Tag: Taliesin changes

A drawing of the main floor of Taliesin, 1936-39. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), Number 2501.048.

The Chronologies—my detailed history of Taliesin

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The drawing above shows the main floor of Taliesin where Wright lived, 1936-39. This is one of my favorite Taliesin drawings. Why? Because it actually shows the space pretty much as it existed at that time.

In this case, I’m talking about Taliesin the building, not Taliesin the estate.

            I mean: the UNESCO site, not the 600-acre National Historic Landmark1

I wanted to write about that after putting up the link to a post on my LinkedIn page.

While doing that I re-read that I told you all I should “write about” my Taliesin Chronologies some time.

This was great, because

since I don’t answer “Hey Keiran” questions from Taliesin tour guides anymore,

I was looking for something new to write.

The compact version of the Chronology project is in my post, “How I Became the Historian for Taliesin“.

The longer version

involves

as I recall,

some tears and some hyperventilation.

Over 21 years ago, Taliesin Preservation (then doing Taliesin’s restoration2) was gearing up for the Save America’s Treasures project that put in comprehensive drainage at the residence in 2003-04

(that’s when we found the window).

So, in the summer of 2003 I was asked to start writing detailed histories of each space in Wright’s living quarters.

You see it in most of the photo below:

Black and white photograph from Taliesin's Hill Crown to its Living Quarters. April 1953
Taken by Richard Braun or his brother.
Property: Taliesin Preservation, Inc.

I concluded it was best for me to tackle Taliesin one room at a time.

Because I did not intend to write a detailed explanation of what we knew about the entire floor where Wright lived after he started his home,

And then

after 56 pages or so,

write

So, in the next year….

Repeat, repeat, repeat until you got to the year 1959…

My analysis began at the southern part of this floor, with the intention of writing a history of each room to the north.

I chose this path because there were generally fewer post-1925 changes made to this wing as you go north (towards Taliesin’s living room).

I researched and wrote the complete history

Or at least I hope I did

of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bedroom and bedroom area over about 6 weeks.

I mean,

As I’ve written before, the man often didn’t write what he was doing at his house in any detail.

Or sometimes he wrote some things that we don’t necessarily find out to be true.

Like, he wrote in his autobiography that after Taliesin’s 1925 fire,

I made forty sheets of pencil studies for the building of Taliesin III.3

An Autobiography in Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings: 1930-32, volume 2. Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, introduction  by Kenneth Frampton (Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York City, 1992), 303.

40 sheets? Where the hell are the 40 sheets, Frank?

There are some drawings, like the one below I originally referred to as the “crazy-making drawing”:

Black and white drawing in heavy contrast of main floor of Taliesin living quarters originally drawn in 1925 with freehand additions. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), number 2501.003.

That hell-spawn of a drawing you see is number 2501.003 at The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). Click on the drawing to see a more humane version of it online.

However, I have never come across what appears to be 40 preparation drawings.

Still, I had to start and, fortunately, the office had black and white photographs of some of the drawings, too, which were easier on my eyes. And I could magnify them without the computer scan dissolving into only pixels.

Since my first room was where Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bedroom is today (what he used as of 1936)4 and looked at the entire space from 1911 onward (even before a room existed).

I’ll put an early drawing of Taliesin III below. First I’ll show the whole floor he drew in 1925, then a detail of his bedroom:

Black and white drawing of the entire main floor of Taliesin as drawn by Wright in 1925. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), number 2501.001.

Main floor of Taliesin c. 1925. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, number 2501.003.

A detail from drawing 2501.003, in color:

Detail of Taliesin floor plan from 1925. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), Number 2501.001.

The room exists in the photo below under the shed roof beneath the arrow:

Black and white photo looking (plan) northeast at the Taliesin living quarters in summer. 1929-33. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), George Cronin collection.

George Cronin took this photograph 1929-33 while on top of Taliesin’s Hill Crown. Looking (plan) northeast.

In 1935, he built a fireplace for this room

in this photo online.

Then he took over the space a year later, and added a terrace as he made this into his personal bedroom. The photo you see in this link from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation has him sitting on the terrace with his daughters and members of the Taliesin Fellowship.

When Wright no longer lived in Wisconsin in the winter, he extended his bedroom onto the terrace in 1950, like you see below:

Color photo of Frank Lloyd Wright's Bedroom Terrace at Taliesin taken from Taliesin's Hill Crown in the summer of 1957. William Blair Scott, Jr. Collection, OA+D Archives

Photograph taken in 1957. William Blair Scott Jr Collection, OA+D Archives.

As a result of my work,

my “first go” at the detailed history of one room was over 100 pages long.

So you can see why I can walk through the rooms in my head in the past. 

5 or 6 months later,

I was on the third room

(out of 10 rooms on that floor).

Then

the Executive Director5 came and asked me to complete the write up of the history of all of the rooms in this wing of the building

over the wing’s three floors, and totaling 20 rooms

in 10 weeks.

While listening to her, I was probably nodding. When she said I had to finish all of this in 10 weeks, I probably took on an expression of,

well,

“terror” might best explain it.

Truth is,

that led me to, an hour or two later, putting my forehead on the desk and crying.

10 WEEKS!…

I went home early.

So, that night,

I decided to throw out anything about the rest of the rooms that took place before c. 1950 and combine a few spaces.

And I did it!

In early April,

in other words, 10 weeks later,

I presented the Executive Director with 12 documents that had a total (as I recall) of 821 pages.

At least 821 is the number I remember putting in size 56+ font on my computer desktop for a couple of days after completing the work.

Then a month or two later Carol directed me to write Chronologies for the rest of Taliesin (over 100 rooms).

 

 

First published December 17, 2024.
The drawing at the top of this post, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives Number 2501.048, is available here at JSTOR.

Notes:

1. wtf, Keiran: the estate is 800 acres. So much for this “Taliesin Historian” crap!

The NHL is for the 600 acres that Wright had and was owned by the Foundation when it received NHL status. In the 1990s, the Foundation bought the neighboring 200 acres, originally owned by Wright’s Uncle Thomas. This creates a land buffer.

2. In early 2020, the site owner, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, completed what it had been doing for several years: moving all of its preservation and restoration staff from Taliesin Preservation back under its management. The two organizations still work together, but care of the NHL is again under the Foundation.

3. Note to those who are convinced that Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t refer to his home as Taliesin II or Taliesin III until Henry-Russell Hitchcock wrote In the Nature of Materials in 1942: Wright referred to his rebuilt home as Taliesin III in his autobiography first published in 1932. I know ‘coz that quote above is from my own paperback copy of it, published in 1933. Sorry – it’s just an ongoing argument in my head. Carry on.

4. Some people might think it’s weird that the Wrights eventually had two bedrooms, but I know people who also made that choice, because they sleep better.

5. I referred to Carol here when I wrote about “The Album”.

Photograph by Keiran Murphy, September 1, 2003.

The Abandoned Stairway at Taliesin

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I was working on my Taliesin Book1 and thought up another change at Taliesin I should write about.

So today I’m going to write about what you see in the photo at the top of this post.

The photo shows

a stairway that used to take you from Taliesin’s Guest Wing (the first floor) up to its main floor, where the Wrights lived. If you popped through the black rectangle in the photo, you’d be in Taliesin’s Entry Foyer (below), about where the black outline is on the floor.2

Interior of Taliesin, looking toward Entry Foyer. Photograph by Keiran Murphy, September 3, 2003.

Finding that stairway was always a wild moment for people. To start with, you’d be on the first floor (which most tour guides aren’t casually allowed into), and be poking around the rooms (by invitation of course).

On the side of the hallway opposite the rooms, about halfway down, you’d see wooden doors covering up an alcove. If you opened them you’d see a couple of steps on one side, and a door-frame with no door. Beyond that, you’d see a stairway that leads nowhere.

This stairway is really old. It might go back to 1911. But if not, part of it definitely goes back to Taliesin II.

In 1911:

to get to these stairs, you’d walk outside to where the kitchen is, and take a right near the current “front door”.

See this post on how to get to the front door in early Taliesin.

I put a drawing from Wright’s archives below and drew a blue line on the drawing to show you how you’d walk there Taliesin’s Porte-Cochere:

Detail, Taliesin floor plan. June 1911. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1104.003.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1104.003.

So, if you walked into Taliesin at that time, you could go through that door, take a step or two, and there was a descending stairway to your right. That was the only way to Taliesin’s first floor for years.  

There aren’t any floor plans for Taliesin’s first floor, but you can see the steps in a section drawing I added below:

Taliesin section. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1403.013.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). This is a detail from drawing #1403.013. “1403” refers to Taliesin 2 (1914-1925), but this is Taliesin 1 (1911-14). In the right-hand side of the drawing, you can see plaster in the terrace above the stone foundation. That’s a T1 trait. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, the late curator of Wright’s archives, didn’t know this and thought for other reasons that this was T2. He had to know a lot about thousands of Frank Lloyd Wright drawings; while I only have to know what’s on the Taliesin estate.

After the first and second fires at Taliesin, Wright kept the steps in the same place. Following Taliesin’s 1925 fire, Wright expanded the descending stairway by about 4 inches.

You could tell that by looking at the stone:

Seven steps on this stairway (from the top down) are red, showing where the fire touched.3 Then there’s a break line on the left, and these yellow steps are undamaged.

The last time

the stairway appeared in that spot in a drawing was the January 1938 edition of Architectural Forum magazine. Here it is, below:

Detail of floor plan of Taliesin published in the January 1938 edition of Architectural Forum magazine. Following page 4.

Taliesin’s living room is on the left and Frank Lloyd Wright’s bedroom is on the right (“Master”). Apprentices executed the drawing in the fall of 1937. 

If you click

on the link for the Architectural Forum magazine ABOVE, it takes you to the copy of that magazine issue at ARCHIVE.ORG.

when you get there, the floor plan of Taliesin starts after page 4.

It’s kind of dark, but still: it ROCKS.

BACK TO

what I was talking about:

You don’t see those steps today because Wright changed them

starting in 1939.

Here’s what Taliesin Fellow Curtis Besinger wrote about it in his book, Working With Mr. Wright:

Toward the end of the summer [of 1942] Mr. Wright completed a change in the way one entered the guest wing below the house, a change which he had begun in the fall of 1939 when he had had the inside stair closed….

He had a stair built that was outside but under the cover of the roof connecting the house to the studio. This change in the entrance to the guest wing seemed to be in anticipation of the fact that the Fellowship, reduced in numbers, would all be living at Taliesin during the coming winter.

Curtis Besinger. Working with Mr. Wright: What It Was Like (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1995), 139.

Luckily, his 1939 change appears in a drawing in the book, In the Nature of Materials, 1887-1941: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Henry-Russell Hitchcock:

Detail of Taliesin floor plan, figure 271, from the book, In the Nature of Materials, 1887-1941: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Apprentices in the Taliesin Fellowship also executed this drawing not currently in Wright’s archives. This drawing is in the book, In the Nature of Materials, figure 271.

But those steps are no longer there, either.

Besinger explained the move in the same passage as above:

Of course this entrance was changed again several years later. It was made into an entrance that was more gracious, less steep, and better lighted.

Besinger, Working with Mr. Wright, 139.

They’re under the roof you see in the 1955 photo by Maynard Parker:

Black and white photograph taken at Taliesin in 1955. Maynard Parker, photographer. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 1266-016n.

You can see this view if you take a 2-hour Taliesin House tour, or the 4-hour Estate tour.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen

a photo from when the steps were in front of the Taliesin kitchen

(the “Little Kitchen”).

But, like many things at Taliesin, while Wright changed stuff, evidence of it was usually left behind.

We found this out during Taliesin’s Save America’s Treasures project in 2003-04. The contracted masons were taking the stone out of Taliesin’s Breezeway and it was like, lookey here!

Before:

Exterior of Taliesin, taken early in the work for Taliesin's Save America's Treasures drainage project from 2003-04. Photograph by Keiran Murphy, October 20, 2003.

Looking in Taliesin’s Breezeway at the door to the “Little Kitchen”.

And after:

Taken in Taliesin's Breezeway on November 17, 2003 during Taliesin's Save America's Treasures projecft. Arrow pointing at discovered change.

The Breezeway again. You can see to the edge of what’s been removed, where the top of the steps were revealed.

I’ve written about the SAT’s project before. With the found window, and the found floor—and other things—I should write that down sometime.4

Last thing:

those steps under the main floor are one of those things by Wright that you will only (mostly) be able to experience in your mind.

Because

they are now inaccessible.

The climate control work that the Preservation Crew has done included finding spaces where they could add chases for machinery to adequately heat and cool the building.

In fact, when staff and I went down to the Guest Wing in 2018 to see their work, I asked the Director of Preservation at Taliesin if we could still see them.

He opened the door to the alcove and, on one edge, you could see maybe 4 inches [10.16 cm].

STILL:

I showed a drawing with the steps in my posts about the night that future architect Gertrude Kerbis spent at Taliesin; and when I identified an old photo of the “Blue Room”.

First published November 1, 2024
I took this photo the first day I was taking photographs related to Taliesin’s SAT’s project.

Notes:

  1. It’s a continual project that I hope to finish one day.
  2. It was right next to where we found that floor in 2003 during Taliesin’s Save America’s Treasures project. I wrote about that in 2022.
  3. Read my “I Looked at Stone” post to find out why they’re red.
  4. I’ll put it into a book entitled, “That’s Not a Crack, That’s a Change: Adventures in Preserving Taliesin”.
Distant view of Taliesin in 1921-22. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), Photograph by Clarence Fuermann of Henry Fuermann and Sons.

The Musical-Note Retaining Wall at Taliesin

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We hear he liked music,

            if you didn’t know that, just trust me

but what is this thing about a Musical Note?

I’m talking about a retaining wall outside of Taliesin and I’m going to write about it today.

It’s called that because

It looks like two musical quarter notes touching end-to-end.1 You can see it in the historic photo at the top of this post, just left of center.

And you can see it in the modern-day photo below:

Exterior photograph taken at Taliesin showing stone retaining wall. Taken by Michael Pipher.

Used with permission.

The wall seems to have shown up after 1912, based on other photographs at the Wisconsin Historical Society. For instance, this really old photo of Taliesin doesn’t show this wall at all:

Photograph of Taliesin in sepia. Taken in the winter of 1911-12. Image number 29058. Wisconsin Historical Society ID number 29058.Looking northwest (plan direction) at Taliesin’s living quarters, 1911-12. Given the configuration of the building, it looks like this was taken during Taliesin’s first winter.

Then there’s one taken in 1912 by Clarence Fuermann of Henry Fuermann and Sons; and if you look closely at it, something has been built in the area, but not the retaining wall.

But we know he was doing something around there in 1913.

We know that because on June 19 of that year, The Weekly Home News2 stated that:

Work has started at Frank Lloyd Wright’s summer home. B.F. Davies3 has a crew of men laying water mains, which will supply all the buildings with water and also irrigate the gardens, vineyards and flower beds.

All of these things help to get water to the gardens, which Wright wrote in his autobiography that each court at Taliesin:

… had its fountain and the winding stream below had a great dam. A thick stone wall was thrown across it, to make a pond at the very foot of the hill, and raise the water in the Valley to within sight from Taliesin. The water below the falls thus made, was sent, by hydraulic ram, up to a big stone reservoir built into the higher hill, just behind and above the hilltop garden, to come down again into the fountains and go on down to the vegetable gardens on the slopes below the house.
An Autobiography, by Frank Lloyd Wright. In Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings: 1930-32, volume 2. Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, introduction by Kenneth Frampton (Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York City, 1992), 226.

This is the second time I posted this quote. The first time was about whether or not Taliesin had outhouses. You don’t know?! Well check it out.
Of course I’ve thought about that. I think I’ve mentioned on here that sometimes I walk through Taliesin in the past to relax myself before sleeping.

Still, we can only confirm that Wright built the “notes” (the circular parts at either end of the wall) during the Taliesin II era. One of those Taliesin II images is at the top of this post.

And,

those “notes” maybe may have been functioning cisterns. 

After all, that part of the hill faces mostly south, which means that it gets a consistent amount of sunlight, so it’s a place Wright, in the earliest years was trying to get vegetables grown while trying to make a go of it out here in the country.

A good Taliesin II photo of planting grids on the southern part of the hill, is below. I’ve pointed out one of the “notes” on the retaining wall:

Black and white photo of Taliesin 2 exterior; 1915-1921. Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives.

Looking (plan) northwest at Taliesin’s Living Quarters, 1915-21. This photo is printed in the book, Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings, volume 2, p. 145.

But I have no idea what he could have been growing in those grids.

            btw: anyone who knows me knows I have a black thumb.

Anyway,

So, if they were cisterns, Wright stopped using them. Probably, once he expanded his land holdings, he could grow vegetables in all the other spaces as he bought more surrounding land. Yet, while he eventually had no reason to use the stone structure, he still kept it. Like what you can see in the Taliesin 3 aerial photo, below:

Black and white aerial photograph of Taliesin. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), 2501.0183.Photo published in Frank Lloyd Wright: Complete Works, volume 2, 1917-1942, by Pfeiffer, Bruce Brooks (Taschen, 2009), p. 145.

When I first started giving tours, we walked up to the house and took a rest at that retaining wall to catch our breaths. While they sat on the wall, I’d invite my guests to look at the view while I started telling Taliesin’s story.

nowadays, folks on the Taliesin Estate tour still walk past there before going up to have their break.

In fact,

I remember plenty of days in my earliest years in which I repeated the myth about Taliesin’s 1914 fire that the murderer “sealed all of the entrances to the House“.

Information about this retaining wall probably isn’t common knowledge at Taliesin. But a lot of people can see it on tours, so there’s a bit of info for you. 

First published on October 1, 2024.
The photograph at the top of this page was taken by Clarence Fuermann of Henry Fuermann and Sons. I talked about the Fuermann photos in my post about the Flower in the Crannied Wall statue. 

Notes:

1. p.s.: I don’t think Wright ever referred to it that way, but that’s what we all call/ed it in Taliesin tours.

2. Spring Green’s newspaper.

3. I think I might have found B.F. Davies in the census. Wright wrote to a “Ben Davies” several times in the late 1920s.

Color photo taken at ground level under Taliesin's horse stable. Photograph by Keiran Murphy

Newspaper under Taliesin’s Horse Stable

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No, not Taliesin’s first horse stable (as seen in this post).

I’m talking about the other Taliesin horse stable. The one he added some time in the Taliesin II era (you know, “The Forgotten Middle Child of Taliesin“).

I think he stopped using the first stable when he started having draftsmen live with him. So he turned the first stable (and a carriage house) into apartments.

I found this newspaper while working on the history of the spaces at Taliesin.

I called these the “Chronologies”. These were narratives of the spaces in chronological order. These were of Taliesin’s rooms, spaces, or groups of rooms. In the end I created over 25 of them and gave them to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation so that my knowledge and information didn’t disappear into the ether….

These covered Taliesin’s Living Room and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bedroom, but also places with few photographs where no one ever lived. Like that second horse stable, the tack room next to it, or the rooms and under it… so other mechanical spaces.

Still,

they all add up to Taliesin having 101 rooms spread out over 7 wings.

And, sure: one of those rooms is a closet, but one-hundred-and-one is still a fun number to throw out there.

And one of Taliesin’s rooms was known as “the Kohler Room”. You see the outside of it in the photo at the top of this post. Its the room with four windows. It’s labelled as the Kohler Room on at least one floor plan: drawing #2501.046. They called it that because there was a Kohler generator there for additional electricity.

The space is also known as called “Gene’s Print Room” because it held the printer that Gene Masselink worked on.

Getting back to the point

If you look at the photo, you can see a rectangular window on the wall perpendicular to the Kohler Room. The window looks into a garage that was, originally, a throughway for the driveway. On the ceiling of that garage is 

the discovery

I remembered last week.

I was watching a video tour of Fallingwater that Boaz Frankel (of Next Pittsburgh) took. In it, Executive Director Justin Gunther1 takes Frankel through the unusual spaces at Fallingwater, like the kitchen, private offices, and the basement.

At just over 7:20 into Frankel’s video

Gunther shows a detail in the basement: its ceiling shows the impressions of the wood from the forms that were built to set up the concrete in the ceiling.

Gunther talking about the concrete detail reminded me of what I’m going to write about today: when I was writing about the history of that horse stable, I found a piece of newspaper embedded in the ceiling of the garage. The newspaper tells us when the pour was made.

When I was doing the “chrono” on the horse stable, my research sometimes took place in my head. Sometimes it took place while I peered at every drawing or bit piece of oral histories that I could think of.

Or, sometimes I did it by driving to Taliesin and walking around the spaces at Taliesin, trying to poke into everywhere I had the nerve to go

I was a little nervous because my balance sucked (even before my MS2).

We don’t know exactly when Wright added this stable, but it might have been part of the changes that the Baraboo Weekly News mentioned in 1919:

Story from Baraboo Weekly News on October 2, 1919

The title of the piece is:

Wright Adding to Property: Architect Making a Number of Changes to his Wisconsin Home Near Spring Green

In part, the note says that Wright was making “improvements”, and an “addition” which was “being built to the stable and a number of fine cattle will find shelter there[e].“

Since there was nothing added to Taliesin’s original stable, I think this points to the current Taliesin stable you can see in the drawing below.

Drawing executed in 1924 of the western wing of Taliesin. Drawing number 1403.023. Owner of drawing unknown.

Wendingen Magazine published the drawing in its issues devoted to Wright in 1924 and 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).

The horse stable is the vertical rectangle to the left of the “SHELTER”. The drawing shows that the drive went under it. That’s why you see “SLOPE UNDER STABLE” and “RAMP” which I labelled in red. Not only could you drive up to the house, but farmhands could drive a trailer under it and they could sweep the horse manure onto waiting wagon. 

Unfortunately,

that scoundrel didn’t even leave us any other drawings; this one comes from 1924.

And

you can also see the words “Cow Barn” on the drawing: the horizontal section 15.

Wright never built that, but I think this must have been what the Baraboo Weekly News was talking about. Well, regardless of how Wright used the area around the sable, he wanted to change how someone got to his home after Taliesin’s 1925 fire.

In Taliesin’s earliest years, you drove to the house by going up to the Porte-Cochere, like what’s in the photo below:

Photograph of Taliesin's porte-cochere seen in late fall/early spring
Photograph of Taliesin by Taylor Woolley in the Utah Historical Society, ID #695913

But after 1925 he eliminated the chance to do that.

Instead

People drove from the dam and waterfall around Taliesin’s pond at the base of the hill:

Aerial of Taliesin taken Feb. 7, 1934
From the William “Beye” Fyfe collection at The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives

then up the drive and under the horse stable.

Very few visitors took photographs at this part of the house. Fortunately, though, you can see the drive going under the stable in one photo I showed here before. I’m showing it again and lightened up part of it to show the drive. It where the added arrow is, too:

Photograph of a part of Taliesin taken on December 17, 1928. Photograph by architect George Kastner. Courtesy, Brian A. Spencer

Photograph by architect, George Kastner. George Kastner took this photograph on December 17, 1928. Brian A. Spencer collection

The date on the photograph is in 1928, but a piece of newspaper

told me when this drive was completed.

When the workmen poured the concrete (like Gunther at Fallingwater said) and built the wooden forms, they put the newspaper down to keep the concrete from curing on them. That’s how, when I was investigating the garage and snapped photos, I found the newspaper you can see below:

Newspaper crop. Photo by Keiran Murphy

Date from bit of newspaper. Photo by Keiran Murphy

October 1, 1926.

Wright wasn’t at Taliesin that day. At the time, he was hiding in Minnesota due to problems with his second wife, Miriam Noel. But obviously, he still had work going on at his house.

Wright changed this drive in 1939

and built a large parking court that still exists. Here’s my photo from when I researched the stable. The red arrow I added is at the garage:

Looking west on Taliesin's Lower Parking court. Photo taken in May 2005 by Keiran Murphy

The last I heard,

That whole wing is in pretty good shape, so it doesn’t look like this area desperately needs restoration or reconstruction.

 

 

Published May 13, 2024
I took the photograph at the top of this post almost 20 years ago, in July 2004. You’re looking (plan) east at the first floor under the horse stables. You walk past this stonework on one Taliesin tour: the 4-hour Taliesin Estate tour.

Notes:

1. Gunther and I sat close to each other at the conference in September when I received my “Wright Spirit award“. I regret not speaking to him.

2. My father once said to me, “Balance is not a gift God gave to you.” Which honestly made me really happy.

 

Photograph by Clarence Fuermann, 1926-28 of Frank Lloyd Wright's bedroom (now Taliesin's Guest Bedroom). Showing bed, furniture, and a door on the right to the terrace.

Another Taliesin mystery that I missed:

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I know you think I know everything

at least if I listen to my mom and oldest sister

But,

this post is where I come clean about something I missed about the history of Taliesin.

it’s only one thing in the pile of things that I know I have missed

and I say that and you don’t believe me1

But I’m not being modest. I say I don’t know everything because I’ve seen it happen.

For example:

In my post “A room at Taliesin“, I wrote how when I look at drawings I try to “wipe my mind of preconceptions”, which I put a note “2” on.

What was note 2?

Regarding missing things, I wrote:

“… I remember every damned time I think about the window found in Taliesin’s guest bedroom that was staring me in the face for years in photos. I’ll write about it another time to go over it in detail. It’ll be penance.“

I don’t feel like doing penance, but it is Lent

And while I’m not a practicing Catholic, I grew up with it. Remember the ashes on my forehead in my post, “Dune, by Frank Herbert“.

So, let’s do this

For years I worked as the historian at Taliesin.

In addition to answering questions for the public and guides, I tried to figure out the history of the spaces in hopes that I could help the Preservation Crew working on the buildings.

            I always felt lucky that I got to do this

When I didn’t have projects, I researched and wrote about the history of specific rooms, with the possibility of these things being of assistance when projects arose.

A big write-up was the “Slice” of Taliesin that I figured out.

In fact, all of this work was part of my chronologies listed for my Wright Spirit Award.

At the top of the list

Was my research about the rooms on Taliesin’s main floor.

the ones you see on Taliesin tours

One of these rooms

Was originally Frank Lloyd Wright’s personal bedroom. The photo of it while he and his wife slept there is at the top of this page.

The Wrights moved out of the room into their own bedrooms in 1936.2

How to we know this?

Fortunately, this information came out in an “At Taliesin” article. The article by apprentice Noverre Musson published on March 12, 1937 says in part that,

Last summer saw quite a bit of this seasonal growth….

            … [T]he opposite end of the house was found to be unsatisfactory in some ways.  This wing which is passed first by the entrance drive had always turned its back on the approach but now sprouted a new branch to meet all arrivals.  It took the form of a cantilever terrace high in the air commanding a magnificent view of the valley and provides outdoor sunny living space as complement to a sunny new bedroom, also developed from an old one, for Mr. Wright.

At Taliesin: Newspaper Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 1934-1937, edited and with commentary by Randolph C. Henning (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1991), p. 246.

Wright built the terrace for his new bedroom (seen in this post c. 1950), which he’d formerly used as a guest bedroom. His wife took the room next to it (you can see her room down the page in this post of mine).

Their former bedroom remained the Guest Bedroom throughout their lives (and beyond). You can see how he changed the room when you compare the photo at the top of this post with the one below taken by Ken Hedrich in 1937:

Photograph of Taliesin's Guest Bedroom taken by Ken Hedrich. Taken in 1937 Has a bed, chairs, furnishings, and a wooden door. Fire in the fireplace.

Looking northeast in Taliesin’s Guest Bedroom.3 If you walked through the door you would be in the alcove off Taliesin’s Living Room.

The photo also shows the underside of the room’s “loft”, like you see in this photo:

Photograph of the Guest Bedroom at Taliesin. Taken by Keiran Murphy.I took this photograph in 2006. I first put this photo in my post, “My March Madness“

When I first started giving tours in 1994, the north side of the Guest Bedroom had drywall so I didn’t think about anything immediately around the fireplace or that north wall. In the winter of ’95-’96, the Preservation Crew worked in this room to fix a leak.

Probably due to Wright’s experimentation and changes over time, the north side of the room had (possibly still has) a leak. They work on it, then water finds its way in through another avenue and makes its way back to leaking. In fact it was leaking in this photograph taken by someone on a House tour in 2018:

A photograph looking north in Taliesin's Guest Bedroom taken while on a tour. Includes the bed, several seats, and lamps. Has masonry in view. Photograph by Stilfehler.

But leaks are not what this post is about.

The thing I should have known (but didn’t) existed in the wall to the right of the leak. It’s a window that was found by the Preservation Crew on December 14, 2017. Taliesin’s Director of Preservation, Ryan Hewson (from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation) excitedly discusses this find on this video, here.

HERE’S THE THING:

I only knew it was there when,

            thank Frank,

John Jensen, then on the Preservation Crew, uncovered it.

Now, to be honest, the window was covered up after Wright’s death in 1959. This is what it looked like when I first started giving tours in 1994:

Photograph by Yukio Futagawa showing the corner of the Guest Bedroom in Taliesin. Has with beige walls, light fixtures and a mirror.

After her husband’s death, Olgivanna probably wanted to make the Guest Bedroom more private. Having that open window (and French doors opening to the Loggia on the south) makes the space very light.

And it makes it difficult to sleep if there’s anyone else in the Taliesin living quarters.

Still,

I should have known. After all, I’d studied Taliesin for years and knew I had to “clean” out my preconceptions. Yet I had only seen the window in photos after John Jensen uncovered it.

And I have to say that had John not been careful he could have damaged the window and its frame.

The window you can see in Ken Hedrich’s photo from 1937 should have alerted me. But I let myself think the the light was reflecting off of something else.

Maynard Parker took a photograph in 1955 and the lighting he used cast shadows so you can only see a window shade to the left of the fireplace:

Photograph of Taliesin's Guest Bedroom taken by Maynard Parker in 1955. Has a bed, furniture, and a view out of the French doors. In Huntington Hartford Library--Maynard Parker collection, 1266-047n.

This isn’t even the first time I’ve shown things I’ve overlooked.

Here was the post I wrote about the found window at Taliesin, and how I realized I hadn’t noticed a drawing of it for years. Of course it could also be that I mostly worked by myself.

Which led to a lot of great discoveries, but, probably, oversight.

 

 

First published March 2, 2024.
 Clarence Fuermann, of the firm, Henry Fuermann  Sons took the photograph at the top of this post c. 1926-28. It’s been published in a variety of places including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Selected Houses, volume 2. You can see it in the Journal of the Organic Architecture + Design Archives, here.

Notes:

  1. Again: that’s really directed at my mom and my oldest sister. 
  2. they got separate bedrooms probably because he slept less than she did. I’ve seen one photo of their bedroom when they shared it and the room has a drafting table in it. Makes sense, but if I were Olgivanna after awhile I’d be all right sleeping in my own bedroom after living with someone who would wake up and start drafting in the early-morning hours.
  3. I hear this was also called the “Big Guest Bedroom”.
Exterior photograph of Taliesin in snow. Published December 1911. Property: the Chicago Tribune.

Another Change at Taliesin

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This part of Taliesin in the photo above is the part that faces the Wisconsin River. A photographer for The Chicago Tribune took this on Christmas day, 1911.

The other night I was thinking about changes at Taliesin and remembered something I haven’t written about: the expansion of Taliesin’s “Front Office”. That is, in the room next to Taliesin’s Drafting Studio, Wright moved the wall to the north.

The First Time

this part of the building appeared in photographs was the photo at the top of this post. The photographer took it on Christmas day 1911, the day Wright gave a press conference that informed the world that Mamah Borthwick and he were living together at Taliesin.

I mentioned the press conference here, here, and here.

Drawing Time!

I’ve added some for you, so you know what part of the building you’re seeing in the old photo. The first drawing, #1104.013, is a nice rendition of Taliesin 1911-14. It’s in the book, In the Nature of Materials: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, 1887-1941, by Henry-Russell Hitchcock:

Taliesin Floor plan. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1104.013.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1104.013.1

And below is a closeup, with the Front Office near the middle of the drawing:

Taliesin Floor plan, The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1104.013

The drawing has the “TERRACE” under a roof, just like you see in the photo (the roof is noted by the arrow):

Exterior photograph of Taliesin in snow. Published December 1911. Property: the Chicago Tribune.

Here’s comparison:

This photograph I took below looks straight at the part of the building that had the “TERRACE” in the black and white photo:

Looking south at Taliesin from Office Terrace. Photograph by Keiran Murphy.

I took this photograph in 2004 while researching the Front and Rear Offices.2

The “TERRACE” was below the wall of rectangular windows behind the trunk of the White Pine tree.

btw: the pine trees (there were two) were removed in 2019. Don’t cry about it: one tree was dying (fixing Taliesin’s drainage took away a water supply); and each of the tree limbs weighed, like, 100s of pounds. Everyone in preservation at Taliesin felt nervous at every strong summer rainstorm.

Going inside

Wright never named the room, really. Moreover, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation staff didn’t call it the “Front Office” when I started at Taliesin.

           At that time (1994), Foundation staff used it as their business office.

The Foundation used the space until 1998 when the Tea Circle Oak tree fell (I wrote about that in this post). Here’s a photo from there:

Taliesin's Front Office. Photograph by Stilhefler in 2018.

Today I’m going talking about the part of the room on the right.

I didn’t work on the restoration of the studio after the tree fall,

—Why? at that time I was just a tour guide—

so writing this post gives me a chance to educate myself.

More drawings—

Here’s one showing the other side of the room. It shows that part of Taliesin you see today in the Garden Court when you take a tour:

Taliesin elevation. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1403.020.

Details on the drawing indicate that Wright probably drew it by 1913.

The drawing’s ID, “1403.020”, implies that it’s a drawing from Taliesin II. It’s the “1403”: 1914-25. But that’s wrong because of details in the larger drawing. That drawing can be currently (and until August 2024) be seen online here.

The windows you see in 1403.020 were added in 1913-14. Wright was adding the windows (and making other changes) when the photo below was taken:

Wisconsin Historical Society, Lynn Anderson collection, c. 1901-c. 1987. ID #68047. Looking northeast from Taliesin tower with drafting studio and courtyard in view. Possibly late fall.

The Front Office is to the left of the large chimney for Taliesin’s Drafting Studio.

I’m always happy when I look at this photo because of all the changes you can see going on. While Wright was always doing that, they were rarely caught in photos. Among things happening, there are the windows near the ground and the clerestories in front of the chimney.

If you want to know what a clerestory is:

it so happens I wrote a post about what looks like one at Taliesin (BUT IT’S NOT).

Anyway, back to the Front Office:

in that drawing I added above with the red, you can see Wright labelled the room as “Library”.

And in 1911, when draftsman Taylor Woolley took the photo below, you can see bookcases against the wall on the left:

Taken by Taylor Woolley in Wright's Taliesin drafting studio, 1911. Looking west.

This photo’s also in my post, “Don’t Touch That Stone“.

But he changes his mind and puts in the windows. He designs furniture to be put elsewhere to at least (maybe?) put drawings. The collections coordinator for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation noted there were several pieces of furniture, below:

Taliesin section drawing. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), 1104.011.

And

This drawing says “1104.011”, when it’s actually Taliesin II (“1104” means Taliesin I: 1911). 

Although, here former Archives Director Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer made the mistake.

There’s a photo looking at a drawer, or drawers. It’s been published a few times. I took a photo from the book, Frank Lloyd Wright, Selected Houses, v. 2: Taliesin, then put in an arrow pointing at the drawers:

Photograph taken in Taliesin drafting studio toward Studio alcove. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

 

It looks like Wright gobbled up a bit of the terrace by 1916, where he put that set of drawers. He added a flat roof because he enclosed the terrace when expanding the room:

Taliesin Roof plan. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1403.019.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, drawing #1403.019.

I added the red outline to highlight the roof, terrace, and descending stairs. So, he pushed out part of the room (expanding it), then added the flat roof on top. There was a door under that roof, so you could walk out to the terrace, then down the stairs.

So he did name the space!

Or part of it. He thought this area was part of the studio, and this was the “studio alcove”. He apparently kept it this way into the 1920s, judging from a later drawing, #1403.023:

Taliesin Floor plan, The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #1403.023

The drawing was originally published in Wendingen Magazine (in Holland) during issues it published on Wright in 1924 and 1925.

I’ve posted parts of this drawing before: here, here, and here (I like using it because that bastard didn’t create many drawings for all the changes he made).3

It occurred to me that, by 1924 he perhaps added two “studio alcoves” for the draftsmen that he wanted to live at Taliesin for extended periods of time.

After all,

by the summer of 1924, his personal life was looking up in (what he thought was) the end of his relationship with his second wife. Little did he know how things were going to change.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). Wright standing at car outside of Taliesin. Mid-to-late 1920s.

This is a photo of Wright standing outside Taliesin apparently in the 1920s when he’s got kind of Knickerbocker-vibe.

actually, I just looked at the link I put up there: those don’t “have” a Knickerbocker look; those ARE Knickerbockers. I don’t know whether I’m proud or slightly disturbed that I instantly remembered that word. I can only imagine he was wearing those long black socks to keep the ticks at bay. 

He’s standing in the space that became Taliesin’s Lower Parking Court. The Front Office is out of the photograph, on the right. A recent photo of the area where he’s standing in the photo is here on Wikimedia Commons.

 

The photograph at the top of this post is printed it with a story “Flashback: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin was a refuge for illicit romance….” and was printed December 4, 2020.
Originally printed January 20, 2024.

Notes:

1. In the spirit of education, I’ve used those drawings from ARTSTOR a LOT on this site. Because I don’t want the fuzz (really, lawyers demanding money) coming after me. Hopefully I’ll figure this out because the site is supposed to be retired in August 2024. LATER: all former ARTSTOR images are now on JSTOR.

2. I have a feeling that some of you might be jealous and want to go onto that balcony. I’m no expert, but from a liability standpoint I can’t imagine anyone on a tour (or just visiting) being allowed up there. Because the edge of that balcony doesn’t even come up to my knees. If you fell off you’d either drop about 12 feet onto a concrete terrace; or 40-to-50 feet down the hill on the north side of the building.

3. While some of #1403.023 is incorrect, it’s not (as far as I know) in this area. You can always write me if you’re curious about what’s inaccurate.

Frank Lloyd Wright and Alexander Woollcott standing outside of Taliesin. Photograph in the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Edgar Tafel collection.

A room at Taliesin

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Alexander Woollcott with Frank Lloyd Wright outside of Taliesin. 

a room that existed before we (or I) knew it existed.

I’m going to write about my discovery of that room’s appearance today. It’s the room with the windows that you see behind Wright, Woollcott, and the birch trees.

It was thought that the room was originally designed for Wright’s youngest daughter Iovanna (born to Olgivanna in December 1925).

Meryle Secrest wrote in her Wright biography that in March 1925, Wright and Olgivanna “made an impulse decision to start a family of their own.” [Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography, 315]

Secrest gave no evidence for this “impulse decision”. Obviously something impulsive happened and Olgivanna was young and pretty, so I’m like, “Yeah… Sure.”

Here’s where it is:

The room is one floor above Olgivanna’s bathroom, so you walk by it as you go into her room on a tour through Taliesin.  

FYI: The bathroom was dismantled, so it’s not on tours.

You can see the outside of Iovanna’s sitting room when you’re on the Hill Crown at Taliesin. Wright added the parapet1 which you can see in this photo I took:

Looking at Taliesin living quarters on a sunny day in spring. Iovanna's sitting room is behind the parapet. Photograph by Keiran Murphy

Taliesin Fellowship apprentices did the construction of the rooms in 1933-34. Abe Dombar wrote about it in this February 9, 1934 article:

Two new rooms were added to the pageant of Taliesin’s 40 rooms merely by lowering the ceiling of the loggia and raising the roof above it to get the most playful room in the house.  The boys call it a “scherzo.”  This is little eight year-old Iovanna’s room.

Several new apprentices, with the aid of two carpenters, were working on the job continuously from the architect’s first sketch on a shingle to designing and building in of the furniture.  And the girls made the curtains.  In celebration of the completion of the room we had a “room-warming” in the form of a surprise party for Iovanna. 

Abe Dombar. “At Taliesin,” February 9, 1934. Reprinted in At Taliesin: Newspaper Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 1934-1937, ed. by Randolph C. Henning, (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), p. 20-21.

It makes you think:

While kids may have been more hardy in the past, that is a lot of space for a little girl. Here’s one drawing that shows it:

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #2501.008.

Although the rooms in the 1930s were smaller, there was still a bedroom, sitting room, and bathroom.

That makes sense

when you think of the playroom he scaled down for his kids in his first home in Oak Park, Illinois.  

I was told years ago that it was originally scaled down for Iovanna when she was 8, but I’ve never seen an interior photo taken at that time.

Not that this would matter anyway. Remember: Wright’s building scale already messes with your mind.

However,

The number of rooms is also due to things happening in the Wright family.

See,

when the Wrights started the Taliesin Fellowship in 1932, Olgivanna’s oldest daughter, Svetlana (“Svet”), was 15. So the next summer, Wright designed those bedrooms for both Svet and Iovanna (then 7 years old).

But things got complicated.

One of those complications was related to one of the first Taliesin Fellowship apprentices: Wes Peters.

No doubt

Olgivanna made sure to keep her pretty young daughter away from all of the architectural apprentices in 1932 and ’33. But it was all intense and, even if you had them working 15 hours-a-day, young is young and those two (Wes and Svet) fell in love.

They wanted to get married and Svet’s parents said absolutely not.

And, yes, Frank Lloyd Wright fell in love with Catherine Lee Tobin when he was, maybe 19-20 (Kitty was 16-17); and Olgivanna got married when she was 19, but the marriages for those two ended in divorce, so….

But, come on:

check out the screenshots from the film apprentice Alden Dow made in 1933, the first summer those two knew each other. They’re so cute:

Screenshots of William Wesley Peters and Svetlana Wright Peters in 1933 film by Alden B. Dow.

The movie is the property of the Dow Archives, but you can see it in sections through this link.

So, in September 1933,

Wes and Svet left the Fellowship, even though Svet couldn’t get married until she was 18. You can read about their history in this book, “William Wesley Peters: The Evolution of a Creative Force“.

Svet’s age (15 or 16), gets me scandalized, but then again: I’m no longer a teenager.

I mean: I was completely bummed when—in grade school in the spring of 1980—I found out that Sting was 28 years old and married. But then I realized that, “uhh… Keiran? Sting’s not waiting for you.” [I may remember this moment because I was surprised by that grown-up thought]. 

You can read my teenage thoughts about Sting in my post: “Dune, By Frank Herbert“. I wrote this about the second installment of the Dune movie by Denis Villeneuve that came out in March 2024.

To get back to Iovanna’s bedroom:

For years, we thought that before that area had rooms and a bathroom, there was just a mezzanine up there that ended above Taliesin’s Living Room.

You can see it at the top of this post.

And that it ended on the other end just over Wright’s bedroom.

To picture it, you can see part of the mezzanine in this post.

However, in 2004-5, I was asked to research the entire history of that floor up there.

So I did what I usually try do:

I try to wipe my mind of preconceptions2 and look at photos. And so, for the the first time, I saw something earlier photos at Taliesin that shouldn’t have existed at that time. I saw in these earlier photos a chimney flue for the fireplace that’s in Iovanna’s Bedroom. Among other photos,3 the flue appears in one taken in 1928:

Photograph by architect George Kastner of Taliesin. Taken on November 11, 1928.

This photo is published on p. 4 in the Journal of the Organic Architecture + Design archives, Vol. 7, no. 3, 2017 in the article for that issue, “Desert and Memoir: George Kastner and Frank Lloyd Wright,” by Randolph C. Henning.

That flue I pointed out goes to only one fireplace: the one for Iovanna’s Bedroom. Yet George Kastner took this photograph in 1928, 5 years before the apprentices even started working in that area. So it didn’t match what I thought I knew. I thought that, before 1933, this stone mass was simply… stone. That it was like the stone mass that’s on the south side of Taliesin’s living room. That this part was only stone.

Like what was in Hillside’s Dana Gallery on the Taliesin estate that I wrote about in “Truth Hiding in Plain Site“. That it was mostly stone before the Taliesin Fellowship.

But since I couldn’t deny what was in photographs,

I got in my car and drove to Taliesin to see what I could find.

I went upstairs, looking for evidence that things had changed. First thing I noticed was that the stone was executed at one time, as opposed to being changed later. See my photo of the fireplace below:

Interior photograph of fireplace in Iovanna Lloyd Wright's Bedroom. By Keiran Murphy on 9-24-2003.

Contrast this

With the fireplace in the adjacent room. In 1933-34, Apprentices built that fireplace out of the existing chimney. And it certainly looks like it.4 

I took the photo below where you see the side of the chimney. On the left hand side you see stone that used to be outside. The red stones were those that went through the Taliesin fires in 1914 and 1925. The lighter stone on the right is stone placed there by apprentices when they built the fireplace mantelpiece:

Side of the chimney in Iovanna Lloyd Wright's sitting room. Photo by Keiran Murphy in 2003.

 

After looking at the two fireplaces, I thought about that “At Taliesin” article. In the article, Abe Dombar says,

Two new rooms added to the pageant of Taliesin’s 40 rooms….

But there weren’t two rooms on that floor in 1934. There were three: Iovanna’s bedroom, the bathroom, and the sitting room (the room at the newer fireplace).

In fact, the drawing doesn’t label Iovanna’s bedroom. It only labels “Iovanna’s room”, which is the sitting room with the new mantelpiece.

And one more thing: the bathroom

You can see the bathroom in the plan above. When I started thinking maybe Iovanna’s Bedroom was there before 1933-4, I thought how it doesn’t make a lot of sense for Wright to build a bathroom out of line with the bathroom one floor below. Often bathrooms are in line with each other because this makes laying the plumbing lines easier.

yeah, yeah, yeah: we can talk about how impractical Wright could be as an architect, but at Taliesin he had to live with whatever he designed. And bathrooms are expensive, even if the labor was free….

Moreover,

in 2007, I looked at Taliesin’s drawings for real in Wright’s archives. Luckily for me, Taliesin’s estate manager suggested I take photocopies of Taliesin’s drawings so I could take notes on what I saw in them.

In drawing #2501.007, I saw the word “nook” in pencil with a line going about where Iovanna’s Bedroom was:

Elevation of Taliesin. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). #2501.007.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #2501.007.

I can’t tell you when 2501.007 was drawn, but the details say 1925-32. I think that in the early Taliesin III period, what became Iovanna’s Bedroom was originally a sitting room, a “nook”, that could be used as a bedroom if needed.

alas, we don’t have Wright’s design for the couch/bed simplicity of a futon frame

3 more things:

coz: in for a penny, in for a pound

One Taliesin drawing shows the “sash details” of the windows in Taliesin’s Living Quarters. This is drawing #2501.032. See the detail of it below:

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). 2501.032.

The three windows I pulled out from the drawing match the three windows currently on the east wall of Iovanna’s Bedroom. The drawing labels these windows as being for—not a clerestory or above the mezzanine, but—”Gallery Bed Room”.

Also, in 2006

The Taliesin Preservation crew worked in a closet in Iovanna’s Bedroom and found remnants of pipes going through the floor above Olgivanna’s bathroom. I asked what those pipes could be, and one crew member (I forget who) said they were small enough to be used for a sink, but not a toilet or tub.

Wright could have had this little room up there and if someone were just staying overnight, they could use the sink in the morning to brush their teeth.

One of those people might have been architect Philip Johnson

See, back in the 2000s someone emailed me at work. He was working on a book of interviews conducted by architect Robert A.M. Stern with Philip Johnson.

Stick with me here

At one point, Stern talked to Johnson about Wright:

Robert A.M. Stern: And in researching for the book [on the International Style] you also went to visit Wright?

Philip Johnson: …. We went to see Wright in 1930 in Taliesin East [sic].5 I stayed overnight in the part that’s now all closed in and ruined, in the upper terrace there, just above the big room. We visited and had a great time and we realized that he was a very, very great man.

The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews with Robert A.M. Stern (The Monacelli Press, printed in China, 2008), 41.
The book’s price tag is over $40, but I’m that crazy: I got the book on sale for $10.

He mentions “the big room”. In 1930, there wouldn’t have been any other “big room” on the Taliesin estate except for the Taliesin Living Room.6 He was wrong about the placement of the room on that floor, but there was nothing else up there in 1930 that matches it.

OK!

I hope I explained what I found/think.

That is:

When Wright rebuilt his living quarters after the 1925 fire, he built a mezzanine above the main floor that ended in a small room with its own fireplace, three windows on the east wall, and windows (or possibly French doors) on the other side.

The windows above and behind where Alexander Woollcott and Frank Lloyd Wright are standing in the photo at the top of this post might have looked into this “nook”.

 

The photo at the top of this post was taken 1937-41 and published in Apprentice to Genius: Years with Frank Lloyd Wright, by Edgar Tafel, p. 179.
First published October 22, 2023.

Notes

1. He expanded the space and added the parapet in 1943 for an anticipated visit by Solomon Guggenheim (of the Guggenheim Museum commission) and curator, Hilla Rebay.

2. Which I remember every damned time I think about the window found in Taliesin’s guest bedroom that was staring me in the face for years in photos. I’ll write about it another time to go over it in detail. It’ll be penance.

My Penance Post is at “Another Taliesin mystery that I missed“

3. I think I first noticed it in a photo that I can’t show because I don’t think it’s ever been published. It’s Whi(x3)48218, an aerial photograph in the Howe Collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

4. Her personal spaces were featured in a Wright Virtual Visit in 2021, which is on Facebook, here.

5. Johnson was wrong on when he and Hitchcock visited Taliesin. According to Wright on Exhibit, the book by architectural historian, Kathryn Smith, they came in June 1932. Wright on Exhibit: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architectural Exhibitions, by Kathryn Smith (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2017), 83.

 6. It wasn’t at Hillside because Johnson said they visited it and while it was a great building, he described Hillside in 1930 as “a total wreck”.  

Black and white photograph looking southwest in Taliesin's living room. Taken by Maynard Parker in 1955. In view: wooden furniture, plaster on walls, artifacts on tables.

Here’s another change at Taliesin:

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Maynard Parker took the photo at the top of the post. It’s Taliesin’s Living Room and he took it in 1955 for House Beautiful magazine’s issue devoted to Wright.

In this post I’ll be writing about the horizontal wood shelf in the center of the photo.

FWIW:

if I haven’t told you already, I’ve never tried to figure out why Frank Lloyd Wright made any changes at Taliesin.

Well: the fact that his house has a kitchen, bedrooms and bathrooms is self-explanatory…,

but I’m talking about experiments or changes. Like Wright adding the skylight in the “Little Kitchen” to show Solomon Guggenheim how the natural lighting at his museum would work.

Anyway,

For years, there was a door just to the left of where you entered the Living Room. It brought you to the kitchen (now known as the “Little Kitchen”).

Wright had that door from the kitchen into the Living Room all the way back to the Taliesin I era (1911-1914). At that time the kitchen had two doors: one opened into the the living room and the other opened into the hallway.

You can see these doors in the drawing from 1911, below. The drawing shows Taliesin’s main entry, the kitchen, and the Living Room:Floor plan of Taliesin living room and kitchen drawn in 1911 by Frank Lloyd Wright. Drawing 1104.003. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art } Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

Here’s another drawing from 1925 (after the second fire) that shows you the same doorway:

Floor plan of Taliesin's living room executed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Drawing number 2501.001, so may be the first drawing did of his house following the April 1925 fire. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, drawing #2501.001.

Then

in 1943, Wright got the commission for the Guggenheim Museum and then prepared for Solomon R. Guggenheim’s visit to Taliesin.1 So, at that time Wright made many changes to Taliesin. I’ve always thought that perhaps Wright made changes in order to entice the new client.

It might be part of the other changes Wright made in the early 1940s that I wrote about over a year ago.

But

these are where I’m writing about different changes in this part of the room in the early 1940s.

These were changes related to the connection between the Little Kitchen and the Living Room.

Here’s a photo with an arrow pointing at the door into the Little Kitchen.

Black and white photograph looking southwest in Taliesin Living Room, 1937. In view: wooden chairs and funiture, light limestone walls. Photograph has an arrow pointing at a wooden door.In the fall of 1937, Ken Hedrich (of Hedrich-Blessing photographers) took photos all over Taliesin and the Taliesin estate; while brother Bill took photos of that new Wright building designed over a waterfall.

By the way: I always struggle to remember which Hedrich brother took photos at Taliesin (Ken) and which one took photos at Fallingwater (Bill). I almost think I should tattoo “Ken Hedrich took the Taliesin photos” on my arm…. Although today I had to look for the answer from my own blog (the post “Hillside Drafting Studio Flooring“)…. So I’ll just keep this website and blog going for… well until I’m in my late 90s at least.

Wright expanded the Little Kitchen in 1943. When that work was complete, the large door near the fireplace no longer went outside; it just opened into the kitchen.

Since he didn’t need the door into the Living Room any longer, Wright just had the apprentices veneer the original door with stone. They did a pretty good job matching, too.  You wouldn’t really know it have been a door there unless you already knew.

Here’s a photo with stone where the door was, and the shelf in place:

Black and white photograph of the southwest corner of Taliesin's Living Room. Photograph taken by Maynard Parker in 1955.Apparently, after he veneered it with stone, he put in the shelf you can see there. Because I have never seen a photo with the stone, but no shelf.

While he might have just wanted that shelf there to draw your eye, or complete the design or match the trim on the south wall (that you see on the left-hand side of the photo);

But,

I think it’s for another reason.

Since a wooden door had been in that spot since 1925, the shelf under the bottom of the cabinet might really have been put there just to keep visitors from trying to exit the old way: the now non-existent door.

I thought that, if someone had stayed as a guest at Taliesin a couple of times, maybe they’d gotten used to getting a snack at night from the kitchen while staying in the Guest Bedroom? So, maybe that shelf kept them from walking smack dab into a wall?

Now,

if you ever took a tour at Taliesin from 1994 until 2018, you walked into the Living Room and that corner was drywalled with gold paint on it. So the corner looked like what you see below:

Interior of Taliesin Living room. In view: wooden furniture, limestone walls, and Asian artifacts. Photograph from 1992.

The photo above is what that corner looked like when I first started working at Taliesin.2

Since the gold in that corner was determined not to be original to Wright’s lifetime, the drywall was removed. “Stilfehler” took a photograph of the corner on a tour and loaded it onto Wikimedia Commons:

Photograph of the Taliesin Living Room with wooden built-in furniture and limestone on the walls. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

First published August 26, 2023.
The photograph at the top of this post is also in the Maynard Parker collection at the Huntington Library. It’s online here.

Notes:

1. I thought for years that Wright did all these changes in anticipation of Guggenheim’s visit. You would, too, if you’ve read Working With Mr. Wright: What It Was Like­, by Curtis Besinger. But in 2012, the diary of Priscilla Henken was published. This was a daily diary that Henken wrote in from October 1942 to late August 1943. On page 195 of the diary, July 18, 1943, Henken wrote that the Wrights, who had been away for days from Taliesin, were back and that: “The contract is for a million dollar museum for non-objective art, sponsored by Solomon Guggenheim….” So: that changed things.

2. And there were more rugs on the floor. That’s not original either. They’re rugs from the collection, but they weren’t there. Bruce Pfeiffer (former Wright apprentice and the original Curator of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Archives) used to say that many rugs in the Living Room made it look like an Asian rug shop. Well, former Wright apprentice John de Koven Hill was the one who “okayed” their location. Since “Johnny” joined the Taliesin Fellowship long before Bruce he outranked him, I guess. By the way: the photo shows the very end of the inglenook in the Living Room (it’s under the metal Asian statue). That’s got gold, too. Was that original? Yes it was. And I’ve been told it’s gold leaf.

Black and white graphic of the Hill Tower at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin.

A recommended book: At Taliesin

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The graphic at the top of this page is one of the designs created by the Taliesin Fellowship for their weekly “At Taliesin” newspaper articles that ran from 1934 through late 1937. Architect Randolph C. Henning found these “At Taliesin” articles and put them into a book that I want to write about today.

The book is

At Taliesin: Newspaper Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 1934-1937, edited and with commentary by Henning (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1991). I included it in the list of books I wrote about awhile ago, but I’ll concentrate on it in this post.

In part because, this book  contains essential primary material about:

  • Frank Lloyd Wright
  • Taliesin, and
  • The Taliesin Fellowship.

Before this book, the “At Taliesin” articles were relatively unknown. Henning wrote in the preface that when he decided to search for them, he thought he would find several dozen.

Or 100 “at most”.

In the end, he tracked down 285 of them. He transcribed them, edited them, and also wrote commentary on and around them. 112 articles are in the book.

The book was only published once,

in hardcover. However, many copies are still available online and elsewhere for purchase. Online aggregate www.abebooks.com is somewhere I often look for books. I typed in the title found this  listing with over 30 copies.

And you could borrow it from your library.

I’m recommending it now because

once you get past its cover which looks like a college textbook

It’s actually a fun summer read.

Most of the articles fit on one to two pages. And many are just a trip. I mean that in a good way: many are a total blast.

As I wrote before:

“At Taliesin” “demonstrates why these kids in their early 20s would move out to rural Wisconsin to live and work with a man old enough to be their grandfather, and like it.“

Their insanity reminded me that, yes, there was a time in my life in which I spent 4 to 5 hours on a Friday or Saturday night on a roof playing drums.

I was not a drummer. I was 21 years old.

Oh, that time passed quickly.

That’s just a year younger than architect Cornelia Brierly when she wrote this “At Taliesin” article in May, 1935:

Screen grab of an "At Taliesin" article published in the Wisconsin State Journal on May 22, 1935.

The whole article is on p. 125-127 of the “At Taliesin” book.

Secondly,

the book is a source about the life and culture of the Taliesin Fellowship. The authors wrote about things going on at Taliesin, but also, as Cornelia did, they relayed their thoughts on new ideas.

Most of the articles

end with a listing of movies that were to be shown at the Hillside Playhouse to the public on the coming Sunday afternoon. Because the “At Taliesin” articles weren’t just philosophical treatises: they were a bid by the Fellowship to entice an audience to come out and pay 50 cents for a movie and cup of coffee.1

The articles also gave weekly updates on building activities at Taliesin.

The July 4, 1935 article

tells you construction they did at Taliesin:

Fortunately, Taliesin is in an ever state of change.  Walls are being extended and new floors are being laid to accommodate our musical friends.  We are trying out the new concrete mixer – which marks a new day in our building activities.

Edgar Tafel. “At Taliesin”, p. 140.

I wrote about this change in my post, “Preservation by distribution“.

Thirdly:

The book has 38 fantastic photographs. Like the one below:

Black and white photograph looking southeast in the Hillside Dana Gallery

This is the fireplace in the Dana Gallery at Hillside. The photo is on page 201 of the “At Taliesin” book. I put this image in my post, “Truth Hiding in Plain Sight“.

and 20 drawings:

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

The image above comes from 154 of Apprentice to Genius because I couldn’t get a good copy of the one on pages 6-7 from the “At Taliesin” book.

In addition, the “At Taliesin” book has 31 articles by Frank Lloyd Wright. In one, he

actually

compliments someone else’s architecture!2

Wright wrote in the August 9, 1935 article that:

…. In their jail and courthouse Pittsburghers own a masterpiece of architecture.  A great American architect H.H. Richardson of Boston built the building.  He was a big man in every way and his bigness was of a kind that not only marks a distinct epoch in American architecture but commands the respect of the civilized world. 

Frank Lloyd Wright. “At Taliesin”, p. 149.

In addition,

Henning wrote overviews for each year that the Fellowship wrote articles: 1934 to 1937. In the introductions to these chapters, he describes what was going on with the group, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the world at large.

Plus

Henning included articles about Taliesin written in the 1930s by professional writers. These writers came from the newspapers in Madison. They were invited out to Taliesin on the weekends. One writer, Betty Cass3 wrote about the “affair of the stringed instruments”. The article is a silly (true) story staring Wright and his wife, Olgivanna.

In it, Olgivanna watches as her husband keeps leaving the living room and coming back in with larger stringed instruments that have been delivered to Taliesin. They’ve obviously cost more and more money, but Olgivanna, helpless, watches as he comes back with them.

The last one is a bass viola. This was, Cass writes, “larger than he was, a regular Paul Bunyan of an instrument.” And Wright is mostly obscured behind it with “just twinkling eyes just peeking over the shiny brown side of the giant he was trying to strum.” “At Taliesin”, p. 308.

At that point, the humor of all of it got to Olgivanna, who started laughing so much that she cried.

 

 

First published July 11, 2023.
The graphic at the top of this post is used courtesy of The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

Notes:

1. I’m not going to reel off all the movies. Read the book if you want to see them! – you could binge them…

we’ll call it “Fringing”

(y’know: binging on movies seen by Frank Lloyd Wright).

Check out how Wright ended his penned article on August 9, 1935:

We are happy to announce the extraordinary program to be presented at the Playhouse this Sunday, Aug. 11.

Four films, of such importance and such different character, will form one of the most significant and delightful performances ever presented at the Playhouse.

Le Million, one of the best films by the greatest French director, Rene Clair,–no film made, unless it be another by this same director, has integrated sound and movement more beautifully;

A Dog’s Life, an early and rare film, one of the few remaining made by Charlie Chaplin;

Orphan’s Benefit, the funniest of all the 30 or more Disneys we have seen;

Czar Duranday, a wonderfully made Russian cartoon of a famous Russian fairy story.

Three of these films have been chosen from the finest we have seen during the past two years at the Playhouse.  Don’t miss this “picnic” next Sunday at three if you want to enjoy a hilariously entertaining afternoon.

“At Taliesin”, August 9, 1935. In the “At Taliesin” book, 150-151.

2. I know, I know: Wright insulting other people’s architecture. Most of us Frankophiles are aware of the man’s many traits, but some people really think he was an S.O.B.

3. Betty Cass is related to Bob Willoughby. He and I both worked at Taliesin Preservation and he read to us one winter at Taliesin.

This is drawing number 4930.006 in the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Library, Columbia University, New York).

I found another Taliesin drawing

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Reading Time: 6 minutes

This is drawing number 4930.006 in the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Library, Columbia University, New York).

Two years ago I wrote here about when I found a Taliesin drawing of bunkbeds for a room at Taliesin in 1911.

srsly: someone needs to give me a commission for suggesting that the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation use this to market Wright-designed bunkbeds.

My post today is about another Taliesin drawing I found.

Several months ago I went looking at the drawings that show Wright’s drawings related to buildings on the Taliesin estate.

I did that because researching things related to Taliesin makes me happy.

C’mon: you know you’re not surprised.

You can see the drawings from 1910 at the Wasmuth Portfolio and in a number of books. But you can see also a lot of online black and white photos in the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives here, through JSTOR.1

JSTOR is “part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.“

Every drawing in the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archive has an identification number. The first four digits of each ID comprise the project number.

So, like, all drawings for Wright’s Guggenheim Museum commission start with “4305.”

The first two numbers are because the commission started in 1943. Bruce Pfeiffer (a member of the Taliesin Fellowship who became the archivist for Wright’s collection) numbered the Gugg as that year’s 5th commission. So: 4305.2

I’ve got the project numbers for all of Wright’s buildings on the Taliesin estate. So I searched for those numbers.

You can do it, too, if you have the time. Just go to this page. Might not be something you want to do in the summer, but you could. Sure, you could!

One of the building projects that I studied was labelled:

#4930

4930 were drawings executed during the planned renovation of the “Home Building” at Hillside. Hillside is one of the buildings on the Taliesin estate. If you’ve taken a tour that went anywhere near the Hillside building, your guide might have told you about the Home Building. It stood there from 1887-1950, and is part of the site’s history.

In 1887, Wright designed the building for his aunts, Jennie and Nell Lloyd Jones when they were planning their new school (see the whole history of it here).

You can find lots of photos of the Home Building at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Here’s one below:

Black and white photograph of the Home Building at the Hillside Home School. Real photo postcard at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

From a postcard. Photo taken 1887-1915 (although probably pre-1915). Looking northwest at the Home Building. The postcard says “Hillside Home School”, which was the name of the school, but not the name of the building. Wright’s later Hillside Home School building (the stone building) was built to the left of the building you see in the photo.

When Wright published his autobiography in 1932, he described the building as

[D]esigned by amateur me and built by Aunt Nell and Aunt Jennie in 1887 to mother their forty or fifty boys and girls.3 

Actually, he was so young when he first designed it, that none of the detailed drawings survive.4 But here’s part of what Aunt Nell wrote to the young Wright after he’d arrived in Chicago:

…. Do not take time to make elegant drawings if you are busy but send a rough sketch of what you think the best plan as soon as you can – as we hope to get men at work upon it as soon as the ground is fit in the spring….

 I write in great haste but with much love –

                        Aunt Nell 5

Really: it was not a bad building for a 19-year-old to design.

After Wright’s aunts closed their school in 1915, the building and grounds stood idle for years.

Then,

in 1932 he and wife Olgivanna started the Taliesin Fellowship (his apprentice program).

The photo below

Shows work taking place at the Home Building. Apprentice Edgar Tafel took it and it’s published in his book, Apprentice to Genius. The photo was taken in 1932-33:

Looking northeast at two people working near the Home Building during its initial renovation. Photo in Apprentice to Genius, p. 29.

We saw this side of the building in the earlier photo. In the photo above, we’re looking northeast. In the earlier photo, we were looking northwest.

Apparently, he wanted to do a lot more, but he never got around to it.

Yet in 1949, he addressed the building again.

And that’s how come,

Bruce numbered this collection of drawings “4930”.

When I looked at them, I realized one of them wasn’t the Home Building at all.

It’s drawing 4930.006 and

it shows the old dining room. At Taliesin.

Check it out:

I put a drawing of the old dining room on the left and the drawing in the 4930 collection on the right:

The first thing you can see is the fireplace.

It’s shaped like an upside down “T”.

Not that far from it is the “entry” and the “cooling” room, just like they were in that part of the building. You can see where Wright drew little tables and chairs in figuring out the seating. 

After looking, I sent the compared drawings to Kyle Dockery, the Wisconsin onsite Collections Coordinator for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

He agreed that I found another Taliesin drawing and that 4930.006 shows Wright’s thinking about expanding the room. Which is why he had that large part (also shaped like a “T”) coming off on the left.

After this, I wrote my thoughts to someone at the Avery Library, since they have the drawings. I gave them my theory and sent them the comparison drawings. Shelley (from the Avery) wrote me back, agreeing with me and thanking me for my “meticulous eye”.6

By the way:

Wright halted the renovation of the Home Building in 1950 and ordered his apprentices to destroy the building.

That lead to this fantastic photo of Wright conducting, as the photo’s caption says, “a symphony of destruction”:

 

You can see it on page 6 of The Harvester World at the Wisconsin Historical Society. The image above links to that page of the magazine.

Why did Wright get rid of the Home Building?

It was part of Wright’s “cleaning up” of Hillside over the years. I think he did this because Hillside became his testing ground for large-scale designs. Here’s a photo of the walk up to Hillside that he created:

black and white photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright's Hillside building by Maynard Parker, 1955.Photograph that Maynard Parker took for House Beautiful magazine in 1955. Looking east at the Hillside Home School structure.

Previous to 1950, you really could not have gotten a view like Parker’s in the photo above. That’s because Home Building would have stood right in the way of the photographer.

 

First published July 2, 2023.
The drawing at the top of this page is property of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and is from The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art|Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia, New York).

Notes:

1. Prior to late November 2024, the link took you to ARTSTOR, “a nonprofit organization that builds and distributes the Digital Library….” That changed in August to JSTOR.

2. I think the second number is the commission for that year. No one ever told me, but it seems logical.

3. Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 129.

4. One was published at the time in Inland Architect. It’s on this page.

5. Nell Lloyd Jones to Frank Lloyd Wright on March 9, 1887. FICHEID #: J001A03

6. Someday I’d like to get to the archives and look at everything they haven’t identified.