and I believe they were, for me, a lifetime.7

IMO,8 Miriam, whether she planned it or not, was the perfect person for him at that point. Wright was probably among the walking dead in those months after August 15, 1914. And along came this sensuous stranger, who he probably engaged with physically very early. The emotions, and intensity, probably distracted him emotionally.

In fact, very quickly the two were plunged into drama. By August of 1915, she wrote him these letters that implied already that they were having emotional fights. If you want to see some of this, read the November 28, 1915 edition of the Washington Herald newspaper  (available via Chronicling America from the Library of Congress). The story includes part of one of the letters that Miriam had written in August 4. The writing is… turgid:

“I went to pieces at mention of the things that were going on at Taliesin. The disappointment was too horrible. I shall always go to pieces like this, I know. Your letter has just come. For God’s sake do not torment me by relating your life as it is at Taliesen [sic].

Fears Her Own Emotion.

            “Do not come. I cannot see you again. It will simply precipitate another outburst. Your carnivals at Taliesin are not for me. I do not want to be in them nor do I want to be told of them. A merry party of debauchers using your house for purposes too shocking for words—invited for that purposes. . . . if you write me again about it, I don’t think I shall be able to read the letter.

Why are you reading these “turgid” letters?

That’s because of a woman named Nellie Breen.

Nellie Breen was Wright’s housekeeper. Wright unfortunately left her in charge of his home on several occasions. At that time Breen got a hold of letters written by Noel to Wright. Due to this, Breen went to the United States Department of Justice and filed charges against Wright. These charges were for Wright’s violation of the Mann Act.

Created in 1910, the Mann Act

“criminalizes the transportation of any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”

Or: another thing I learned while working at Taliesin.

Breen said Wright was violating the Mann Act by bringing Noel into Wisconsin from Illinois. And Wright had the charges dismissed due to the work by the lawyer Clarence Darrow

– yes it’s true! Wright really was related to ever-y-thing!

Ok, coming back from that

Thanks, Clarence!

Wright would stay with Miriam, from this time, and into his work in Japan on the Imperial Hotel. I theorize that Wright’s responsibilities on his commission kept him busy enough to get along with Noel for periods of time.

Wright’s son, John, had a front row to the relationship:

I remember… when Dad soft-shoed into the drafting room and read her note to me. He thought it wonderful. I thought it terrible. Dad viewed the occasion so lightly, he smiled when the poetess faced him, he winked and the poetess chased him. He had an empty place with him and he felt a need to fill it up with something that is a little like love, or was it poetry? But, as the drama developed and the meaning of the poetry became clear to Dad, it was too late.9

The last of the relay race:

Wright finished the Imperial Hotel, and he and Miriam came back to Taliesin by August 1922. That November, his first wife, Catherine Lee Tobin Wright, granted him a divorce. Then Wright and Miriam married in November 1923.

The second Mrs. Wright left him by May of the next year (1924). The two began divorce proceedings, which were stopped when, apparently, Miriam found out about Olgivanna (who I wrote about regarding Taliesin’s 1925 fire).

Which ignited Miriam’s revenge.

That a surprise? Look at the damned letter in the Washington Herald that she apparently wrote after they’d only been together for 8 months!

And on.

The relationship between Wright and Miriam twisted and tangled up, losing Wright his clients, more dignity within the American press, and Wright ended up being thrown in jail in 1926.

Lastly

If you want to read about Miriam, there are the biographies by Meryle Secrest, Brendan Gill, and Finis Farr that I wrote in the Notes, below.

In addition, author TC Boyle made her into a hell of a character in his book,

or an annoying PITA, depending on your viewpoint; both of which are legitimate

The Women (Penguin Books, New York, 2009).

One of our staff members read it to us at lunch. I wrote about this when I related some of what we did at my old job during the Winter.

First published, May 2, 2023.
The image at the top of this post comes from the cover of the November 28, 1915 Feature Section in the Washington Herald newspaper.

Notes

1. Miriam Noel died on January 3, 1930.

2. Meryl Secrest Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, New York City, 1992), 238.

3. Brendan Gill. Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright (G P Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1987), 235.

4. Secrest, note on page 581. According to Secrest, Emil Noel died in 1911. Secrest didn’t write whether Emil and Miriam were living together at the time, or if Miriam had left for Paris without her husband in 1904.

5. Meryl Secrest. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, New York City, 1992), 237-238. I’ve taken the basic biography of Miriam Noel from Meryle Secrest’s biography. Noel appears in the chapter, “Lord of Her Waking Dreams.” That title is a modification of what Noel wrote to Wright in a letter.

6. Finis Farr. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (Charles Scriber’s Sons, New York, 1961), 146, 147. Farr wrote that David Robinson, the Office Manager, gave him the letter. Ok: so that’s the guy we can blame for Wright meeting Miriam.

7. Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 191.

8. and, if I haven’t said this before: the tenor of this post is pretty much all imo. Not that I’m wrong, I just don’t want you to think that this is the lasting authority.

9. John Lloyd Wright, My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright (originally published as My Father Who is on Earth (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946; Dover Publications, Inc., New York; 1992), 108-109.

Headline describing the April 20, 1925 fire at Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's Wisconsin home

What a Way to Begin

Posted on | by keiran
Reading Time: 5 minutes

Have you ever fallen in love with someone, were blissfully going along, and then

something crazy-bad happened

outside of the control of either of you?

It’s a test of your mettle. And you move beyond your fears and you are all there for that person. It’s a test and you’ve aced it, in this binding experience.

Well,

that is, in short, my completely unauthorized and totally subjective start of the story of Olgivanna Milanoff Hinzenberg (later, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright) and the dashing, brilliant architect, Frank Lloyd Wright1 in the aftermath of the fire that ripped through Taliesin on April 20, 1925.

So, that’s what I’m going to talk about in this post. Because the anniversary is right around the corner.

Let’s go back in history

In 1924, Frank Lloyd Wright was living back in Wisconsin, after his supervision and building of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo Japan, followed by designing and building in California.

He referred to most of these California homes as the Textile Block homes. Wright had a cool idea with these homes. They would be made out of specially-designed concrete blocks, that used material from the site. This way they would be less expensive, and use local material as the aggregate that would normally be displaced during construction. Plus, Wright was trying to think of a way to beautify the “gutter rat” (as he said) of concrete. They were “textile block” because of the way they were “knitted” together. He tried to do this once more in Oklahoma, but it wasn’t as easy or as inexpensive as he thought they would be.

Then, by mid-May, 1924

he was newly single after his second wife, Miriam Noel, had left.

About 6 months later, in late November, Wright went to Chicago and visited friend Jerry Blum. Wright says in his autobiography that Blum was a “diamond-in-the-rough painter” who had been “spoiled” by his parents giving him “too much easy money.”2 Blum brought Wright to an afternoon ballet performance in Chicago.

Afternoon ballet performances might not be the common thing nowadays, but then again, this was 1924. After all, my parents used to drive us to NYC in the late 1970s/early ’80s to see matinees on Broadway on Sunday afternoons. It was inexpensive, but mom made sure we all held hands because at that time, Times Square could be a little sketchy, to say the least.

The theater was packed and Wright and Blum sat in the box seats with one free seat. That’s where Wright and Olgivanna

had a meet-cute.

She was brought in to the only free seat in the theater just as the performance began. Wright wrote that he was drawn to this striking woman with no jewelry, and with dark hair worn straight down on either side of her face. He wrote in his autobiography in 1943 about this chance meeting:

Suddenly in my unhappy state something cleared up—what had been the matter with me came to look me in the face—it was, simply, too much passion without poetry… that was it, the best in me for years and years wasted—starved! This strange chance meeting was it… poetry? I was a hungry man.

An Autobiography (1943 edition), 5093

The photograph below is Olgivanna, apparently on her first visit to Taliesin:

Photograph of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright on her first trip to Taliesin in Wisconsin

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

She’s standing in front of the south wall of Taliesin’s Drafting Studio.

Shortly after the new year, Olgivanna moved into Taliesin with her daughter, Svetlana.

Then, just over 3 months later,

on April 20, 1925, Olgivanna, Wright, Svetlana, and a few others were eating in Taliesin’s dining room up on the hill. At that time, a fire began in Taliesin’s living quarters and would destroy them.

I wrote just about the this fire two years ago, in this post.

Olgivanna wrote about Taliesin’s 1925 fire, later published in her autobiography:

One evening while the three of us were having dinner in the little dining room up on the hill, separate from the residence, I smelled smoke. The telephone rang incessantly. The housekeeper and her husband did not bother about it and said later that they were not conscious that the smoke might spell fire. “There must be something wrong,” I said. “Don’t you think we had better find out? Frank,” I insisted, “I think we had better go down and see what is going on. The smell of smoke is growing stronger.”

            We stepped out and saw Taliesin in flames. We ran down fast. The neighbors began to arrive….

They all fought the flames for hours until rain came, dousing them. Yet, while the studio and offices were untouched, the living quarters, and almost everything in them, were destroyed mostly down to stone.

Olgivanna wrote that Wright had been so concerned about stopping the fire, that he argued against people removing objects from the building. So, he sat on the hill blaming himself for all of the lost art.

Continuing her story,

Olgivanna wrote:

I moved close to him and said, “We will get more works of art. We have each other. Nothing can stop us. We will rebuild Taliesin. you will make it more beautiful now. Let us look at it as a truly fresh beginning of our life, all new. Great opportunities lie before us.” “And,” I whispered to him, “I’m going to have a baby.”

…. He put his hands around me and said, “Nothing matters but you and me – now we will be welded together.”

The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright: From Crna Cora to Taliesin; from Black Mountain to Shining Brow, compiled and edited by Maxine Fawcett-Yeske, Ph.D. and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, D.H.L. (ORO Editions, 2017), 83.

After this, there would be lots of problems in the press, and with money, and, you know, that weekend Wright spent in jail.

Helped, or created, by problems with Miriam Noel.

But according to Olgivanna, her push (and optimism) immediately after the fire helped him start to rebuild. Talk about a test by fire, man.

 

First published April 19, 2023.
The newspaper headline at the top of this post is from the New Britain Herald and was printed on April 21, 1925.

Notes:

1 Re: Wright as “dashing” – his widow’s peak seen in the photo below is quite respectable. It’s got a flavor of Christopher Walken:

Frank Lloyd Wright with draftsmen outside of Taliesin.
Photograph published in Big Little Nobu. Right No Deshi Josei Kenchikuka Tsuchiura Nobuko

Back: left to right: Kamecki Tsuchiura, Nobuko Tsuchiura, with Silva Moser behind her husband, Werner Moser.
Seated are: Frank Lloyd Wright, Erich Mendelsohn, with Richard Neutra in the front.

2. Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, new and revised ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 508. I don’t know why Wright wrote that about Blum, but it’s amusing to read.

3. You may have read about this meeting in the book by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman: The Fellowship: The Unknown Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship. And, yes, I have opinions about it.

In fact, my major opinion is that if you haven’t read it, please don’t.

 
Taliesin II living quarters, approximately 1922

Taliesin II: the forgotten middle child of Taliesin

Posted on | by keiran
Reading Time: 7 minutes

The photo at the top of this page shows the living quarters of Taliesin: the portion of the building rebuilt after the fire of 1914 and destroyed in the fire of 1925. Someone took is around 1922.

Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin II:1

Frank Lloyd Wright named his home Taliesin, but later wrote that the building after the 1914 fire was Taliesin II, and that the building after the second fire (of 1925) was Taliesin III.

Taliesin II gets lost because Wright built it after the 1914 fire (caused by an act of violence). Then, in 1925, an electrical fire again destroyed it. Wright began rebuilding that summer.

The home that exists today was where Wright lived when:

    • He recovered his career in architecture
    • Started the Taliesin Fellowship
    • Designed some of his most well-known buildings (including Fallingwater), and
    • Became, apparently, the first “starchitect”

Although, as of 1939 his main studio in Wisconsin was his newly designed and built drafting studio at Hillside2 on the southern part of his Taliesin estate (which I wrote about in an earlier blog post).

So Taliesin II gets overshadowed

Also, Wright was out of the country a lot from 1915-1922 , working in Tokyo on the Imperial Hotel.

Still, by the time he finished with the Imperial Hotel, he had added two more rooms to Taliesin’s living quarters (on the ground floor and one above that). Then made that part of the building taller.

Here’s that part of the building later in the 1920s:

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

The Griffins took the photograph above on their trip to the United States in 1924-25. Compare this photo to the one at the top of the page: the chimney you see here on the right on the photo at the top of the page is the same chimney that you see on the left in the photo above. The photographer took this photo from the Hill Crown at Taliesin. On the right hand side of the photograph was a guest room. Today, that’s part of Frank Lloyd Wright’s bedroom.

The photo comes from the National Library of Australia

Take a look at this page, where you can get more information on the photo. It comes from the collection of Eric Milton Nicholls, architectural partner to husband and wife architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin.

Down on this page, you’ll see that I put hyperlinks to all of the photographs that the Griffins took of Taliesin.

In addition to the changes Wright did at his living quarters, he extended Taliesin to the west, adding a root cellar and ice house in 1916, and, by 1924, another horse stable, and also chicken coops, a granary and a pigsty.3

If Taliesin II had stood longer, more photographs would exist of it.

Plus, the reason for less photographs is that Wright was out of the country for large chunks of time from the late 1910s to the early 1920s. He didn’t return to live full time in the United States until 1922, after he had finished most of his work on Japan’s Imperial Hotel. Then things went sort of “sideways” with his longtime partner, Miriam Noel.

Wright and Noel married in November 1923.

Noel lived with him about 5 or 6 months as his wife. She left by April or early May the next year.

My personal opinion is that those two seemed to bring out the worst in each other. You can read about her in Meryle Secrest’s Wright biography (don’t be afraid of its number of pages—someone told me to skip the first 100). Another book is Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography, by Finis Farr.

Or you can read the fictionalized Miriam in The Women, by T.C. Boyle.

Wright met Olgivanna Milanoff about six months after Miriam left. Olgivanna, who married him in 1928, moved into Taliesin by January 1925.  On April 20 of that year another fire (probably because of bad wiring) struck Taliesin. It destroyed Taliesin’s living quarters. No one died, but Wright lost thousands of dollars worth of Japanese art. While he worked on rebuilding Taliesin, Noel found out about Olgivanna (now pregnant with her and Wright’s child). Miriam’s discovery resulted in more bad press and career problems (even before the stock market crashed in 1929).

            That’s the easy version of that story.  

Although, when you know where to look, you can find photographs online of Taliesin II.

I’d love to plaster this page with Taliesin II photos, but I think I’d get into trouble (copyrights and all that). So, I will show where you can find these images for the rest of my post.

Photographs of Taliesin II

There are a couple of places where can you find Taliesin II photographs in print:

By the way: if you get the “Global Architecture” book, or “Selected Houses v. 2”, trust me when I tell you that, while the cover of the books has a Wright-designed rug on the floor of the Taliesin living room, that rug was never there while he was alive.

Here are links to images on-line:

Eric Milton Nicholls Collection, National Library of Australia:

Nicholls worked in the office in Australia of architects Walter Burley Griffin and his wife, Marion Mahony Griffin.

The site shows seven photos taken on the Taliesin Estate: five show Taliesin II, one shows the dam and waterfall, and one shows the Hillside structure. Of these seven, the Griffins took some when they visited the U.S. in 1924-25 (like the photo I showed above). But one shows Taliesin II a little earlier: https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-150233395/view. It looks like it was taken around 1917, before the Griffins went to Australia.

Links to the five other photos:

If for some reason these URLs don’t work, go to the Library of Australia in the Nicholls Collection: https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-150140881

Go to Search and the Taliesin photographs are on Pages 821-840.

Here are other photographs, most at the Wisconsin Historical Society:

Exteriors

Interiors:

  • Taliesin II Dining Room: https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/record/image/W012PMH
    • The design of the ceiling shows this to be Taliesin II, not Taliesin I. A Taliesin tour guide told me this years ago (hi, Bryan).
    • Aside from the ceiling another thing that shows this is Taliesin II is the design of the chair in the foreground. This “room” is not surrounded by four walls; so, the living room “starts” when the ceiling drops down.
  • Another Taliesin II Dining Room photo (from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation website), https://franklloydwright.org/an-autobiography-in-wood-and-stone/1403-0038-dining-s/
    • It’s showing the same space as the first one above. Go back and forth between the two to see the differences.
  • Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin, sitting at a table near the window: https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/record/image/W012HH2
    • He’s sitting in Taliesin’s living room, along the east wall, north of the photos of the dining “room” above. So if you were sitting where he was, and looked to your left you would see the dining area.
  • Frank Lloyd Wright at the Taliesin Drafting Studio, 1924: https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/record/image/W012HDA
    • We know where he is because of the fireplace on the left hand side of the photograph. The photographer who took this photograph was probably standing in the space where all the drafting was done (which you see in the next photo).
    • One of the things I find silly about this photo is that Wright looks to me like he’s 4 feet tall.
  • Drafting Studio: https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/record/image/W012HFQ
    • The person closest to the photographer was Nobuko Tsuchiura, she was a draftsperson4 at Taliesin with her husband, Kameki, from the beginning of 1924 to the end of 1925.
  • Taliesin II Living Room: https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/record/image/W0135VZ
    • The TII living room is noted by the long rectangle at the fireplace.

First published on March 2, 2021

I don’t know who took the photograph of the Taliesin II living quarters that is at the top of this entry. I got a copy of it from someone who convinced someone else not to throw this out.

Notes:

1 Some say the words Taliesin I, Taliesin II, and Taliesin III shouldn’t be used. That using these numbers imply the building was completely destroyed twice with a new one built on top of the ruins. But the Taliesin fires only destroyed 1/3 of the building (but not its drafting studio or farm wings).

While I don’t commonly call the house that stands “Taliesin III”, I use those terms because Wright wrote them in his autobiography. Even if someone says he’s wrong, I’m not going to disagree with his choices because Taliesin was his house, and he was a lot smarter than I am or ever will be.

2 And, in a a moment of a snake-eating-its-own-tail thing, I first wrote the Wikipedia page about Hillside that I linked to. I’m using it here to back up my  assertion. I’ll try not to link back to this blog post if I update the Wikipedia page on how much work Wright did at the Hillside drafting studio.

3 He labelled it as a pigsty in a floor plan, but someone told me that Wright used it as a goat pen. Probably because even randy goats can smell better than pigs.

4 I asked people who’ve worked in architecture what term I should use to describe Nobuko Tsuchiura. I didn’t know if “draftsman” was proper, and “draftswoman” seemed odd. Someone suggested “draftshuman”, but I thought I should go with something that is more commonly used nowadays. “Draftsperson” was the most suggested so that’s why I put that here.