Comparisons of Taliesin drawings showing changes over time. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, New York, Columbia University)

The Three Taliesins

Posted on 07/22/2025 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

You are looking at floor plans of Taliesin showing the areas around the bedrooms for Olgivanna and Frank Lloyd Wright. Her bedroom is number 30 and his is number 33. I think it’s cool that in 1911 those numbers are just hanging out there in space and the building just keeps getting bigger.

I’m going to explain where they come from in today’s post.

Taliesin I is the building from 1911-14, ending at the first fire
Taliesin II is the building from 1914-25, between the two fires
and Taliesin III is the building from 1925-until his death

Even though one wing of the building was destroyed in the 2 fires, we stick to calling them Taliesin I, II, and III. Although some scholars

say that’s incorrect, because ONLY the living quarters were destroyed.

But really:

it’s all Frank’s fault.

Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright used those terms in 1932 in An Autobiography while clawing his way out of obscurity.

Although I don’t think that Wright ever said in the car: “Oh, yes, Olgivanna – drive us back to Taliesin III after I pick up my Holstein-hide jacket in Dodgeville.”

I don’t think Wright commonly referred to his wife as Olgivanna

(even though that’s what she was known as, opposed to “Olga”)

— he might have called her “Mother“

but, really: the whole reason I made up Wright’s comment was so I could show him wearing the Holstein-cow-hide jacket:

Wright in Taliesin in the late 1920s.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

Back to the 3 Taliesins:

Wright first called his house Taliesin I

when he wrote about the lead-up to finding out about the fire at Taliesin in 1914:

In the fall of 1913 Young Ed Waller’s head got outside the idea of the Chicago Midway Gardens and he set to work. First on me, one day when I had come in from the workshop, not in order, at Taliesin I.

Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 178.

and II

when he wrote about deciding to rebuild after Taliesin’s 1914 fire:

Anguish would not leave Taliesin until action for renewal began. Again, and at once, all that had been in motion before at the will of the architect was set in motion. Steadily, again, stone by stone, board by board, Taliesin the II began to rise from Taliesin the first.
An Autobiography, 192.

And gives us Taliesin III later

while writing about Taliesin’s second devastating fire in 1925 that happened 100 years ago on April 20:

A few days later clearing away the debris to reconstruct I picked up partly calcined marble heads of the Tang-dynasty,… Sung soft-clay sculpture and gorgeous Ming pottery turned to the color of bronze by the intensity of the blaze. The sacrificial offerings to—whatever Gods may be.

And I put these fragments aside to weave them into the masonry—the fabric of Taliesin III that now—already in mind—was to stand in place of Taliesin II. And I went to work.

An Autobiography, 260.

Conveniently,

the fires go hand-in-hand with those simple dates I mentioned last year when writing about the Wrights’ wedding anniversary on August 25.

The fires are something solid I can use to mark a change at Taliesin.

As opposed to Wright’s tendency to change things constantly at his home.

However,

The structure changed as Wright’s life and economics changed, or for such seemingly trivial reasons as preparation for a magazine article

an example of one such change was one he made preparing for a photograph in an insert in 1951 Architectural Forum magazine. Apparently, Wright expanded his bedroom for that photo.

The photo was taken by Ezra Stoller. His firm, ESTO, keeps a tight hold on his photographs, so I linked to a .pdf of the that issue from Architectural Forum. The insert, showing lots of Wright spaces, starts after page 71.

The photo caption says in part that the “beautiful room” you see in the photo was “not there six months ago.”

Or as significant as beginning a winter home (Taliesin West).

This undergirds the idea of Taliesin as change.

So, even if there had been no fires and Wright was flush with money (and skilled craftspeople all of those years), he would have made extensive changes to the structure, as he did to his residence in Oak Park, Illinois, and Scottsdale, Arizona.

For instance,

The Baraboo Weekly News on April 30, 1925— while talking about Wright’s rebuilding following Taliesin’s second fire—described changes he had made “last summer”:

Start Work to Rebuilt Wright Bungalow Soon

The clearing away of debris of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin… has been completed and workmen will begin this week to rebuild the parts of the bungalow destroyed by the fire. The work of reconstruction will be in charge of W. C. Schwanke of Spring Green who had charge of extensive improvements and additions last year. An addition of four rooms and a large balcony which was built last summer was part of the building consumed by the flames.

Online at Chronicling America from the Library of Congress, here.

The rooms might be two rooms on two floors, but I don’t know about the balcony. We might find out by looking at a photo in the National Library of Australia:

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

You’re looking at the Taliesin’s living quarters c. 1924. Mr. Wright’s Bedroom now starts on the far right.
Speaking of “other” Taliesins, I showed this photo in my post, “Taliesin II: The Forgotten Middle Child of Taliesin“.

The different Taliesins in drawings:

When I study Taliesin, one of the things to do is take two or three electronic drawings that I trust, cut up parts of them, then compare them over time.

At the top of this page is one of my sequences showing the areas of the Wrights’ bedrooms in Taliesin I, II, and III. I once again put that below:

The consistent features I used were the chimney on the left; and the horizontal line that ends in a “key” design. Despite the fires and expansions, those two features have stayed somewhat the same. I used a several gray and black rectangles to establish consistent lines so you can see how things moved in Taliesin 1, Taliesin 2, and Taliesin 3.

Sometimes figuring out the building this way helped the Taliesin Preservation crew figure out why the building was doing one thing or another.

The building’s so variable and imperfect that Wright’s sentence about its early design sometimes goes through my head: “It was intensely human, I believe.”¹

First published on July 22, 2025.

You can find the three Taliesin floor plans I used online at JStor. Here’s the link to the one for Taliesin 1, c. 1912, for Taliesin 2, c. 1915-20, and for Taliesin 3, c. 1936.

Note:

1. An Autobiography, p. 176.

Stone Entry Gates on Highway 23

Posted on 06/05/2025 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Photo taken in 1955 by Maynard Parker for House Beautiful magazine. It wasn’t published at that time, but you can find it on p. 4-5 in the book At Taliesin; and in the book Working with Mr. Wright, p. 8-9.

Are not the original entry gates to Taliesin.

That’s what I’m going to explain in my post today.

You can see the gates I’m talking about without being on a Taliesin tour. They’re just off the road, and Wright’s estate mostly surrounds you. In the photo at the top of this post, the gates are under the clump of fir trees by Highway 23.

I took the photo below that shows the stone gates today:

One of my close-ups is in the slideshow you see on my homepage. I took this and other photos while: trying to come to terms with losing my job; and my husband was gently persuading me to develop the domain name keiranmurphy.com that he’d reserved for me.

I gave a presentation a couple of weeks ago and was reminded that many people think that those stone gates are “the original entry” to Taliesin.

No, they aren’t.

Let’s get it out of the way and confirm that the original entrance gates to Taliesin are by Taliesin’s waterfall.¹

In 1911, Wright’s draftsman, Taylor Woolley, took the picture of those original gates on County Road C surrounded by its stonemasons:

This photo is published in Building Taliesin: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home of Love and Loss by Ron McCrea (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, Madison, Wisconsin), 2012, p. 102 (fig. 96). It’s now out of print, but you can get it from other sites online.

So, why do people think the gates on Highway 23—about half a mile away from Taliesin—are “the original”?

Long story:

You’re not surprised, are you?

In the 1980s,

the Taliesin Fellowship was in charge of giving tours at both Taliesins. Wright’s widow, Olgivanna, decided to employ guides in Wisconsin instead of just using architectural apprentices.

The tours usually only went to Hillside, the hub of the architecture firm, Taliesin Associated Architects founded upon Wright’s death.

They didn’t have regular Taliesin House tours because Olgivanna lived in Taliesin’s Living Quarters, while the rest of the Fellowship lived elsewhere in the building.

So, with brand new guides,

Fellowship members relied on each other

to gather the information needed for a tour, while apprentices also taught new guides.

Everyone went with what they knew, and apparently the story that rose to the top was that those Highway 23 gates were “the original”.

That’s what I learned in 1994 when I started in tours.

Tours then (like today), started by leaving the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center on a shuttle bus and driving down the highway.

Since we drove to Hillside for tours around a dozen times a day, we all learned to point out things on the right as we drove by, including the stone entry gates.

as a result, I’ll probably be able to confidently reach my left arm out while saying, “And, to your right…” to the end of my days

Although I don’t think I’ll be able to do this while walking backwards anymore.

I didn’t question

the history of the stone gates until the winter I worked in the Preservation Office.

When I wrote “My Dam History“and discovered Raymond Trowbridge’s photographs.

And saw the gates weren’t in a plan with Taliesin published in 1913 in Western Architect magazine:

You can see this in “The Story of Taliesin: Wright’s First Natural House,” by Neil Levine in Taliesin 1911-1914, Wright Studies, v. 1.²

Plus,

The office also had Plat maps. One from 1915 showed that Wright’s brother-in-law, Andrew Porter, owned the land where the gates are now:

Someone in the office used a green highlighter on the properties owned by Wright or his relatives. Frank Lloyd Wright’s land is on the edge of the number 3 in “30”.

You can see Porter’s land under Wright’s. If the stone gates were there in 1915, would be roughly to the right of the “R” in Porter.

So the gates weren’t there in 1915.

Or after Wright bought the land (c. 1920), because he was busy with the Imperial Hotel in Japan.

And after this, he was working in California.

Then there was Taliesin’s 1925 fire, and all the problems with his second wife.

Because of all of that and more, by the late 1920s he was pretty poor.

Hey! I made a rhyme!

And in May 1928, the Bank of Wisconsin foreclosed on Taliesin.

Still,

that’s gonna help us get closer to understanding the gates.

In July 1928

Wright buys Taliesin back with the newly created “Frank Lloyd Wright, Inc.”

A lot of people banded together and bought shares in Wright’s future, thinking that it would all be ok.
while I wrote last year that “Wright Was Not a Shyster“, still… none of them knew the Great Depression was coming up.

Wright moves back home and writes to stalwart (not always by his choosing) Darwin Martin: longtime friend, client, and benefactor.

In the letter

Wright wrote that the highway was newly re-done and he was planning on building a road to it.³

Unfortunately,

the b—–d didn’t write “I’m calling one of my stonemasons to build some nice gates on the highway.”

But I think we’ve got proof he was building a road in 1928 because of a letter in early November to the Capital City Culver Co.⁴ He ordered several long, wide pipes. It seems logical that they could be used when constructing a road over the creek that runs through his property.

The creek that fills the pond, and creates the waterfall which, again, as of May 27 2025 is back at Taliesin!

So, with the road constructed in 1928-29, the stone gates were built.

This seems likely given a photograph of the gates taken by a photographer named Gilman Lane, from Chicago:

This photograph by Gilman Lane is courtesy of the Oak Park Public Library Special Collections, Oak Park, Illinois.

We don’t have an exact date, but it was taken 1930-33, based on Lane’s other work. And the young pine trees behind the gates show, I think, that they were newly constructed.

And you can see “Taliesin” carved onto the stone. That was done by Wright-apprentice Abrom “Abe” Dombar. Abe was in the Fellowship from 1932-35.

First published June 5, 2025.
The photo at the top of this post can be found on this webpage: https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll5/id/10262

Notes

AS OF THE LAST WEEK OF MAY 2025, THE POND- AND WATERFALL ARE BACK AT TALIESIN!
Publishing info: editor, Narciso Menocal (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1992).
This is MICROFICHE ID #L003C04, which is in the collection of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).
This is MICROFICHE ID #C003D03, written November 1, 1928 from the Capital City Culvert Co. regarding for several culverts they were sending to Wright. Also in the collection of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives.

Change at Taliesin’s Hill Crown

Posted on 04/20/2025 | by keiran

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Looking north at Taliesin during its initial construction. Wright’s draftsman, Taylor Woolley took this photograph in 1911.¹

In today’s post I’m going to write about another change at Taliesin.

This was something I became aware of Frank-knows how many years ago.²

I probably realized it after looking through a loupe in ferreting out changes on the masonry on Taliesin’s Hill Crown—

OK, hold on:

I gotta explain that I mean by Hill Crown.

Since the word Taliesin is Welsh for “Shining Brow”, the building, according to Wright, is built “on the brow of the hill”.

That means that the Hill Crown stands above Taliesin’s living quarters

(or as I say, “house part of the house”)

, drafting studio and most of the agricultural part of the building.

So, in the photo at the top of this post, the Hill Crown is to the right of the tower, where the trees stand. And the “house part of the house” is on the brow, on the far right.

And you can see in that photo at the top of the page that there’s no retaining wall encasing the Hill Crown. You might think there wasn’t a wall because Wright wasn’t quite done building the house, but that might not be true.

I only started thinking about when that wall around the edge of the Hill Crown was added years ago.

So, while I was

working on those chronologies about Taliesin’s spaces and rooms that I wrote about before, I decided to look at a photo from 1912 that you can see below:

You can find this photo in the issue that the Organic Architecture + Design Archives published in 2018.

Looking (plan) southwest past Taliesin’s Tea Circle in this photo, I realized that it lacked the retaining wall that’s there now.

The wall should have been about where you can see the arrow in another version of that photo:

You can see what I’m talking about if you look at another photo that shows the wall:

This photo was taken 1935-39. It was published on p. 199 in that book I recommended: At Taliesin, ed. and with commentary by Randolph C. Henning. The woman on the step is apparently Kay Schneider (later Kay Rattenbury). “Kay” joined the Taliesin Fellowship apparently when she was 17 years old and spent most of the rest of her life there (she died in 1996).

Since I noticed

that the wall wasn’t there in 1912, I tried to figure out when it did show up. First, I looked at other photos from around the same time, and then eventually found the photo by Taylor Woolley that’s at the top of this post.

Also, I tried to figure out when—or if—Wright’s plans for the wall existed.

Once I looked,

I realized I couldn’t find anything that shows the wall in the drawings for Taliesin I (1911-14). Like 1104.003, below:

And 1104.009,

or 1104.013:

Apprentices in the Taliesin Fellowship drew this in the early 1940s for the book, In the Nature of Materials, by Henry-Russell Hitchcock.

And lots of others I could show, but I’ll stop for now, at least with drawings.

But since I couldn’t get a clue from drawings,

I looked in Wright’s autobiography to see if he mentioned anything.

Unfortunately, he didn’t write, “So, I left part of the Hill Crown open until pushing past the cows that wandered up there got too annoying.“

Despite what illustrator Razin Khan put into his fantastic Taliesin 1 drawings.

The closest I found in his autobiography might have been this:

And so began a “shining brow” for the hill, the hill rising unbroken above to crown the exuberance of life in all these rural riches.…

Finally it was not so easy to tell where pavements and walls left off and ground began. Especially on the hill-crown which became a low-walled garden above the surrounding courts, reached by stone steps walled into the slopes….
Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography, new and revised ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 170.

So, that doesn’t give us a lot of clues about the Hill Crown in 1911, and there doesn’t seem to be anything else until after 1914.

Therefore, Taliesin II

is when you get the wall in this pretty drawing:

I wrote where you can see the retaining wall that’s included in the drawing. If you click on it, you’ll go to Jstor where I think you’ll see the wall better.

Now, if you go to Taliesin today, you’ll see that the building, or low retaining walls, form a rectangle around almost all of the Hill Crown, like what’s in this photo:

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #2501.0183.
The arrow in the photo is from when I included it in my post, “The Musical Note-Retaining Wall at Taliesin“.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s widow, Olgivanna, made a change to the wall after her husband’s death, which I mentioned in the wide-ranging post, “The Prisoner, Taliesin, and My Sister“.

And, lastly, I put a photo below that shows more of the wall during summer:

I took this photograph on July 18, 2014.

First published April 20, 2025.
You can find Taylor Woolley’s photograph at the Utah Historical Society, here.

1. I’ve put so many photos by Woolley in blog posts, that you can best find them by just going to the “search” feature in my posts when you click on “blog”. You’ll see the “search” box on the right. Or you can just look at this link for all the times I’ve “tagged” him: https://keiranmurphy.com/tag/taylor-woolley/

2. actually, for today’s post, I looked in my “Finds & Investigations” folder where I keep “unknowns” in Taliesin history. I started this folder when things occurred to me during research that I didn’t have time to pursue. The first time I wrote a note to myself to investigate this Hill Crown retaining wall?
2006.
When I saw that year, I just laughed so heartily (hardily?).

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“.

Photograph by Keiran Murphy, September 1, 2003.

The Abandoned Stairway at Taliesin

Posted on 11/01/2024 | by keiran

Reading Time: 6 minutes

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

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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

And after:

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:

It’s a continual project that I hope to finish one day.
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.
Read my “I Looked at Stone” post to find out why they’re red.
I’ll put it into a book entitled, “That’s Not a Crack, That’s a Change: Adventures in Preserving Taliesin”.

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

Another Change at Taliesin

Posted on 01/20/2024 | by keiran

Reading Time: 6 minutes

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:

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:

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

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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.

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.

Photographs showing "Octagon" and "Cube" at Frank Lloyd Wright's Midway Gardens. Taken from the book The Life-Work of the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Missing Wright

Posted on 03/05/2023 | by keiran

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Three photographs of statues at Midway Gardens, by Frank Lloyd Wright. The statues represent “attributes of geometry”¹. The two photos on the left show the Octagon statue, and the one of the right shows “cube”. I took this photo from my copy of the “Wendingen”.

No: not missing the man, Frank Lloyd Wright.

I’m talking about missing a building designed by Wright.

in other words:

Which destroyed Wright building would you like to see?

The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy says that ONE in every FIVE buildings he designed has been destroyed.²

Therefore, some Frankophiles play the game that they imagine which destroyed Wright building they want to walk through. So, it’s a chance to visit your favorite Wright buildings IN YOUR MIND.

Although, really, unless we live there or work there, most of us only have our minds as the vehicles to visit our favorite Wright buildings.
It’s a minor compulsion. We can deal with it if we want to.³

On that question

there are those who will vote for Taliesin 1 as their favorite destroyed Wright building. That is: his home, Taliesin, from 1911-1914.

btw, you can find Taliesin I in my blog here and at this link here, among posts of mine.

But, I am not one of them.

I mean: I do not think that Taliesin I was the “best” Taliesin.

That’s because I see Taliesin as a manifestation of Wright’s mental and artistic process, from the time he started it until the last day he saw it.⁴

Although, I have thought differently about Taliesin II in the last year or so.

So, with Taliesin out of the running, which building do I wish I could see?

Midway Gardens

I have come to this conclusion recently. That is because I am currently reading Frank Lloyd Wright, The Lost Years: 1910-1922.⁴ This book from 1993 was by author, architect and architectural historian Anthony Alofsin. He developed it from his doctoral dissertation.

My husband gave me the book as a gift, so I’ve been underlining a lot and writing notes in order to maintain an understanding of what I’ve read.

Don’t worry, I’ve been underlining in pencil, so I’m not carrying on in some sacrilegious defacement. Although, I often keep my space in books by turning down the corners of pages.
I don’t know why I perform this mutilation. I guess you’ll have to deal with it.

What was Midway Gardens?

Edward C. Waller, Jr. commissioned Wright to design Midway Gardens as an entertainment, eating and drinking establishment in Chicago. It took up one-square-city block and was constructed next to the Midway Plaisance park in Chicago’s South Side. Waller wanted it opened as long as possible in the Midwest, so it had a summer garden (outside), and a winter garden (inside).

Waller intended it to be a venue where people could spend an entire evening. They could eat dinner and drink, as well as dance. That’s why it had a band-shell for live music.

How it got started:

Midway Gardens came about because Edward Waller, Jr. (whose father commissioned Wright) approached Wright with an idea to create an entertainment establishment similar to the beer gardens he had seen in Germany. My research for this post told me that beer gardens emerged in Germany in the 18^th Century. The website TripSavvy says that:

Maximilian I, Bavaria’s first king, … signed a royal decree that allowed brewers to sell beer, but not food. People compromised, enjoying the best beers direct from the brewer and bringing a picnic. Thus, the tradition of the biergarten was born.
https://www.tripsavvy.com/what-to-expect-at-german-biergarten-1519627

Beer gardens were sites where the whole family could gather for hours and see friends. Waller approached Wright on this at an interesting point: Wright had been in Europe with Mamah Borthwick in 1909-1910, absorbing a lot of ideas. So, this commission came in 1913 and gave him the chance to weave these ideas into a project.

With this commission,

Wright took all he had seen and learned in Europe. He designs something massive:

Drawing from The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), drawing 1401.087.

The drawing above is most of the winter garden.

and all-encompassing:

Drawing from The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), drawing 1401.156.

I mean: the drawing above shows both a ticket counter and cigar booth. Totally out of control, man!

Midway also had:

Light fixtures, stained glass designs, and a mural called “City by the Sea”.

He also designed these geometric concrete blocks suggesting movement that were veneered on the building’s exterior:

Additionally, he designed concrete figures embodying the spirit of architecture, and platonic shapes (which, if you didn’t know, were also just fine to look at). Two of these statues are in the three photos at the top of this post.

And then there were the vertical concrete figures known as “Sprites”, which people still really like.

One appears in the photo below, taken at Taliesin West. When I went to study there, I often took tours after working all week. I took the photo below while on one of them. It shows one of the sprites outside of the Garden Room at Taliesin West:

The sprites at Taliesin West are painted, like you see above. Several guides on my Taliesin West tours told the story that Wright had the sprites there, and that his daughter, Iovanna, went to him and said, “Daddy, I want to paint the statues,” and the paint on the Taliesin West spites is the result.

This story, in my opinion, might fall under what I call “the telephone game of tour guiding.”

I don’t know when the sprites came to Taliesin West, but I was told Wright bought the land in Feb. 1938. That would mean that Iovanna was 12 years old. “Daddy, I want to paint the statues” makes her sound like she was 5. So, I believe the story might be conflated a little bit. On the other hand, there were plenty of children growing up at T-West so maybe that’s what happened.
/Frankophile out

Wright also designed the restaurant’s plates, beer steins, and cigarette holders. This artifact page in at Steinerag.com/flw/index.htm has a great selection of them.⁵

Midway, in short, was awesome

A whole lotta gesamtkunstwerk goin on.

I mean:

it was a total work of art.

I don’t speak or read German; but, like some German words, it crams a lot of meaning into one word.

This is a video of a pretty cool model of Midway Gardens in the program known as SketchUp. It’s a 3-D modeling program and takes you all around the building so you can see the size of it and how it all relates together.

And Douglas Steiner (of Steinerag) wrote on the Midway Gardens design, below:

There are many classic Wright details. The basic material[s] are brick and patterned concrete blocks. There are cantilevered and trellised roof overhangs and cantilevered balconies, decoratively designed metal fascia cornices. Horizontal lines, columns, hidden entries, horizontal rows of leaded glass windows and rows of leaded glass doors that open outward, vases, light trees, pedestal bases and sculptures, many, many sculptures.

Steiner copyright from 2008.

Unfortunately, fate killed it.

First of all:

Its grand opening was June 27, 1914.

That was the day before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Which led to World War I.

Those of you who have read me for awhile know I have an interest in World War I. In part because I believe it’s “the Worst Mistake We’ve Ever Made as a Species“.

Additionally, Wright and his son, John, were finishing up one of the building’s murals when they found out about the fire (and murders) at Taliesin. This did not seem to effect business at Midway Gardens, but was/is a really sad note/coincidence.

Then, there were money problems.

Even I know that restaurants can bleed money.

But, while the first two summer seasons went well, there were still bills from before the establishment opened. In 1916, Edelweiss Brewery bought Midway Gardens, and it became the “Edelweiss Gardens.”

The Gardens limped through World War I, but finally,

there was Prohibition.

While overall I think it was a good thing that we in the United States kicked our habit of drinking,

you know, like drinking a liter of hard liquor a day,

it sentenced Midway Gardens to history.

Here’s Wright in his autobiography regarding the Gardens’ downfall:

…. And then the “affliction” fell. The Nation went dry.

That was the final blow….

[T]he Midway Gardens sunk to the level of the “beer-garden” without the beer….

“They” painted the chaste white concrete sculpture in more irrelevant gaudy colors, stenciled more cheap ornament on top of the integral ornament, wrecked the line and mass of the whole—until all semblance of the original harmony utterly vanished. Yes, a distinguished woman dragged down to the level of the prostitute is now its true parallel.
Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (Longmans, Green and Company, London, New York, Toronto, 1932), 187.

However:

even though fate doomed Midway Gardens from the start, what Wright designed is still glorious. Even if only in our minds.

Here are some resources:

And a great page on Midway Gardens from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

In 2014 Chad Solon created a Model of Midway Gardens in the modelling software “Sketchup“, and you can walk through it.

And the link to Frank Lloyd Wright and Midway Gardens, the book by Paul Kruty.

And lots of photos in the ‘teens by Henry Fuermann Sons at a page on the FLW Pages at Steinerag.

First published on March 5, 2023.
I took this photo from The Life-Work of the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1965; Santpoort, Holland: C. A. Mees, 1925), by Frank Lloyd Wright, H. Th. Wijdeveld, ed.
The “Life-Work” is the book publication of seven issues of Wendingen magazine that were published in 1924-25. Wendingen magazine was published in the Netherlands from 1918-32. Because of the link to the magazine, people refer to it as “the Wendingen”.

Notes:

1 Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 1910-1922: A Study of Influence, by Anthony Alofsin (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992), 143.

2 The Building Conservancy determined that number in the late 1980s. Since then, with a few exceptions, they’ve successfully splashed daylight on endangered Wright buildings.

3 Nooo – after all, I can sleep without my blanket.

4 Not that there aren’t Taliesin details I’d like to see, along with those things I really wish he had not changed (as I wrote about here).

5 Douglas Steiner writes these pages. Sometimes I’ll check on items because he explains things really well.

Postcard of crowd at Taliesin. Caption on card: "WEST WING. WRIGHT'S BUNGALOW". Property: Patrick Mahoney

What is the oldest part of Taliesin? Part II

Posted on 11/26/2022 | by keiran

Reading Time: 6 minutes

A postcard looking (plan) northeast at the western façade of Taliesin’s hayloft, summer (the hayloft is under the roof). Because the collection of people are unexpected at a farmhouse, Randolph C. Henning (who collected this postcard), thinks this was taken the day after Taliesin’s 1914 fire and murders.

I wrote The Oldest Thing at Taliesin (stuff that goes back to 1911-12), and was going to leave it at that. But before I posted, I realized there were too many things to point out. I needed to divide it into two posts. So, that was part I(opens in new tab).

Here’s part II.

Like last time, I’m going back to stone because it’s the easiest material to trace at Taliesin. That’s because Taliesin’s shingles, wood, and plaster has to be replaced. And I’m not sure how much of the window glass at Taliesin goes back to 1911-12.¹

Therefore, in 2010,

Taliesin Preservation(opens in new tab)‘s Executive Director taped a printout of the picture at the top of this post onto my computer monitor.

In 2005, she (Carol) also told me(opens in new tab) about “The Album” on auction at the online site, Ebay(opens in new tab).

Architect and writer, Randolph C. Henning(opens in new tab), had sent her the scan of the image. Although he knew what you see in this image (the courtyard on the other side of Taliesin’s Hayloft), he wrote asking for help on any research on the rest of the images in his upcoming book, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin: Illustrated by Vintage Postcards(opens in new tab) (this image is on p. 39).

I’d never seen anything like that image because

you can’t really see this view today.

Why?

Because that nutter(opens in new tab) changed his house all the time, of course.

A similar angle of view is in the photo below:

I took this photograph from the roof of Taliesin’s former icehouse. The photograph is looking northeast according to Taliesin’s plan direction. Taliesin’s “Work Court” is one floor below.
I was up on this part of the roof with a member of the Preservation Crew. He was showing me details on the re-roofing. And, NO, you cannot stand on this roof while you’re on a tour(opens in new tab).²

Almost nothing in this photograph matches what you see in the c. 1914 postcard at the top of this post.

But,

even though everything’s different here’s what got my attention: the stone pier under the hayloft.

THAT is still there! Here’s a comparison of the 1914 photo and the photo from 2004:

In the Work Court, looking southeast according to Taliesin’s plan direction. This photograph has the stone pier that I saw in the 1914 postcard. The image below has both the old and new photos, with the stones in the pier compared.

Here’s the stone pier in a close-up of the two photographs:

TA-DA!

More Taliesin 1911-12:

The next photo appeared in 1911. I first saw it two years ago when the Chicago Tribune(opens in new tab) treated us all to was in a published article:

Looking east at Taliesin's agricultural wing. — In view behind trees: hayloft of Taliesin. Car [?] garage on the right. First published 12/29/11. Unknown photographer. (Chicago Tribune historical photo)

This photograph was taken December 25, 1911. The photographer was looking east/southeast (according to Taliesin’s plan direction) at Taliesin’s agricultural wing in 1911. The photo was taken on that day when Wright gave the disastrous press conference(opens in new tab) at Taliesin.

This, and the article that included it,

made me so happy that I wrote a post about it: “This is FUN for me…(opens in new tab)“.

Props(opens in new tab) go to Stan Ecklund on Facebook(opens in new tab) who, in 2020, first alerted me (and other Frankophiles(opens in new tab)) to this article. Stan created and curates two Wright-based groups on Facebook(opens in new tab), The Wright Attitude, and Wright Nation. The “WA” is a private group, but Wright Nation on Facebook is public, here(opens in new tab). If you are in the WA group, Stan posted the link to the article in the Tribune on Dec. 4, 2020.

Again, you can’t see the same view today because of Wright’s changes at Taliesin.

But I found a photo on Wikimedia Commons(opens in new tab) that’s shot from a similar angle. That’s below:

Photograph of Taliesin roofs taken on July 4, 2018. — (opens in new tab) By Stilfehler. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Looking (plan) southeast to the chimney that’s in the photograph from 1911 in the Tribune.
Taken by Stilhefler while on a tour. Click the photo to see it on-line.

I am not publishing the second photo from the Chicago Tribune. Most of what you see in the second photo cannot be seen on a tour and if you read “This is FUN for me…”, I explain it some more.

Then there’s the Hill Crown:

And its retaining wall:

I took this photograph in April, 2005.

Most likely, there are other parts of the retaining wall that go back to 1911. However, I do not think you’ll be able to look at those places for any length while on a tour at Taliesin.

Lastly, I’ll show something else you can see on tours:

(opens in new tab)

This was also published in Architectural Record magazine in 1913. Here’s (opens in new tab) where I wrote about it.

Look at the pier on the right, with the pool. The open windows on the right are at the kitchen (today it’s called the Little Kitchen). Every tour you take at Taliesin walks near that pool.

I put a present-day photo of it, below. The person who took this photo in 2018 also took the one above.

Photograph of pool next to the "Little Kitchen" at Taliesin. Taken on July 4, 2018. — (opens in new tab) By Stilfehler. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Taken in the Breezeway at Taliesin. Looking (plan) southeast at the stone veneer on the west wall of the Little Kitchen.
Photo from July 4, 1918, by Stilhelfer. Click the photo above to see it on-line. You’ll see that this photo has been cropped.

I love this area.

Wright changed things so much at Taliesin that I’m intrigued when he didn’t.

That’s all I’ve got the time to show you right now. Oh, and last thing: remember that these parts of the building I talked about were just what you can see.

So, thanks again for coming along!

Published November 26, 2022
Randolph C. Henning acquired this and sent this to the Executive Director of Taliesin Preservation while he was working on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin: Illustrated By Vintage Postcards. You can see the photo on page 39. Henning sold his collection to Patrick Mahoney(opens in new tab), AIA.

Here’s “What is the oldest part of Taliesin? Part I(opens in new tab)“

Notes

1 I could go and point out windows that seem like they were at Taliesin in 1911-12, but I dunno.

2 “WHAT – do you think we’d just walk onto the roof?”
No, I do not think you would.
However: one time a person arrived at the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center(opens in new tab) in January or February and wanted to know if they could go into the buildings on the Taliesin estate. I asked, “Did you see the notice on our website that there are no tours at Taliesin until May 1?” The person replied nicely that, “Yes, we saw that. But you didn’t say the estate was closed.” So I’m double checking.

Photograph taken at Taliesin in late summer. The structure has been built, although not all of the windows are in. One man is bending working on teh ground.

What is the oldest part of Taliesin? Part I

Posted on 11/16/2022 | by keiran

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Looking (plan) east at Taliesin from the balcony of its hayloft, fall 1911. Taken by Taylor Woolley, who worked as a draftsman for Wright at Taliesin. I showed this image in the post, “This will be a nice addition“.

While people don’t ask that question at other Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, it’s part and parcel of his personal home in Wisconsin.¹ After all, he was already changing things after 1912, and he probably would have made changes at his home even if it never suffered two major fires.

And, remarkably, there are things at Taliesin that go back to 1911-12. Even where there wasn’t any fire.

Why am I bringing this up?

I thought I would share what people asked me sometimes while I gave tours. Hopefully I didn’t overwhelm them with info. But while “don’t talk about what you can’t see” is one of the tour-guiding rules, change was a part of Taliesin.

In fact, that’s true even in the photo at the top of this post. Wright changed almost all of the stone piers and chimneys that you see there.

Now, while Wright didn’t sit down in April of 1911 and say, “I want to change my home with Mamah all the time!”, he liked the flexibility of changing things as he had new ideas. He refined his ideas all the time, and his home was the best place see these new things.

After all, I’ve heard people say that –

Taliesin is like a life-sized model.

Even Taliesin’s most consistent feature, the Tea Circle, would change.

The Tea Circle

It’s a semi-circular stone bench where Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship used to have tea.

In the photo at the top of this post, the Tea Circle will be eventually built on the right, where you can see the man working under the two oak trees. They wouldn’t finish it until 1912.

So, the photo shows that they had removed all of the dirt around those oak trees, and built the retaining walls. Then they gave the roots of the oaks a chance to settle before making more disruptions.

But Wright’s plans included the Tea Circle at Taliesin almost from the beginning.

However, you can see that unfinished Tea Circle in another photo by Taylor Woolley, below. He took this in the spring of 1912. Taliesin’s basically been built, but the Tea Circle steps, and its stone seat, don’t yet exist:

Photograph at Taliesin in early spring. In view: pool on left, Flower in the Crannied Wall statue at Tea Circle. — By Taylor Woolley. Courtesy of Utah State History, Taylor Woolley Collection, ID 695904.

Looking west toward the Tea Circle. The chimney at Taliesin’s Drafting Studio is on the right. The Hayloft is under the horizontal roof in the background.

I used to look for the Tea Circle on plans to orient myself when I was first learning about Taliesin. I put one of Taliesin’s early drawing below, with an arrow pointing at the stone bench. Western Architect magazine published this drawing in February 1913:

Drawing of Taliesin complex. Published in February 1913. — Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), 1403.011.

In fact, here are links to Taliesin plans that have the Tea Circle seat.

JSTOR says the drawings are from Taliesin II, but that’s wrong. I noted before that the former director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, the late Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, was wrong on the structural details of the building. But I never got the chance to talk to him about how he came up with the dates for the drawings.²

The Preservation Crew at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation carried out restoration, preservation, and reconstruction on the Tea Circle in 2019.³ They had to replace a lot of the degraded/missing stone work there. Its form (and as much stone as possible) now matches what was there in when it was originally finished.

Anyway, here I was,

trying to figure out the date of Woolley’s photo showing the forecourt and unfinished Tea Circle.

that’s the problem with black & white photos: they make late fall and early spring look the same!

And, HOORAY! Wright’s scandals gave me the info.

See, on December 23, 1911, the Chicago Tribune sent a telegram to Wright asking to confirm or deny that he was living in Wisconsin with Mamah Borthwick.

(by then, she and Edwin had divorced, and she legally took back her maiden name)

The Tribune published his reply on Dec. 24,

Let there be no misunderstanding, a Mrs. E. H. Cheney never existed for me and now is no more in fact. But Mamah Borthwick is here and I intend to take care of her.

Since Wright’s telegram made things even worse, the next day, Wright and Borthwick invited the reporters inside Taliesin so he could give a public statement. He hoped doing this would explain things and take pressure off himself and his family.

It didn’t go well.

In part because Wright said, “In a way my buildings are my children”. The guy needed a publicist. But it was 1911; whatcha gonna do?

This disaster with the press answered my question:

As Wright escorted the reporters to the forecourt (now the Garden Court), he talked about upcoming work on the building and grounds. He said:

There is to be a fountain in the courtyard, and flowers. To the south, on a sun bathed slope, there is to be a vineyard. At the foot of the steep slope in front there is a dam in process of construction that will back up several acres of water as a pond for wild fowl.

Chicago Daily Tribune, December 26, 1911, “Spend Christmas Making ‘Defense’ of ‘Spiritual Hegira.'”

AHA!

There it is: at Christmas 1911, they hadn’t yet finished Taliesin’s dam! So the hydraulic ram wasn’t yet working to bring water to the reservoir behind the house, giving Taliesin running water and water for the pools!⁴

In contrast, Woolley’s photo has the fountain (on the left in the photo above). That means the water system was working.

More Taliesin photos

In January 1913, Architectural Record published photos taken in the previous summer. Click on the photo below for the link to a .pdf of that magazine. The link is the whole magazine for the first half 1913, so you’ll have to go through it.

You go to the link (which has 6 months of the issues). You can find page 44 of the January issue, and that’s the start of 10 pages of Taliesin photos, like the screenshot above.

These Fuermann photos are what a lot of people envision when they think of Taliesin I.

You can also find them at the Wisconsin Historical Society in the Fuermann and Sons Collection.

And if you love them and want All The Fuermann Photos, you can buy the special issue on them that was published in the Journal of the Organic Architecture + Design Archives. They’ve got the photos Fuermann took in three photographic sessions. Architectural Historian, Kathryn Smith, explains their history.

More to come

I was ready to post this when I realized there are a few more things that you can see on tours that go back to 1911-12. So I’ll publish another post with more.

Taylor Woolley (then Wright’s draftsman), took the photograph at the top of this post. It’s at the Utah Historical Society, here.
Published November 16, 2022

Here’s “What’s the oldest part of Taliesin, Part II“.

Notes

1 I don’t think they’ll be offering tours underground any time soon, in part because the openings into some places are only accessible by crawling on your hands and knees. Like what I wrote on in “A slice of Taliesin“.

2 I didn’t want to come off as a snotnosed smarty pants. Although maybe we could have talked about it. He seemed to trust my opinion by the end. He respected my opinions on one drawing I asked about.

3 The restoration work is due to a donation by educator and Architectural Historian, Sidney K. Robinson.

Watch Ryan Hewson, of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation talking about the restoration of the Tea Circle the “Frank Lloyd Wright x Pecha Kucha Live 2020” event. Pecha Kucha is a fast-paced slide show, and Hewson’s presentation is just over 6 minutes. It explains the work really well.

4 I wrote about my study of the dam in the post, “My dam history“.

Photograph of Taliesin's Entry Foyer taken by Keiran Murphy in May 2004.

When did Taliesin get its front door?

Posted on 03/26/2022 | by keiran

Reading Time: 8 minutes

My May 2004 photograph looking at Taliesin’s entry and entry foyer.

I find humor regarding Wright’s placement of his own home’s front door, so my post today is going to be about that.

I say “humor” because of how Wright is praised on his placement of the front doors of his homes. That he placed the entrances in ways that create a journey of surprise to visitors as they seek them out.

Therefore, his houses do not usually have the front doors smack dab in front of you.

Ok, well there was that one time.

And he was young! The house (the Winslow) was his first independent commission in 1893. He was 25 or 26. Haven’t we all done things as we’re learning the ins and outs of our own lives?

Well, THAT’S an apartment building. You gotta make the entry really large to help people to go in —

STOP THAT!!

Those are all photographs of Wright buildings, but I’m trying to make a point.

. . . . Against my fictional self.

But, seriously: I find the history of Taliesin’s “front door” funny because, when he first designed his home in 1911, when you arrived at Taliesin’s first courtyard, a door was one of the first things you saw, but it wasn’t the front door.

Let me back up and show you:

So, in 1911, you would drive past Taliesin’s waterfall, and along the carriage path up the hill, and stop under the roof of the Porte-Cochere, in the photo below.¹

This photograph was taken by Wright’s draftsman, Taylor Woolley, in the late fall or early spring, 1911-12.

And once you stopped under the roof, you could get out of your vehicle and walk into the “forecourt”. And here, you saw this door, behind the vertical wood strips there at the low wall near the middle of the photo:

Wisconsin Historical Society, Lynn Anderson Collection — Postcard property of Patrick Mahoney. Published in *Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin: Illustrated by Vintage Postcards*, by Randolph C. Henning, p. 17. It’s a great book of images to get you started on your Frankophile feast.

And yes, behind the vertical pieces of wood are bug screens. Even though Wright supposedly hated them. I think it took only one summer in Wisconsin, with the Taliesin pond, for Wright to understand that the mosquitoes in Wisconsin can be pretty nasty.

Knowing me, if I were invited to Taliesin in 1912 I probably would have walked right up to that door, figuring that was the main house entry. But that’s not where Wright designated the front door. No; apparently Wright’s planned trip for visitors to the main, formal, Taliesin entry was that they would walk straight from the Porte-Cochere, through the forecourt, and up three steps and under the roof on the left that you see in the photo above.

The photo below I think shows you the straight shot he wanted you to take.

The continued walk to the door:

You go up those steps and under that roof. And on your left was another door. Which was not the front door.

Here’s why I think this is funny: in many of his designs, I get the impression that there is just one door that he intentionally leads you to. But at his home, he’s got these other doors and I think I’d get frustrated after awhile.

Although under the roof, you could see the river

I think he hoped to draw you to the view in the distance to see the Wisconsin River.

And, then you’d see the front door. It would be on your right.

The best view of the door is actually in a drawing:

I’ve never seen a photo of that door on the outside during Taliesin I or II.

Elevation of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin I. — The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).²

You can only see the door at that time from the inside, at Taliesin’s living room. You can see one view on the other side of the inglenook which I wrote about in my last post, 1940s Change in Taliesin’s Living Room.

But the other thing that is really interesting was that when you walked through Taliesin’s “front door” at that time, you walked right into the Living/Dining room of Taliesin.

And before that, you walked passed the kitchen.

This caught my eye starting about three months ago:

That’s because I was writing an article on Wright’s kitchens at Taliesin. This will appear in the Spring 2022 edition of the magazine, SaveWright . SaveWright is the magazine put out by The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.

Here’s one thing Wright wrote about kitchens in 1907:

… Access to the stairs from the kitchen is sufficiently private at all times, and the front door may be easily reached from the kitchen without passing through the living room.

“The Fireproof House for $5,000”, in Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings: 1894-1930, volume 1. Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, introduction by Kenneth Frampton (Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York City, 1992), 81-2.

So, he’s not paying attention to this, in his own home. At that time at Taliesin, the only way to get to the front door would be by walking past the kitchen. And, if you were inside the kitchen, the only way to get to that front door would be by going through the living room/dining area.

You’ll see this if you look at the Taliesin drawing in my post, “Did Taliesin Have Outhouses?“

And he’s working out these ideas at Taliesin: like I wrote, “The Fireproof House for $5,000” was published in 1907.

In addition,

He does the same thing in Taliesin II

That is, 1914-1925

Although I think by that time, he tried to hide that first door when you stopped at the Porte-Cochere.

Here are a couple of Taliesin II photos:

Looking east at Taliesin II forecourt. Photograph by Clarence Fuermann. — Wisconsin Historical Society.
Collection Name: Henry Fuermann and Sons Taliesin I and II photographs, 1911-1913, 1915

Looking north in Taliesin II forecourt. Photograph by Clarence Fuermann. — Wisconsin Historical Society.
Collection Name: Henry Fuermann and Sons Taliesin I and II photographs, 1911-1913, 1915

Taliesin’s front door is past the ceramic vase you see in the shadows. The kitchen is through the open windows that you can see above the low, stucco, wall.

Then the 1925 fire happens

So, Wright keeps the door in the same place, but changes how you get there. And, for almost 15 years, he had you drive east of the living quarters to get arrive at the front door. An aerial photograph showing the road is below:

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

From the book, The Fellowship: The Unknown Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship, by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman (Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2006). This image was published in the page opposite page 1.

That road in the aerial brought you to the steps on the way to the front door that you see below in this 1929 photograph.

Photograph of Taliesin's entry steps taken in 1929 by Vladimir Karfik — The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), Karfik Collection.

These steps took (and take) you to Taliesin’s entry. When this photograph was taken, you would walk up the three sets of steps and the door into Taliesin was to the right of the chimney.

Here’s what former apprentice Edgar Tafel wrote about his first experience walking into the house:

At Taliesin, we went through a Dutch door, its top half swinging open. Below, flagstone, and all around us natural stone. The ceiling was low, sandy plaster just above our heads. Wright led the way into his living room. What an impression that room made! It was my first total Frank Lloyd Wright atmosphere. How I was struck by those forms, shapes, materials! It was heartbreaking – I had never imagined such beauty and harmony.

This comes from page 20 in Apprentice to Genius: Years With Frank Lloyd Wright, the book I recommended last year.

In 1943, Wright changed the entrance to where it is now:

Another former apprentice, Curtis Besinger, wrote about his in the book, Working With Mr. Wright: What It was Like.

I mentioned this book when I wrote about books by apprentices.

He described in in the chapter, “Spring and Summer, 1943”:

It seemed that some students from Harvard had complained to Mr. Wright when visiting Taliesin that they had had difficulty finding the entrance. He was going to correct this.

… These new doors were visually on the center of the garden court, and made a stronger connection between the interior of the entry area and the court.

Curtis Besinger. Working with Mr. Wright: What it was Like (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1995), 147.

Re: “students from Harvard”:

When I gave tours, if I had time after bringing people to the front door, I’d tell them about the Harvard students. I often added that “Wright said Harvard took good plums and turned them into prunes.”³

Here’s a photograph taken in 1945 (I included it in my post, “In Return for the Use of the Tractor“):

Exterior photograph looking northeast at Taliesin. Taken by Ezra Stoller — Photograph in the book, Masters of Modern Architecture, by John Peter (Bonanza Books, New York, 1958), 47.

The formal entry was to the right of the two tall birch trees in the center of the photo. Although people usually went inside through the door to the left of the two tall birch trees.

Although the students from Harvard possibly influenced Wright to take away some of the FIVE DOORS that he had on that side of the house. Seriously: take a look at drawing 2501.048. It shows Taliesin’s living quarters, 1937-43.

First published March 26, 2022.

Notes:

Another word I’ve learned while working at Taliesin. Porte-Cochere: a “carriage porch” and “a covered carriage or automobile entryway leading to a courtyard.”
The Dictionary of Architecture and Construction, 4^th ed. (2006, Cyril J. Harris, ed., McGraw Hill, New York, 1975).
If you click on the drawing, you’ll see it’s characterized as “Taliesin II”. That’s wrong. Architectural details in the drawing show that this was actually 1911-14, Taliesin I. It just hasn’t been corrected. If you know anyone close to the Avery library who wants to contract with me as a consultant to correct these dates on Taliesin drawings, I’m all up for it; please give them my contact information. Thx.
As always, I learned the “gist” of that quote, but I can’t find the actual quote itself.

Wright wrote something about the same in his book about mentor Louis Sullivan, Genius and the Mobocracy. Wright while writing about university education, says that the “creeping paralysis” in ” higher learning” takes “Perfectly good fresh young lives—like perfectly good plums… destined to be perfectly good prunes.”

That’s in the Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings 1939-49, volume 4, 343-344.
I like the way I first heard it, rather than how Wright wrote it. Maybe he said it someplace else.