The Three Taliesins
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:
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.
