Taliesin Fellowship Archives

Photograph taken July 2019 by Michael Pipher. Used with permission.

The Guest Wing at Taliesin

Posted on 06/01/2026 | by keiran

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Photo looking at Taliesin taken in 2019 by Michael Pipher. My post today is going to be about the Guest Wing, or the ground floor in the photo, beneath the level of the house with the bands of windows.

I’m late.

I’ve been caught up in another post because I’ve been looking for something “perfect” to write. Which led to more delays

and

that common procrastination path.

So, instead of continuing to get more anxious, I decided just to write what came to mind last night.

Therefore, today’s post will be about the Guest Wing at Taliesin.

Although I’ve written a few posts related to it:

The room in the Guest Wing I successfully identified in a photograph (the Blue Room, rm. 20¹): https://keiranmurphy.com/what-i-did-one-time-before-christmas/
How future architect Gertrude Kerbis snuck into the Guest Wing one night in the 1940s: https://keiranmurphy.com/gertrude-kerbis-architect-because-of-taliesin/
And the abandoned stairway there: https://keiranmurphy.com/the-abandoned-stairway-at-taliesin/

But nothing about the area itself.

Personal history:

A couple of people lived there in 1994 when I first started at Taliesin:

A secretary for the School of Architecture; and Heloise Christa (a sculptor and member of the Taliesin Fellowship). Another apprentice I knew lived there one summer, in 1996.

By that time, Heloise had settled permanently at Taliesin West.

Are you gonna tell us wth the Guest Wing is?

Oh, sorry: it’s the floor underneath Frank Lloyd Wright’s personal living quarters.

Here’s a drawing from JSTOR that I manipulated to highlight it:

This drawing #2501.066.

Why is it called that?

dunno. I think it’s been called that for awhile, because Curtis Besinger (one of Wright’s former apprentices at Taliesin 1939-55), referred to the Guest Wing in his book, Working With Mr. Wright: What It Was Like.

In the “Spring and Summer 1942” chapter, he wrote:

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, and the only access to the guest wing had become an outside path around the northeast corner of the house from a terrace below the loggia.

Besinger, 139.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So I’ll tell you

The history of the Guest Wing.

In a way: the first 14 years of its existence are easy to talk about.

Because Wright left us no floor plans and barely any sections of it until 1925.

But it’s been there since the beginning. You see it in the 1911 photo by draftsman Taylor Woolley:

Looking (plan) northwest in 1911-12. You can see this photo in my very first post.

However, at this point we really don’t know anything about the rooms there.

We can see a couple of small windows in that ground floor. Presumably, they’re for rooms? And the vertical black rectangle was presumably where to put coal.

Also,

there was a stairway down to the Guest Wing, like I showed in “The Abandoned Stairway at Taliesin” post:

Drawing #1403.013. I know the numbers “1403” might make you think this is a Taliesin II drawing, but some of those drawings show Taliesin I (and the other Taliesin numbers, 1104 and 2501, are mixed up). Bruce, the archivist, wasn’t always correct. I was told that even Bruce knew this wasn’t accurate but he figured someone else could amend it later. After all, he had tens of thousands of drawings to arrange.

But, what was also down there?

I’d think rooms under where rooms on the main floor were located. But, like I used to write as the Taliesin Historian: “as no evidence has come to light proving this, one should refrain from thinking that these existed as theorized.”

Therefore,

figuring out even how many rooms were there before 1925 can be tricky.

Although Taliesin II is a little easier because drawing 1403.014 shows two views of it:

Viewing the south facade of the Guest Wing.

Viewing the East Facade of the Guest Wing.

You can find both of these in the larger Taliesin II drawing from JStor here:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28510016

I think it’s weird, but at the time he apparently kept the smaller windows on that first floor.

Future architect/draftsman, Rudolph Schindler, lived at Taliesin in 1918 and 1920. He took photographs that are in his papers at UC-Santa Barbara.

I don’t have permission to show the photos, but I can tell you he lived in the room at Taliesin we know today as the Silver Room.

Members of the Taliesin Fellowship were asked about the names of the rooms and they didn’t know how they got them.

For instance, the Blue Room is the one I made the discovery about before Christmas years ago.

Then

Taliesin’s living quarters burned down to the stone in April 1925.

As Wright rebuilt, he finally drew plans for that floor.

I counted 7 rooms in the plan below:

Wright spent most of 1925 trying to rebuild the house; in the rebuilding, he apparently added steps to a stone landing outside so you could easily walk down.

You can see them in drawing 2501.013:

The steps are in the drawing on the left, close to the bottom.

However, after that, and until the late 1920s, he had lots of problems, including losing Taliesin.

Which was another chance for newspapers to make money off of Wright’s problems/bring up the 1914 Taliesin murders.

Headline from The Bismark Tribune newspaper on July 31, 1928 saying, “Frank Wright Love Nest Is Sold To Bank”.

Actually

I just realized I’ve never written just about the craziness in Wright’s life from 1925-29 (or up to 1932). I’m gonna have to write that up in another post.

Later: yes I did! That post on is here.

But, for Wright

soon after this, along with the help of friends, he formed Frank Lloyd Wright, Inc.

(which was NOT the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation)

I mentioned FLLW Inc. last year in my post, “Stone Entry Gates on Highway 23“

and bought Taliesin back. So, he and everyone else were able to move back in late October/early November.

Later that month, Wright was able to get draftsmen to stay at Taliesin.

One, George Kastner, took photos like the incredible one I posted in “Things I Don’t Know at Taliesin” showing workmen building the stone wall in Taliesin’s Garden Court:

But he didn’t live in the Guest Wing.²

Apparently, when they started the Fellowship, the Wrights decided they could use that floor for more than guests: it could house incoming apprentices.

This caused him to make at least one change.³

He put stone piers on the outside wall of one room. Maybe to provide light for two new rooms there.

You can see the piers in the 1937 photo from the Architectural Forum magazine issue published the next January:

The link to the magazine issue at Archive.org is here. Go past page 32 to start to see all of the work by Wright and the Fellowship.

Those piers remained until the mid-late 1950s.

To get a short version of what led to their disappearance, watch this tour of the Guest Wing by former Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation collections manager, Kyle Dockery, starting at 1:30: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2440876569537811

ALSO

on that same wall, Wright cantilevered the corner for a number of years, which I wrote about in the “Things I don’t know” post.

That cantilevered corner was less “providing apprentice housing” than “experimentation”.

For what, I’ve no idea.

And, as I wrote in my post on Taliesin’s abandoned stairway, he changed the main stairway to the outside; Kyle Dockery started his tour standing on those steps that now lead to the Guest Wing.

The same year Wright changed the steps, he added an interior closet in the Blue Room.

apparently to support something two floors above

That’s the room I found near Christmastime in this photograph:

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

Looking (plan) north in the Blue Room.

I took a photo looking north in that room in 2004. The closet, which the Pres Crew was able to remove, took up a lot of space.

The photo shows it taking up at least half the width of the room on the right:

In 2001,

work began that would lead to the restoration of the entire floor, down to the foundation and HVAC.

I wrote about this work of 2001-02 in “A Slice of Taliesin“.

That was the start.

But things couldn’t get underway because of other priorities and long-term restoration plans.

The Preservation crew knew that it would take a comprehensive approach to get it done and work could ONLY be done in the winter, because of the noise and mess.

For instance: one time the Preservation crew had to jackhammer one floor below during our tour season. I had to ask the crew to stop while we were giving a “Loving Frank” tour⁴ so the group didn’t get headaches from the diesel-engine fumes.

Get some of the nitty and gritty of the work in this preservation report .pdf from March 2011.

Therefore,

the Preservation Crew got just one of the rooms in the Guest Wing from this:

A room under the east side of Taliesin’s Living Room in November 2010

with HVAC along the way

To this:

The same room seen in the 2020 video with Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation staff

First published June 1, 2026.
Thanks to Michael Pipher for the photo at the top of this post.

Notes

And, yes I did just come up with that number off the top of my head. But don’t quiz me on the room numbers in the Hillside, Midway, or Tan-y-Deri structures.
I wrote about where he lived in the post, “On My Frank, I Was Wrong.
I don’t know whether he did this because he was thinking about the apprentices, or if he just wanted to experiment.
Luckily for all of us I can’t find the link to the description on the Wayback Machine.

Color photograph of the interior of Frank Lloyd Wright's Hillside Theater. By Bmzuckerman. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Connections between Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hillside Theater and Unity Temple

Posted on 12/23/2025 | by keiran

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Photo by Bmzuckerman. Looking south over the two seating areas in the newly-restored Hillside Theater.

Today I’m going to be talking about the Hillside structure on the Taliesin estate.

That’s because not long ago I saw a connection to the Sanctuary in Unity Temple, Oak Park.

That is: I saw a link between the Hillside theater you see today

Not the theater Wright designed in for his aunts that was changed into the “Playhouse” theater that you can read about in my post about the 1952 Hillside fire.

with a space Wright designed almost 5 decades before.

First,

let’s get back to Wright’s design for Unity Temple,

known by most (a.k.a., non-Frankophiles) as Unity Church.

As a member of the congregation, he obvs knew the ideas and beliefs of the Unitarian Universalist religion.

They don’t have a creed (or Pope or archbishop), but a set of seven—or eight—principles. These are “the promises that bind congregations, communities, and individuals together in a community.”¹

“UU”s believe in the worth and dignity of every human being, which is then spread out to the community in the congregation, then to the greater world.

Hence, community is an important deal. It’s one of the reasons why they vote on changes in each church democratically.

which is why the answer to the joke “How Many Unitarians Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb?” can be 3, 5, or 300 depending on how many subcommittees you want to mention (and that’s even before you mention drinking coffee).

Because,

“community” is really important in the UU religion, Wright put into a central part of the building’s physical design. First, the building is a bipartite with the spiritual space on side and communal space on the other:

Taken from the 2019 edit of The 20^th Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright Nomination to the World Heritage List by the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, p. 186.

You enter

the building in the open hall that connects its two parts. From the Entrance Foyer you can go to the Sanctuary (Unity Temple) on one side, or the meeting room (Unity House) on the other.

This idea is articulated above the entrance in copper letters:

FOR THE WORSHIP OF GOD

AND THE SERVICE OF MAN

w_lemay’s photograph of the entrance. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

And community is super-present, since the Sanctuary has seating on three sides so most of the group faces each other:

The photo came from page 60 of the World Heritage application I quoted from.

As for fire:

In June 1905, Unity church in Oak Park was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. The congregation approved Wright’s Unity Temple design the next year.

Then, around 46 years later the Hillside Playhouse theater burned. The following Thursday (May 1, 1952), Spring Green’s newspaper (the Home News) noted in “Taliesin School Re-Born on Paper”, that Wright was redesigning the Hillside Theater by the next day:

A design for a new building took place on the drawing board of a famous architect early Sunday morning,

The day after the fire

while smoke still drifted and flames still flickered in the ruins of one of his early works. Frank Lloyd Wright was, as usual, turning a blow into an advantage. A few hours later he was happily telling Home News reporters that this fire which destroyed a major portion of the Taliesin school had been a good thing….

Here’s

one of his drawings for the new theater:

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #5213.011. If you click on the drawing, you’ll see it’s cropped. The original shows notes on lighting and outlets in the room.

Like Unity Temple, the seats at the Hillside Theater are arranged so that most people seated can see each other.

‘tho a former apprentice in the Taliesin Fellowship told me that sitting in that theater could be difficult, since you couldn’t easily sneak out once you were there. I mean, everyone else could see you! Plus, getting out from the taller part of the theater with a full house was pretty impossible. By 1958, he moved the seating so to leave, you have to climb past the pendant light you see in my photo, below:

You have to basically lean on the top of the seats to get past the lamp without hitting it.

And, today is not

the first time I wrote about a link between Hillside and Unity Temple.

Several years ago, I wrote about a link between the two buildings for the website at the Unity Temple Restoration Foundation.

p.s.: the UTRF dissolved after the building was restored.

I wrote that:

…. To the rest of the Wright world, the architect first “broke the box” in the transcendent Unity Temple. Yet the Assembly Hall (designed in 1901) breaks the box by shifting the main load bearing to its corners, and two of its walls (east and south) are filled with vertical glass windows. Additionally, the room has no second floor, but a balcony on its second level, which stands at a 90-degree angle to the floor below. The room’s stone corners support this balcony, so it doesn’t touch the walls. As a result, one can sit in the room, or at its sides, and look straight up, almost two stories, to the roof.

“Breaking the Box” in the Assembly Hall can be seen in a photograph that Maynard Parker took in 1955:

Courtesy Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Maynard Parker collection, 1266-042n. This photo is also in my post, “Charred Beams at Taliesin“.

It’s also cool that,

unlike things at Unity Temple, there are no walls at Hillside between the Assembly Hall and the theater on the other end of the building. When you go to Hillside today

on the Highlights or Estate tours

if the guide opens the curtain in the theater, you can see to the opposite end of the building, all the way up to the bottom of the Assembly Hall balcony.

You can see that a bit in this video of 7-minute-long performance of O Fortuna² from Carmina Burana. It was performed by the Taliesin Fellowship in association with the Rural Musicians Forum of the Wisconsin River Valley:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIJLlMytFgo

At 5:47 you you see a patch of green behind the audience looking at the choir. That green is a view of trees outside in the opposite end of the building.

First published December 23, 2025.

Bmzuckerman took the photo at the top of this post on May 7, 2025 and published it at Wikimedia Commons on this page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frank_Lloyd_Wright_-_Spring_Green,_WI_-_Hillside_(Theater)_(5).jpg. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Notes:

Here’s a link explaining the “principles”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism#Principles
O Fortuna has become a popular song in movie soundtracks. Its appearance is explained by user Invisible_Mikey in the ClassicalMusic subreddit:

“The film that brought it into fashion as a score cue was Excalibur (1981). It was then used in Glory, Hunt for Red October, The Doors, Natural Born Killers and others. By the 2000s it was being used ironically or comedically in Jackass , Cheaper by the Dozen, and Paul Blart: Mall Cop.”

Plus, the song was the inspiration for a really funny beer commercial.

Color photograph with part of Taliesin and a cedar tree on the left. Taken by Keiran Murphy during the autumn of 2013.

More Changes at Taliesin’s Old Dining Room:

Posted on 10/08/2025 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Looking (plan) east toward the old dining rooms at Taliesin. The group dining room for Wright’s apprentices was behind the French doors on the left and the tall windows to the right of the tree branches. The stone wall you can see in the background is the edge of the retaining wall of Taliesin’s Hill Crown.

I’ve been futzing over the same area in my “Taliesin book” project¹ for 2 months: describing the Taliesin Fellowship in the 1930s. That’s why in this post I’ll talk about the old Fellowship dining room.

The “futzing” is because every time I work on the book and think I’ll get through the year 1937, I end up circling around 1932-33.

My problem comes from 2 things:

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

researching is because that’s what I’ve done at (for) Taliesin for more than 2 decades.

But (2),

because of my history giving tours.

At that time, I was used to telling the same story about the space in different ways once, twice,

three times a lady—no, SHUT UP Keiran

and, YES,

occasionally three times a day to different groups.

Back to the subject, Keiran:

The problem with my book-writing project is that because of my history in tours I TRAINED myself for decades to EDIT every time I tried to explain the history of something; and that has spilled into my writing.

HOWEVER,

This very issue works for you right now:

because you’ll get to see two photos of Taliesin that show how Wright changed part of the building for the Taliesin Fellowship.

Particularly the old dining rooms.

I wrote about them earlier in a post, here.

First, you’ll see a photo of the area taken 1917-18:

The early Taliesin II dining room is on the right-hand side of the photograph under the hipped roof ending in the dark plaster wall perpendicular to the ground.

This photo is also in my post, “Anna To Her Son“. In that post, I talked about what’s on the LEFT-HAND side of the photo.

This dining room

most probably existed by early Taliesin II, or 1915 or so.

I believe Wright built this once he realized the dining area in Taliesin’s Living Quarters was too small for all of the workmen and draftsmen that he usually kept at Taliesin.

Additionally, he built a large kitchen there that the Fellowship would use for years.

The first black and white photo above is the dining area; the “Hill Kitchen” is at the base of the chimney.

Then, in 1932, he starts the Taliesin Fellowship.

That means there were lots of young men (and women) coming to Taliesin to learn about architecture and they needed a place to eat.

So, he made the space larger.

He provided more area by pushing out the room’s western wall and also moving it more onto the hill. You can see that part behind the tree trunk in the photo at the top of this post.

When he expanded this part of the building, he just put stone on the floor, which meant architecture apprentices had to be really hardy…,

Because us wimps in the 21th Century go, “uh, Mr. Wright? You do realize you’re building in a state where the outside temperatures in January can reach a high of 10-to-15 degrees Fahrenheit, right?… And you call yourself an architect?“

as I told you before, he did live in Wisconsin in the winter. For awhile, anyway.

But maybe he figured using stone on the floor would save money; people didn’t want to stay too long eating if they were really cold.

Still, when he expanded the room, he also changed the roof and added the chimney.

These changes show up in the photo Gilman Lane took in 1932-33, below:

You can find info on Gilman Lane on this page. When you click on the link you might be asked if it’s ok: click yes.

Looking northeast at the Hill Wing dining rooms. The photo’s date comes from other photos in the collection. For example, the chimney at the end of the building was constructed by 1933.

I put another photo by Lane in my post, “Stone Entry Gates on Highway 23“.

You can see the floor plan showing the expanded dining rooms below:

I showed part of this drawing in my post, “I Found Another Taliesin Drawing“.

The Fellowship eventually moved the main kitchen and dining room to Hillside on the south end of the Taliesin estate.

But then Wright changed these rooms in the early 1950s.

He redesigned the Fellowship dining room into a suite of rooms for his youngest daughter, Iovanna. Because of this redesign, the space has been used as a guest bedroom in the summer.²

You can see my presentation online about some of the changes Wright made to Taliesin for Iovanna through the “Wright Design Series” at Monona Terrace. My presentation, “Life is Not Monotonous at Taliesin” is available at this link. I took the title of the talk from Wright’s writing near the end of the original edition of his autobiography:

Life is not monotonous at Taliesin. The days are a continuous series of changing play and changing work.

Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 366.

By the way, you can read

my analysis on Taliesin’s kitchens in “SaveWright” magazine (which is put out by the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy).

SaveWright magazines are a benefit for their members, but the Building Conservancy puts them online later.

My essay resulted from a conversation we were having on the Publications Committee, of which I’m on. We were talking about an upcoming edition that made me think about Wright and the kitchens he designed for himself in Wisconsin and Arizona. One of the members of the committee liked my thoughts and asked me to write about Taliesin’s kitchens.³

Go to the “Wright on Kitchens” issue of SaveWright, pages 2-5.

First published October 8, 2025.
I took the photo at the top of his post in 2013.

Notes

Putting quotes around Taliesin Book looks like I’m writing a “so-called” book, which isn’t true. It’s just not as high-energy as doing a project like National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a., Nanowrimo, that I wrote about, here.
At this point, the space is still really only usable in the summer. The Preservation Office was there for a while and they were forced to put heavy plastic up on the edge of the room during the winters and everyone had to wear coats and gloves at work. They gave up and everyone moved over to the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center for a while, and I ended up working in there as the Historian.
Someday I should write my thoughts on the kitchen at Taliesin West, but I was asked to focus on the kitchen at Taliesin Wisconsin.

Photo of Wright with apprentices at Hillside with model of Guggenheim Museum. Photo by Volkmar K. Wentzel. Property: National Geographic/Getty Images. Image ID: 82184430

Solomon Guggenheim at Taliesin

Posted on 09/04/2025 | by keiran

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Photo of Wright and apprentices in the Taliesin Fellowship at Hillside with the model of the Guggenheim Museum.

A couple of weeks ago I met with a Taliesin tour guide regarding details about the 1914 murders there.

He wanted to meet because he was going to miss my presentation on the Myths of the 1914 Fire and Murders at a nearby library.

I’ve been trying to publish the article I wrote on this for a while, but haven’t had any takers. HOWEVER, I’ve gotten great responses about my presentation of “the Myths” at Wisconsin libraries.

Although, gorram it! I WILL get my article published some day!…

I wonder if they’ll print it in my obituary??

While speaking, the tour guide said the tour manager at Taliesin Preservation informed the guides that there’s no proof that Solomon Guggenheim ever came to Taliesin.

He did! So that’s what I’ll talk about in this post.

Why do tours care?

Aside from the fact that tour guides should love absolutely everything about Frank Lloyd Wright and his career,

I’m only partially being snarky there

Taliesin and Guggenheim are linked SPECIFICALLY to Taliesin’s history.

That’s because of what former apprentice Curtis Besinger published his book, Working With Mr. Wright in 1995.

In the “Spring and Summer 1943” chapter, he detailed changes made in anticipation of Guggenheim’s visit.

Here’s part of what he wrote how Wright began

a process that later… turned into preparation for an anticipated visit by Solomon Guggenheim and the Baroness Hilla von Rebay…. Preparation for any occasion always seemed to require, as a renewal, some architectural changes. Sometimes these were minor. But the prospect of a major architectural commission was a reason for major changes….
Curtis Besinger. Working with Mr. Wright: What It Was Like (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1995), p. 146.

And then Wright

decided to remodel the two small rooms and bath on the mezzanine of the house, Iovanna’s rooms, into a suite in which Hilla Rebay would stay during her visit. Mr. Guggenheim was to stay in the main guest room, next to the living room.
Working With Mr. Wright, 148.

Read some of my findings about these spaces in this post.

We were all really excited to read that when the book came out.

But

while I worked there, I couldn’t find solid proof that Guggenheim really visited.

Apparently I wasn’t alone, since the tour manager thought she should tell the guides to pull back on saying Guggenheim actually came to Taliesin since it couldn’t be proven.

Great idea!

That cuts down on the chances that the guides will devolve like the character that British actress Maggie Smith portrayed in the stage comedy, Lettice and Lovage

This was a Tony-winning play in which Smith’s character “enhanced” the stories on a tour through Fustian House
watch this YouTube clip if you’ve got 20-or-so minutes:

However, when talking to Bill (the guide), I realized that I now HAD information that would give the answer.

Because,

a couple of years ago I was given access to copies of letters that Wright’s secretary Gene Masselink wrote to Fellowship member John H. “Jack” Howe while he was in prison for being a WW2 conscientious objector.

The letters Gene wrote to Jack show a more private side to the guy.

I mean:

Among other things, he was a little b*tchy and wrote gossipy things about other Fellowship members…. Basically, things appear in those letters that I’m not crazy about.

For example, the guy mentioned women’s attractiveness (or NOT) a bit too much.

But here’s the good news:

While they didn’t come in 1943, Guggenheim and Rebay did make it in September or early October, 1945.¹

I won’t quote from it extensively,²

But Gene writes that after spending a week getting everything at Taliesin spick and span, “honest-to-goodness fall-housecleaning” and using 10 gallons of wax, while continuously chasing spider webs

having cleaning at Hillside and Taliesin during houseopening I can confirm Gene’s observation: spiders at Taliesin are really busy

the day came and they put on the best show they could even though it rained all day.

And then they all had dinner in Taliesin’s living room, with an invited cellist to play music

(her name was Margaret Jean Cree and I couldn’t find info on her in a quick Google search)

and Gene wrote that Solomon Guggenheim was such a fan of her work that he “rose to his feet and shouted ‘BRAVO’ each time….”

So it really did happen! Phew!

Originally published September 4, 2025.
Volkmar K. Wentzel took the photo at the top of this post. Property: National Geographic/Getty Images. Image ID: 82184430. The photo shows Frank Lloyd Wright and apprentices in the room at Hillside known as the Roberts Room. Roberts was former client Charles E. Roberts. He loaned Wright’s aunts money to build this classroom space during construction for their Hillside Home School (I wrote more about them and the school, here).

Note:

He didn’t date the letter, but it follows one he wrote after mid-September.
I’m not quoting from the letter because I don’t know how much I can. That’s because I’m not sure who really has the rights to them: the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives? The Northwest Architectural Archives, with the John Howe papers?

Black and white photograph looking at Taliesin tower with agricultural wing of Taliesin. Taken 1930. At the Chicago History Museum, ISHi-89172, Raymond W. Trowbridge, photographer.

Darkroom at Taliesin

Posted on 05/22/2025 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Raymond Trowbridge took this photograph while looking at the Agricultural Wing at Taliesin. Taken before September 20, 1930.
p.s.: the darkroom isn’t in the part of the building you see in this photo.

My post this week grew out of a question related to Raymond Trowbridge – the photographer who took photos at Taliesin in 1930.

(I wrote about him here)

And my continual quest to understand Taliesin’s history.

Which led me to ask if Taliesin ever had a darkroom –

for developing photographs

and my discovery of where it was.

My question started after

I followed my curiosity while writing about Wright at Taliesin in the 1930s.

Anyone who knows Wright knows Taliesin saw the ups and downs of his career.

Even though

he had triumphs —

like the world-famous Imperial Hotel in Japan that survived an earthquake

demolished in the late ’60s

and Midway Gardens in Chicago

demolished in 1929 because, while a great idea, was a failure due to World War I and prohibition

— his career in the mid-to-late 1920s was a bit of a mess.

But despite this,

in 1930, Wright had Trowbridge come out and take beautiful photos of his home, like the one at the top of this page.

Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how Wright found him.

But still, I theorized that Wright asked Trowbridge to photograph Taliesin in order to create the image of himself as an important architect, despite people starting to think of him as old fashioned

even before the Great Depression had really begun.

After puzzling for days, I asked someone who knows a lot about Wright’s work: scholar, Kathryn Smith. So I asked: “Did Wright ask Trowbridge for the photos to market himself as more relevant?”

She wrote back

an email chock-full of info about Wright in the 1920s, encouraging me to look at her book, Wright on Exhibit,

which—cool—I had recently purchased

and agreed that, yes, Wright probably had the photographs taken to influence people’s perception of him.

So, that’s out of the way.

But she also asked the question that inspired today’s post:

Because my email reminded her that, while she wrote Wright on Exhibit, she read letters he’d written to friends in 1930-31 where he told them he was making “new photo prints”.

Taliesin really is out in the boonies, and Wright might have done things just at Taliesin.

SO she got curious: if he was making new “photo prints”,

did he have darkroom?

That means a place with running water and light control.

I knew there had been a darkroom at the Hillside school that Wright’s aunts ran.

I had found it years before in a drawing

But Hillside was a mess in 1930.

So, with Kathryn’s question in mind, I scanned my brain for what Taliesin’s interior looked like in 1930-31 to figure out if Wright had a darkroom at Taliesin.

I immediately thought it was possible, because

we know

Wright was interested in photography for a long time.

For example, the website Wright in Japan 1905 shows you all of these photos Wright took on his first trip to Japan.

And John Lloyd Wright put a photo that his dad took of him into his book, My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright:

I took this photo on page 23 of John’s book. Wright was using his son in an advertisement for an exhibition.

Even though I felt he might have had one, I confessed to Kathryn that I didn’t know where Taliesin’s darkroom could be. No one had written about or mentioned it.

I did think a darkroom and developing area could be in/near the bedroom under Wright’s Taliesin Drafting Studio eventually kept for years by Gene Masselink, but that never came up anywhere in people’s memories.

Fortunately, I thought to ask Indira Berndtson, the (now-retired) Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Administrator of Historic Studies. She has done hundreds (over a thousand) of interviews with Wright associates, including friends, family, clients and Taliesin Fellowship apprentices.

And she told me that in 1996 she talked to former apprentice Lawrence Cuneo (Fellowship 1938-40). Because Cuneo was in the Fellowship to do photography,¹she asked him if Taliesin had a darkroom.

He said it did, and it was one floor below Wright’s office.²

See, in Wright’s private office off of the Taliesin studio,

there’s a door into Taliesin’s vault.

Next to that there’s another door, which opens to steps downstairs. Apparently, the darkroom was down there.

the steps leading downstairs can be seen next to the vault in Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation drawing #2501.035 at the Avery.

But while Cuneo was supposed to do photography during his apprenticeship, he found the darkroom at Taliesin practically useless.

For example

the inside was painted completely black.

That doesn’t help when you’re trying to develop film in a space where you can’t have any light at all. A place where, ideally, you paint things in a lighter color so at least you know where the table stands that holds your light-sensitive photo paper.

But not only was that darkroom completely black, it was too humid.

which, last I heard, it still is

So Cuneo moved out and built another darkroom off of the Hillside Drafting Studio.

Eventually Taliesin’s unused darkroom was made into Gene Masselink’s living space.

I like it when I’m right on things

Speaking of that,

I gave you a photo so you have an idea of where the hell Gene’s apartment was. You would get to his apartment door by following the arrow in the photo below:

This is the Lower Parking Court at Taliesin. I showed another version of this photograph in my post, “Tour Guides and Trust“.

If you follow the arrow,

not in reality, silly

you get to the door for Gene’s apartment. Once inside, there’s a wall around which there’s a small room with electricity, a toilet and a sink. It’s totally closed off from light, so that’s where the darkroom was until Cuneo dismantled it.

So,

Cuneo’s answer helped me find this almost-useless space and answer Smith’s question.

Originally posted May 22, 2025.
This photo at the top of this post is available at the Chicago History Museum, here.

1. Cuneo was one of several photographers Wright had in the Fellowship, included a young Edmund Teske (I posted a photo by him here) and (most famously) an even younger Pedro Guerrero (I posted a photo he took of the Living Room fireplace, here).

2. Indira Berndtson’s 1996 interview with Cuneo is credited to The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

Taliesin Hill Tower in the Milton Nicholls Collection at the National Library of Australia. nla.pic-vn3603884-s835-v

Hill Tower at Taliesin

Posted on 11/25/2024 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

An unknown woman stands in the Hill Garden of Taliesin with the Hill Tower behind her. Either Marion Mahoney Griffen or husband Walter Burley Griffin took the photo, 1920-24. The Griffins met while working in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Oak Park studio. I can’t tell if the woman is Marion, who would have been in her late 40s/early ’50s.

Today’s post is about another idea I got from a reader—what is the purpose of the tallest part of the building?

We call that the Hill Tower and, in total, it’s 4 stories.

On tour in the 1990s, we interpreted the Hill Tower as a stake that was pounded into the ground. That came from architectural historian Neil Levine. He wrote this in his book, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright:

The tower indicates the deepest penetration of the house into the hill and can thus be read as an eccentric vertical axis staking the building to the site as the house unwinds in a spiraling, counterclockwise direction around the hill and out to the entrance.

Neil Levine. The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1996), 84.

Aside from being

one of the most distinctive features at Taliesin, it’s also one of its oldest.

We know because draftsman Taylor Woolley took a photo of it in 1911.

But it’s also frustratingly absent from the drawing record. Only its ground floor appears in Taliesin floor plans, like in this drawing, published in 1913. Other than that, there are no drawn sections and you see it in one or two elevations, like this:

Details from the drawing 1403.013. Like I wrote in my last post, just because the drawing has “1403”, that doesn’t mean it was executed for Taliesin II. There are details you can see in the larger drawing that show Wright was executing a Taliesin I drawing.

The Hill Tower functioned as a Belvedere

to provide a commanding view

and

a dovecote.

You can see the nest holes for pigeons in many old photos, like the one at the top of this post, and the one below:

I put this photo, c. 1919-1920, into my “Anna to Her Son” post.

The Hill Tower housed dorm rooms for three apprentices right after the Taliesin Fellowship started in 1932. The larger dovecote was removed by 1937, and the room was expanded. That lead to its current appearance:

Looking at the Hill Tower at Taliesin on September 29, 2012. Photo by QuartierLatin1968. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The smaller dovecote is still there, around the plaster wall. You can see it in this photo taken in 2018.

In 1932,

as Edgar Tafel related it, while he and other early apprentices settled into their rooms, several set up house “above the dining rooms”.¹

That is, the old dining room I wrote about before.

Also, Fellowship member John “Jack” Howe mentioned the tower in an “At Taliesin” article:

AT TALIESIN, May 13, 1936

…. One may see how the old carriage house, stables, and granary were converted into apprentices’ rooms, new farm buildings and garages being added beyond; how the old water tower was enlarged and converted into a beautiful trio of apprentices’ rooms; how the dining rooms have been enlarged, the gardens extended and the driveway changed from above the buildings on the hill…. Such is the natural growth of Taliesin (shining brow).

Randolph C. Henning, ed. and with commentary. At Taliesin: Newspaper Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 1934-1937 (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1991), 192-3.

But he was wrong when he called it a “water tower”. It never held water.

I wrote its history from c. 1950 to the early 2000s when I worked at Taliesin Preservation and

it was always my hope

to get back to write its full history. But that always got put on the backburner.

HEY, anyone from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and/or Harboe Architects: you’ve got my contact info.

The lowest part of the Hill Tower is on the main level of the Taliesin complex. This space appears in the drawing apprentices did for In the Nature of Materials, by Henry-Russell Hitchcock.

The room is labeled “Milk Room/Tower above”:

In the Nature of Materials, 1887-1941: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright (New York, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1942), by Henry-Russell Hitchcock, figure 175.
Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives drawing number 1104.013.

The footprint of the “garage” was one story above. I mentioned the garage in the photo I showed from 1911 in my post, “This Stuff is Fun for Me“.

“Milk Room” refers to the room in which the milk was stored; not the room in which the cows where milked.

More on the milk room:

Longtime Fellowship member, Cornelia Brierly, said that they placed milk pails in a trough in the room. It was fed continuously with water pumped up to the hill west of Taliesin from the hydraulic ram at Taliesin’s dam below. This—plus the placement of the “Milk Room” with thick, stone, walls, and lack of windows—kept the milk sufficiently cool.

At the top of the Hill Tower, 3 apprentices lived in the rooms for years.

Until

one apprentice went to visit his family.

According to Joe Fabris (in the Fellowship for decades), while the apprentice—Richard Erickson—was visiting his family in 1949 or ’50, Wright decided to change the room, which was above the Hill kitchen. In order to provide more ventilation, Wright removed the floor of Richard Erickson’s room.²

Joe told Indira that,

“There was a door up there from the Tower landing which came into this room. So when Richard came back he opened his door and all he saw was a big hole!”³

Originally Published November 25, 2024
The photograph at the top of this post is available here in the National Library of Australia, Milton Nicholls collection.

Notes

Edgar Tafel. Apprentice to Genius: Years with Frank Lloyd Wright (McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, 1979), p. 37.
“Joe” told this to Indira Berndtson, the (retired) administrator of historic studies, collections and exhibitions for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in an interview on August 10, 1990.
Page 20 of the interview transcription. Joe’s appeared in this blog before. I put a photograph of him helping Wright onto his horse in my blog post, “Taliesin Kitties“.

American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) looks over a drawing with his assistants at the Hillside Drafting Studio on the Wright's Taliesin Estate near Spring Green, Wisconsin, c. 1957. (Photo by ? Marvin Koner/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

The Taliesin Fellowship

Posted on 06/15/2024 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

A photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright with apprentices at a drafting table in the Hillside Drafting Studio. Photo taken by Marvin Koner in June 1958.

When I gave tours, I introduced the Taliesin Fellowship as:

a coeducational apprentice program that Wright and his wife, Olgivanna, started in 1932. They wanted the apprentices to participate in almost every aspect of their lives and taught the apprentices to “Learn By Doing”. The Taliesin Fellowship eventually became a school.

For years, the school was the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.

Now it’s the School of Architecture, an accredited architecture program that awards Master’s degrees and traces its origins back to the Fellowship. But it no longer operates out of either Taliesin site.

But while it sounds simple

the Fellowship is/was never easy to explain.

When I got my job in 1994 and told professor Narciso Menocal¹ in my department, he disparaged “those people”.

Like, when you say “Fellowship” people think it involves scholars that are awarded grants, like an NEH fellowship.

Wright awarded no grants or degrees and taught no classes.

The Taliesin Fellowship apprentices lived at the Taliesins (Wisconsin in the summer; Arizona in the winter) and farmed, cooked, made music, built/repaired the structures, drafted in the studios, and supervised construction of his buildings. At first for Frank Lloyd Wright, and then for Taliesin Architects after his death.

And paid tuition to do this.

I never went back to Menocal and said

like I wrote in “Wright Was Not a Shyster“

“with Wright, there was a difference between the ideal and the reality.”

In the ideal, the Fellowship would echo apprenticeships from the Middle Ages. He wrote in an early prospectus for the Fellowship that:

“SO WE BEGIN this working Fellowship as a kind of daily work-life. Apprentices at work on buildings or in crafts which have a free individual basis: a direct work-experience made healthy and fruitful by seeing Idea as work and work as Idea take effect, actually, in the hand of the young apprentice.“

Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, new and revised ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 392.

YET,

while the Wrights explained in their prospectus:

“Each apprentice will work under the inspiration of direct architectural leadership, toward machine-craft in this machine age. All will work together in a common daily effort to create new forms needed by machine work and modern processes if we are to have any culture of our own worth having…. Our activities, we hope, will be gradually extended to include collateral arts by way of such modern machine crafts as we can establish.”

Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, new and revised ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 391.

it didn’t always work out the way they envisioned it.

After all,

Curtis Besinger (former longtime Fellowship member) wrote about the expectations new apprentices had:

Some came expecting an academic environment, a school with required and regular hours of classwork…. Some came expecting an artistic community, a sort of bohemian life of freedom in which one could do what he wanted…. Some came expecting an egalitarian co-op with everyone having an equal say. Some came expecting a lesser degree of commitment and involvement….

Few newcomers to the Fellowship received special treatment…. Of course, there were exceptions, but “wholesome neglect” was the practice and the policy.

Curtis Besinger. Working with Mr. Wright: What it was Like (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1995), 22-23.

Nevertheless,

Besinger’s memories of his time echoed many things that people on tour asked:

How could people do all of this: cook, clean, farm, make music, and – oh yeah – work in the drafting studio? And pay for the privilege?

They’re things that I don’t know if anyone could answer, even if they read all the books I first put in my post, “Books by Apprentices“.

And still,

one of the things I liked about giving tours was holding these various ideas simultaneously in my head, continuously: did the Wrights take advantage of people? Yes. But no one stayed if they didn’t get something out of it. Priscilla Henken, then an apprentice, kept a diary, which gives a day-to-day good and bad portrait of life in the Fellowship. The National Book Museum published it as Taliesin Diary: A Year with Frank Lloyd Wright and it gives an unvarnished view as well as many previously unseen photographs.

But personally,

I think the Fellowship helped keep Wright young.

My impression of Wright’s later years is contrasted by my knowledge of the later years of Pablo Picasso.² Picasso’s peers were passing away and he wasn’t surrounded by many young people. So the painter took to rethinking the work of the Masters.

Therefore, in the 1950s he painted his version of Las Meninas by Diego Velasquez (1599-1660), a work by Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), and then Dejeuner Dur L’Herbe by Eduard Manet (1832-1883).

Manet’s painting is below:

Then there’s Picasso’s version from the early 1960s:

I looked at Picasso’s work from the 1950s and ’60s and it was better than what I remembered, but I wonder if he would have done something different if he was surrounded by young artists (unless he was so competitive that it was impossible).

And one night,

months ago, as I thought about the Fellowship,

as one often does

I remembered the saying I’ve heard about the Grateful Dead:³

They may not be the best at what they do, but they’re the only ones who are doing it.

Note: the folks who said that loved the Dead, too.

Published June 15, 2024.
The image at the top of this post is by © Marvin Koner/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images.

Take a look

at “Taliesin Life and Times” by William Walter Schildroth, Architect. He was an apprentice from 1959 (after Frank Lloyd Wright’s death) to 1961 and describes why he came into the Taliesin Fellowship, his duties, and how he learned “by doing”.

Notes:

1. Narciso Menocal was an Architectural Historian in the University of Wisconsin Art History Department. He’s the reason I knew more about Louis Sullivan than Frank Lloyd Wright when I started working at Taliesin: Menocal ran a Graduate Seminar on Sullivan. But he was never my advisor (I asked another professor to be my advisor after he lectured in our first class and I thought “this is why I started grad school”).

2. 1881-1973. I also took a graduate seminar on Picasso. Picasso, like Wright, was also a prolific artist who lived until his early 90s, had several well-known romantic relationships, and had a wife named Olga. Although Olgivanna was rarely just called “Olga” and she was 30 years younger than Wright as opposed to Picasso’s later paramour Francois Gilot (also an artist and mother of Paloma and Claude). She was 40 years younger than Picasso (research for this part of my page brought me to this web page just on Picasso’s muses). Until I looked at images for today’s post, I really didn’t like anything he did after 1939.

3. If you’ve got a couple of hours, here’s a link to part of one of their concerts in 1974. My oldest sister (who saw 300+ Dead shows) would have been happy to see/hear it.

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

Wright was not a shyster

Posted on 12/31/2023 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

A trickster, possibly.

maybe an s.o.b.

But not a con man (not even on the order of Harold Hill).

However, I know why you think Frank Lloyd Wright was like that.

After all—

He borrowed lots of money from people and couldn’t give it back.

And pulled so much money out of former client Darwin Martin.

Check out this documentary on Wright, Martin, and Buffalo that came out in 2016. It’s great.

Then,

In 1932, Wright convinced a bunch of kids (the Taliesin Fellowship) to give him money to learn about architecture when he had no clients.

But while they paid him,

they fixed his buildings both before and after he had clients again,

Apprentices working at Hillside probably in 1933. Yeah, chiseling stone without a shirt on (like the man pictured above) isn’t up to OSHA standards, but then again, I found newspaper stories around that time in which people had to be reminded not to throw cans of used motor oil into their fireplaces to get the fire going (and usually suffered burns from the resultant explosions).

And farmed

his land,

Apprentice Bill Patrick hoes squash in a photograph on page 66 of the book: A Way of Life: An Apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright, by architect Lois Davidson Gottlieb.

While working in the kitchen and serving meals.

As well as,

BUILDING

his furniture

like his drafting tables for the Hillside studio.

You know, drafting? Like, doing something people should get paid for?

Although I get the feeling that becoming an architect is like becoming a doctor: you get the degrees, then you go and work in an office.

… which you get paid for…. C’mon: stay focused!

And later,

Even when things were on the up again, they built the “camp” in the Arizona desert starting in the late 30s.

a.k.a., Taliesin West.

And that’s not counting

the whole, “leaving his wife and 6-kids” thing.

Yeah yeah yeah: it was a lot, ok?

My fingers are too tired to copy/paste all of the stories that will come up. You can read about it if you put “frank lloyd wright” and “scandal” into a search engine.

But as I told architectural historian Kathryn Smith one time:

“with Wright, there’s a difference between the ideal and the reality.”

Then,

I read The Lost Years by Anthony Alofsin. Alofsin identified Wright’s desire to create an educational community back in 1909-11. Wright thought this education would transform architecture:

Recalling the training of artists in Japan or the practice of apprenticeship in the Middle Ages, he concluded that a new education was necessary for youth, incorporating the spirit of great architecture, “the study of the nature of materials, the nature of the tools and processes at command….”

The Lost Years, 1910-1922: A Study of Influence, 90.

Not only that:

Wright seemed to honestly believe that he could build beautiful homes for less money.

Even though the whole country didn’t take him up on that.

So, he wasn’t just full of it. I believe he actually did think it would all work out.

Moreover:

He honestly thought that, within a few years of its beginning, his apprentices wouldn’t have to pay tuition for being at the Taliesin Fellowship. He thought that the cost of their tuition would pay for itself while he created a self-sustaining community.

For example,

he wrote this in a brochure for the Taliesin Fellowship:

[T]he Fellowship has a two-hundred-acre farm, and as another there are yearly fees fixed at about what a medium-grade college education would cost plus work the apprentice can do. Eventually, paid services to Industry in architectural research will contribute substantially to put the tools needed into the hands of the workers and reduce or eventually abolish the fee so worthwhile young men and women may work for their living not as education but as culture.

The Taliesin Fellowship (brochure for the Fellowship), December 1933.

Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings, volume 3: 1931-39. Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, introduction by Kenneth Frampton (Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York City, 1993), 163.

And the work

in the self-sustaining community of the Fellowship would teach apprentices to be better architects. He wrote this in the 1943 edition of an Autobiography:

The field work is as important a responsibility as the work in the draughting room, or in the garden, the kitchen or the dining rooms. This seems very difficult for young America to accept. One of our young men could not see the work in the kitchen as anything but menial work to be done by a servant. When he was told he didn’t have to do it his conscience troubled him because all the others were going that work…. After the work in the kitchen he would sit and make drawings for the new arrangements he felt we needed. He would suggest new systems of serving, which would eliminate waste motions. He was just as interested in work as in any other. His knowledge of the working of a kitchen and dining room on whatever scale is instilled into his very being—a knowledge earned and gained by him by way of actual experience—not by way of a superficial inadequate theory of designing.

Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, new and revised ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 425.

otoh:

There’s no denying what Priscilla Henken witnessed when she and her husband David were apprentices during World War II. She wrote on August 6, 1943 about the inefficiency she witnessed in the Fellowship:

“plows, rakes, hoes, wire rusting in weather of all sorts – and forgotten; berries neglected on the bushes; man power used to dress up a house instead of to repair it—all to show off for guests. Potemkin’s false front and shabby rear.”
Taliesin Diary: A Year with Frank Lloyd Wright, by Priscilla Henken (W.W. Norton & Co., New York, London, 2012), 206.

Like I said:

With Wright, there is a difference between the ideal and the reality.

December 31, 2023.
The portrait at the top of this post is available online here from the National Portrait Gallery.
I added Wright’s quote in the photo. It came from a letter he wrote the people of Spring Green that was published in the Weekly Home News on June 10, 1926 while Wright was having problems with his second wife, Miriam Noel. When I found the photograph by Edward Steichen, I thought of putting the quote in it because it’s like one of those inspirational posters that has taken a turn. I laughed so hard I cried.

Notes:

1. “Shyster” is apparently based on a German word from the 18^th century. When I looked for “Shyster” on vocabulary.com, I found that:

A shyster is someone who might rip you off or do something unethical in order to get his way. A used car salesman might tell you a car is a thousand dollars, but when you read the fine print, it turns out you’ll pay a lot more. That salesman is a shyster — someone who lies and deceives for his own benefit.

Later, to make sure, I looked to Wikipedia. The page on it told me this:

Various etymologies have suggested an antisemitic origin, possibly associated with the character of Shylock from Shakespeare‘s The Merchant of Venice, but there is no clear evidence for this.^[4] One source asserts that the term originated in Philadelphia in 1843 from a disreputable attorney named “Schuster.”^[5]

The United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled that while “some viewers may find the term distasteful,” a television advertisement that used the term in a derogatory context did not “cause serious or widespread offence” according to the CAP Code.^[6]^[7] When contacted by the ASA, the Board of Deputies of British Jews stated that they did not have concerns with the advertisement’s content.^[6]

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

Posted on 10/22/2023 | by keiran

Reading Time: 9 minutes

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: Her bathroom was dismantled, so it’s not yet 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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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 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.

Architect Robert A.M. Stern interviewed Philip Johnson between January and October of 1985.⁵ In one interview, he asked him about Wright:

Robert A.M. Stern: And… you… went to visit Wright?

Philip Johnson: …. We went to see Wright in 1930 in Taliesin East [sic].⁶ 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, 41.

He mentions “the big room”. In 1932, there wouldn’t have been any other “big room” on the Taliesin estate except for the Taliesin Living Room.⁷ He was wrong about the placement of the room on that floor, but there was nothing else up there in 1932 that matches it.

OK!

Here’s what I think:

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. The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews with Robert A.M. Stern (The Monacelli Press, printed in China, 2008), 15.
The book’s price tag is over $40, but I’m that crazy: I got the book on sale for $10.

6. 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.

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

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

A recommended book: At Taliesin

Posted on 07/11/2023 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

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:

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:

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:

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.