Taliesin II fire Archives

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”.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Looking north at Taliesin, 1920-24. On the far left is a workman’s apartment. The vertical tower to the right of the apartment is called the “Hill Tower”. On the far right are Wright’s living quarters. The workman’s apartment and Wright’s living quarters are connected under roofs. But, you can’t see it all because the building wraps around the hill.

April 20 is the anniversary of the second fire at Taliesin: April 20, 1925. That fire (like the first one in 1914) pretty much destroyed Frank Lloyd Wright’s living quarters down to the chimneys and foundation. Fortunately no one was hurt.

Part of what Wright said about the fire:

In his autobiography, he wrote:

[O]ne evening at twilight as the lightning of an approaching lightning storm was playing and the wind rising I came down from the evening meal in the little detached dining room on the hill-top . . . to find smoke pouring out of my bedroom. Again–there it was–Fire!

Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, in Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings: 1930-32, volume 2. Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, introduction by Kenneth Frampton (1992; Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York City, 1992), 294.

The “little detached dining room”? Where was that?

The “little detached dining room” isn’t connected to Taliesin’s living quarters. It’s connected to its Hill Tower. So you can find the room in the photograph at the top of the page by following the line of the tower down. The room is under the low-hipped roof above a horizontal rectangle of stone. Here’s a link to a photograph of the room, available at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

What was the cause of the 1925 fire?

According to Wright: “. . . . The fire had originated in a house-telephone that had given trouble as it stood by the head of my bed.” [An Autobiography in “Collected Writings,” volume 2, 295.]

Wright and the others at Taliesin that day spent several hours fighting the fire. And Wright was so desperate to save the building that, along with burning the soles of his feet, he burned his eyebrows off.

Description of one of those at Taliesin that day:

Draftsman Kameki Tsuchiura, who worked at Taliesin with his wife (draftsperson Nobuko Tsuchiura), wrote this on April 21¹:

We carried water in buckets but how helpless, we were only, Mr. Wright, I and Nobu, Mrs. Ohlson and Jack and [Mel, the chauffeur]. . . . We connected the hose to the water pipe and firemen came, but too late. His apartment, and all the guest apartment [sic] were burning. Strong wind blew from east to west. Such a smoke and flame that no one could get in the house to bring anything out. We could only cut the roof [that connected] Mr. Wright’s kitchen and studio and prevent the fire from spreading west. After 9 o’clock, wind changed, rain started to drop. And what a night we had till midnight, fire, thunderstorm, lightening and more fire!!

William Blair Scott Jr Collection, OA+D Archives

There is a book in Japanese on the architecture of Nobuko Tsuchiura. While I don’t know the full title (I don’t read Japanese), it translates in part as, “Big Little Nobu”. But the book include a photograph that shows the Taliesin living quarters after that second fire. So I put that below. It was taken at floor level, looking north. The fireplace you see on the right is now the fireplace in what became Olgivanna Lloyd Wright’s bedroom.

Photograph looking across the main floor after Taliesin II was destroyed by fire in 1925. — Photograph taken by Kameki or Nobuko Tsuchiura.
In the book, “Big Little Nobu, Right No Deshi Josei Kenchikuka Tsuchiura Nobuko”
ISBN: 9784810705416.

You can find the book on-line. Its ISBN is 9784810705416. ⇐I originally wrote that number incorrectly. Thanks to one of the readers for catching that and contacting me.

While no one got hurt, Wright lost a lot of the art he collected while working in Japan

He wrote:

Left to me out of most of my earnings, since Taliesin I was destroyed, all I could show for my work and wanderings in the Orient for years past, were the leather trousers, burned socks, and shirt in which I stood, defeated, and what the workshop contained.

[An Autobiography in “Collected Writings,” volume 2, 295.]

Personally, it would be difficult not to think that the universe had something out for me. However, then Wright wrote this:

But Taliesin lived wherever I stood! A figure crept forward from out of the shadows to say this to me. And I believed what Olgivanna said.

[An Autobiography in “Collected Writings,” volume 2, 295.]

Olgivanna would become his third wife. I think it’s kind of cool that his description—when Olgivanna said “Taliesin lived wherever” he stood—is the first time that Frank Lloyd Wright mentioned Olgivanna.

Wright starts building “Taliesin III”

During Taliesin’s rebuilding, Wright put pieces of destroyed statuary into the walls:

Smoldering or crumbled in ashes, priceless blossoms-of-the-soul in all ages—we call them works of Art—lay broken, or had vanished utterly. . . .

A few days later clearing away the debris to reconstruct I picked up partly calcined marble heads of the Tang-dynasty, fragments of the black basalt of the splendid Wei-stone, 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 in “Collected Writings,” volume 2, 295.]

First published April 16, 2021

The photograph at the top of this post appears with the essay, “The Story of Taliesin: Wright’s First Natural House,” by Neil Levine, in Taliesin 1911-1914, Wright Studies, v. 1, ed. Narciso Menocal (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1992), fig. 1, p. 3.

¹ I mentioned this couple in my post, Taliesin II: The Forgotten Middle Child of Taliesin.

The Abandoned Stairway at Taliesin

Tag: Taliesin II fire

The Abandoned Stairway at Taliesin

The photo shows

In 1911:

The last time