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.
