Tag: Taliesin

Photograph of Taliesin's living room taken in 1930 i89164, Raymond Trowbridge, Photographer

Taliesin as a structural experiment

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IPhotograph by Raymond Trowbridge looking south at the dining area in Taliesin’s living room (read my post about Trowbridge and Taliesin here).

Taliesin in Wisconsin was Frank Lloyd Wright’s laboratory. This statement is not marketing: it’s truth. Wright experimented with materials, engineering, the play of light, colors, spatial concepts and more all over the Taliesin structure. I am not an architect or engineer, so I don’t intuitively understand the structural experiments. But I do think I understand the engineering in Taliesin’s living room—where things shouldn’t be working, but do—so I’ll write about that space here.

I can write many things to write about the space—bucket-loads—but I’m not going to address them here. Because when I start thinking about the room, I think “and another thing… oh, and also… and one more thing…” and I don’t know when I’ll finish.

Taliesin’s Living Room

In order to understand what I’m talking about, I have to introduce the basics of the room to you. Taliesin’s living room (from north to south, west to the east where its wooden floor stops) is a 986 square foot (91.6 sq. meter) rectangle. Wright initially constructed the room in 1925 after the structure’s second fire that year (its first two incarnations were in the same place, and a little smaller between 1911 and 1914). In those versions of the living room he had “tray” ceilings: like a little attic space before you got to the pinnacle.

The Living Room after 1925

Not so in this third incarnation. In this version you look up and you’re seeing the underside of the roof (with plaster on it). There’s a gabled section (with a clerestory) on the southern part, with the north ending in a hip (with a section with another little hip going to the northeast). Inside the room, a stone wall dominates much of the south, and stone takes up about half (or a little less) on the west side. Then there’s a stone pier in the room near the northeast corner. And all of this 986 sq. feet is without an attic or collar ties. But the attic’s not there. There’s nothing acting like the bottom of an isosceles triangle; and there’s no collar tie holding the opposite walls in place.

And there isn’t any steel. There’s only stone, wood, and plaster (with glass windows). So: what’s keeping the roof up? Why are the walls stable?

Because if the roof weighed too much, the glass windows with their wooden frames (4-by-4 feet) would crack, while the walls would splay (or lean) out. In truth, we’re not really sure what is keeping the roof in place (“we” as in those who have done preservation work at Taliesin—now the Preservation Crew within the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation). We don’t know in part because there are no detailed plans of the roof by the architect. And, sure, while Wright could be verbose on some things, he was silent on others. Maybe because he didn’t care about those details so much.

The living room impressed the “Grand Old Man of Architecture”

Apparently, famous architect Phillip Johnson (1906-2005) also had no clue on what kept Taliesin’s living room roof up. Johnson came to Taliesin in about the year 2000. I was giving tours at that time and was told that Johnson made an appointment “just to sit in Taliesin’s living room.” I’m told that one of the staff members heard him musing to himself, while sitting alone in a chair in the room: “how did he do it?”

After having been at Taliesin for a long time and seeing people study the room, what I know is that the roof’s mass is borne through a bunch of sleight-of-hand.

How the room seems to hold up the roof:

Visible weight support comes in three places: the stone on the south wall, about half of the west wall (with the chimney), and the stone pier inside the footprint of the room near the room’s northeast corner. But other than that, there’s no obvious way to figure out how the weight is being dropped. There are summations, though. The ceiling has two decks (two horizontal shelves) on the east and west sides. The decks have trusses in them, laid horizontally. These help hold the roof in place. Also, on the inside above the decks, there are verticals; those verticals are a little section of wall on the back of the deck. The little verticals form one side of a triangle; the other two sides being formed by the roof and the soffit. These triangles lend stability.

Another sleight-of-hand is the roof sheathing. The sheathing holds the roof rafters in place and stiffens the roof against snow. And the mullions—the vertical pieces between the windows—form posts that support more weight. And the window glass (described by a former Taliesin Preservation estate manager, Jim, as a “diaphragm”) in part holds the frame together. Which you can kind of figure, but what was theorized by Jim was that Wright saw the glass as part of the structural system. Just like Wright thought of the wall plaster and the roof sheathing—it kept the wall together and held it in place but also apparently took a bit of the weight.

Taliesin retains so much of Wright’s thinking

So I think that’s what Wright meant when he wrote about organic architecture. That all the parts work together. The great thing about Taliesin is that these things for the most part still exist; they’ve not been replaced over time by someone with today’s engineering, who “fixed” what they thought to be a mistake on the part of the architect.

I really hope these things can stay as long as possible, since you still get to see and think about the architect’s thoughts on these things. At the very least, it can fill you with wonder. The stuff you can’t really explain. Or I can’t anyway. Because despite “knowing” these tricks he’s doing doesn’t stop the feeling of gratitude one gets in Taliesin’s living room.

Some links:

  • Photographs of the living room are in Wikimedia commons are here.
  • Photographs of Taliesin’s living room and other Wright spaces are in this page of “Wright in Racine”, the blog by photographer and author, Mark Hertzberg.

First Published 11/1/2020.
The photograph at the top of this page is in Chicago History Museum, i89164, Raymond C. Trowbridge, photographer, collection. The image is in the public domain and a larger version from the Keiranmurphy website is here.

Did Wright ever live in Wisconsin in the winter?

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The simple answer is yes.

But today anyone walking into his living quarters at Taliesin sees flagstone floors and floor-to-ceiling French doors with single-pane glass (as you see in this interior photo at the Wisconsin Historical Society). So, it’s a natural thing to wonder, if you know Wisconsin at all (or have heard of the IceBowl), how the hell someone could have lived in this house in a Wisconsin winter.

In 1911, when Frank Lloyd Wright first designed Taliesin, he did intend it to be a year-round home. And he knew the state gets cold in the winter, so it was more airtight at that time (as you see here) and had radiators as well as fireplaces. His Wisconsin home worked with Wisconsin winter weather up until the 1930s. After that, Wright left for Arizona practically every fall/winter. He was going there with his family and apprentices in the Taliesin Fellowship to live and work. After a few years of searching for a site, he found land in Scottsdale in 1937, signed the papers on it the following February, and began building his winter home (Taliesin West).

Wright started Taliesin West, including, very importantly to the architect, a drafting studio, so he could work in the winter. After he began Taliesin West, Wright, his family, and the Taliesin Fellowship, moved between Wisconsin and Arizona each year. They would leave Wisconsin in the fall, and arrive back the next spring. Leaving and coming back allowed Wright to see his homes “fresh” eyes and ideas. So the two Taliesins (Wisconsin and Arizona) changed constantly under his direction.

Taliesin reflected Wright’s winters in Arizona

By 1959 (the year that Wright died), Taliesin in Wisconsin reflected his time in Arizona. By the end of his life, Wright hadn’t worried about Wisconsin winters for over 20 years. He returned every spring, moved out or eliminated walls, and added more glass and stone.

Of course, when I write that “he” did this or that at the buildings, the physical work was really done by his apprentices—young men and women—in the Taliesin Fellowship.

Click on the links below for photos from the Wisconsin Historical Society that show the inside of the house in these later years during the summer. You’ll see all of the stone and glass:

https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM64955

https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM64906

The man writing about winter weather

Of course, all of this didn’t stop the man from having, sometimes, overly romantic views of the winter. Among what he wrote in his 1932 autobiography about his home in the winter is that Taliesin

“was a frosted palace roofed and walled with snow, hung with iridescent fringes, the plate-glass of the windows delicately fantastic with frosted arabesques.”

Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings: 1930-32, volume 2. Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, introduction by Kenneth Frampton (Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York City, 1992), 228.

Took me awhile to realize that when he lovingly described “frosted arabesques”, he meant frost. When he was writing in 1932, Taliesin was still where he would live in the winter, and he described frost growing on the inside of the windows in his house. I’ve lived with frost inside the windows in Wisconsin. It’s, um… unpleasant, to say the least.

First published 9/8/2020.
I took the photograph at the top of this post in 2016.

Here’s a link to a post I did about a book by a member of the Taliesin Fellowship.

I never knew he was such an S.O.B.!

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Frank Lloyd Wright, that is. Still, after the documentary about Wright by Ken Burns came out in 1998, that’s what all of my friends said to me that Christmas.

The stuff you hear about Frank Lloyd Wright

I wasn’t surprised that they said this. Let me tell you: among other things, what’s heard about Wright is that he was arrogant, his buildings all came in over-budget, they all leaked, and his furniture is uncomfortable. But working at Taliesin teaches you a lot about varying degrees of acceptance of the man and his work. I’ve seen people burst into tears while walking into rooms at Taliesin (the beauty hits at the gut level). Kids and adults will go into the first room they see in the Hillside building on the Taliesin estate and go, “wow!” Someone reminded me that people come to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s home Taliesin from all over the United States, South America, Japan, and at least a couple of countries in Europe.

And “He was such an S.O.B.” is the other side of Wright’s fame. He was in his early 40s after building over 100 buildings when he became known nationwide—not because of his genius in design—but because of a notorious set of relationships that landed him in newspapers, where he could be the subject of press conferences (as well as the murders in 1914, but that’s not what this post is about).

Wright: forced to become adept at working in mass media

Personally I think that by the time he turned 60 in 1927—after two divorces, a child born out of wedlock two years earlier, and “shacking up” with a “dancer” 30 years his junior/the future third Mrs. Wright (with whom he would spend the rest of his life)—he’d spent almost two decades as the subject of newspaper columns. I think he realized he could turn his notoriety on its head. He’d already been on the “bad” side of press; might as well use those columnists to get press that he controlled.

As for his genius in architecture, that’s too much to really get into here,1 but his buildings at times are more than the sum of their parts and are more beautiful than you can find all the reasons for. It’s a reason people have said to me that they’ve waited their whole lives to come to Taliesin. It’s also why I had an eleven year old tell me excitedly that her parents gave her a tour of Taliesin for her birthday. I think that girl had a few years before hearing the parts that could make him an S.O.B.

First published 8/9/2020.

1 I wrote about some of his genius in “Taliesin as a structural experiment”, and “Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings are Smaller Than You Think”

East facade, Taliesin I

What was on the menu the day they were murdered?

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Looking (plan) northwest at Taliesin’s living quarters (the part of the building where the architect lived). On August 15, 1914, fire destroyed every part of the building you see in the photograph that’s not stone. 

On August 15, 1914, while Frank Lloyd Wright was working in Chicago, a servant named Julian Carlton – for reasons that will probably never be known – murdered seven of nine people at Wright’s Wisconsin home, Taliesin, while they were eating lunch. Six out of the seven were murdered with an axe. Before/ after/ or while he was doing that (we don’t know), Carlton set fire to Taliesin’s living quarters, pretty much destroying that part of the building down to the stone (that’s why one of the victims, David Lindblom, died from his burns). Among those murdered was Wright’s partner, Martha “Mamah” Borthwick (formerly Mrs. Edwin H. Cheney).

The 1914 fire was a historic detail until the book, Loving Frank

Aside from Frankophiles (fans of Wright’s), this horrible act was mostly unknown to people for decades. In part because it happened before the existence of radio and television. In addition, it’s unbelievable (“Wait – you’re telling me that there was a MASS MURDER at the house of the guy who designed Fallingwater?”). 

The murders were a strange, sad, fact until the August 2007 publication of Loving Frank, a novel of historical fiction by Nancy Horan. The book’s main character is Mamah Borthwick.

It was a huge hit: Loving Frank stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 54 weeks.1

Curiosity about that day’s lunch came unexpectedly

One thing I didn’t anticipate with the book’s release was people calling us2 wanting to know what the victims were eating for lunch that day. Sometimes people called just wanting to know that day’s “menu”. And some wanted to know what soup was being served.

Soup? Could you explain that?

That question is because of the book, Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders, by William Drennan. It so happens that  Drennan’s book was published 5 months before Loving Frank. I think it would have faded into obscurity otherwise.

Drennan chose to write that Carlton served the victims soup before attacking them.

So – how to you know they didn’t eat soup?

I’ve read lots of newspaper accounts about the murders (over 75), but I’ve not found any proof that they were eating soup for lunch. And, aside from the fact that the victims were attacked at lunchtime, no one wrote what they were eating. And I doubt the reporters would have asked the two survivors (Herbert Fritz or William Weston).

Furthermore, let me tell you: southern Wisconsin can get very warm in the summer. Soup is kind of improbable. Drennan’s choice therefore led some of us at Taliesin Preservation to wonder if Carlton, or his wife, Gertrude (the cook), had perhaps served vichyssoise or gazpacho that afternoon.

Additionally, Taliesin wasn’t an upscale abode with a chef and butler. It was a house in the country:  Gertrude would not have had planned, printed menus.

Regardless:

Fritz (who escaped by jumping out a window), and Weston (who survived, but lost his son, Ernest) probably didn’t think or care about what was on the table since that day. It ended with horrific murders that were mostly done with an axe. If I sound intense, it happens when you think about seven people murdered, only one of whom died as the result of his burns, and three of whom were under the age of 14.

First published 8/9/2020.
Photograph at the top of this page was taken by Taylor Woolley, 1911-12. It shows the east facade of Taliesin. ID 695917. A larger version of this photograph is located through here at the Utah Historical Society.
The entire Taylor Woolley photograph collection is here. See this and other Woolley photographs in Ron McCrea’s book, Building Taliesin: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home of Love and Loss.

1 By the way: people have asked me how “true” Loving Frank is. It’s remarkably accurate. The author definitely did her research. Obviously, the conversations that took place between Mamah and Frank are fiction, but many more things are backed up by research.

2 “us” being employees of Taliesin Preservation, in Wisconsin. Where I worked for half of my life before Covid.