“Architecture is the truest record of life as it was lived… yesterday, as it is being
lived today or ever will be lived.”
Hi everyone, ken here, welcome to "ThisHouse"! These words were spoken by Frank Lloyd Wright,
whose derived beauty from tragedy in the formation of his personal house, Taliesin.
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The story of Taliesin begins in 1903.
Frank Lloyd Wright was an established architect, working from his home in Oak Park, Illinois.
Edwin Cheney and his wife Mamah were avid fans of his signature Prairie Style and commissioned
Frank to design their dream home.
Upon meeting, Frank and Mamah were immediately taken with each other and began having an
affair.
By 1909, they had both separated from their spouses, and in the following year, they travelled
off to Europe together where they could be with each other openly.
As time went on, they dreamed of building a house together, settling down, and starting
a family, but two married people having an affair could not expect so much without their
reputations being destroyed.
That’s when they began devising a plan to evade scandal.
Back in the United States, Frank’s mother, Anna, was living on their family’s ancestral
land near Spring Green, Wisconsin.
The property was expansive and remote with rolling hills and deep ravines far away from
anyone who might pass judgement on Frank and Mamah.
In 1910, Frank met with his mother and convinced her to allow them to move to the property.
He took out a small loan to build his mother a house, but in reality, the house would be
built for his lover.
He moved Mamah to the property to live with his sister in a house known as Tan-y-Deri
which he had designed several years earlier.
Everything seemed to be going according to plan, but later that year a reporter broke
the news in the Chicago Examiner that Wright had been living a double life.
With the break of this scandal, Frank’s career came crashing to a halt.
Very few people clients, most of whom were very reputable, wanted to associate with him.
This gave him the chance to focus on his new life with Mamah and thoroughly plan his dream
home.
He scouted for the perfect location to begin construction, and chose to build on one of
his favorite locations from childhood, near the top of a hill.
He designed a house that would become part of the hill, blending nature and the built
environment together, naming it Taliesin, meaning “Shining Brow” a nod to his Welsch
ancestry.
Frank Lloyd Wright described the home as “…low, wide, and snug…” as the single story residence
protruded from the hill in three main sections: A residential wing and an agricultural wing
joined by an office wing, all seamlessly connecting to a courtyard.
He chose yellow limestone to imitate the natural rock formations found in the landscape and
mixed plaster with sienna for the walls to resemble the sand found on nearby river banks.
Every detail was planned thoroughly to blend the house with its natural environment even
planning for materials such as the roof’s shingles to weather and age with grace so
that they might become indistinguishable from the grey branches which swayed overhead.
Though not everything would remain natural.
He brought in hundreds of fruiting trees and vegetables to be planted around the house,
creating a working farm to sustain the family with food.
Finally, with the contours of the house planned in idealistic fashion, he designed the courtyard
to imperfectly balance the organic aesthetic.
Using the concept of Wabi-Sabi, a Japanese practice in Landscape Architecture, he laid
out the courtyard with a tea circle boasting a natural pool in the center with oak trees
planted to both disrupt the seating area and accent it.
While the architecture presented a strict adherence to geometric principles, nature
was allowed to flaunt its beauty through seemingly random, imperfect means.
But this isn’t the house we are looking at, not quite.
Because in 1914 tragedy struck.
Frank and Mamah had settled into the home with Mamah’s children from her previous
marriage.
As Frank was out of town working, a member of his domestic staff, Julian Carlton, was
given notice of his last day of work.
Carlton, originally from Barbados, had been continually harassed by one of Wright’s
draftsmen, Emil Brodelle, who frequently insulted Carlton with racial slurs.
Upon receiving his notice of termination, Carlton began plotting his revenge against
Emil and the rest of the family for his poor treatment.
On August 12th, just as lunch was to be served, he picked up a hatchet and approached Mamah
and her son from behind, slaying them as they sat.
Her daughter jolted across the house and fled into the courtyard where Carlton caught up
with her and took her life.
He poured gasoline over their bodies, as well as the entrances and exits from the house
and lit it all on fire.
As people began exiting the house in terror, he chopped them down one by one with his hatchet,
killing 6 people.
He then attempted to take his own life by drinking a vile of hydrochloric acid, but
it proved not to be a fatal amount.
Though Carlton was captured by police and charged with murder, he entered a plea of
not guilty.
Even though the acid did not kill him immediately, it had greatly injured his esophagus and stomach
lining to the point that he was not able to consume food.
After 47 days, he passed away in his jail cell due to starvation.
When Frank heard this news, he came rushing home to find that his family and house were
gone.
After dealing with his grief, which included insomnia and temporary blindness, he decided
that the best path forward was to seek a new chapter of renewal at Taliesin.
With a few modifications, he reconstructed the house naming it Taliesin the Second, though
he would not spend much time here.
One of his fans, a wealthy woman by the name of Miriam Noel wrote him to express her condolences.
The two began corresponding and eventually met face to face and in less than a year they
were dating.
Around this time, Frank’s reputation began to repair itself and he was offered a major
commission over seas designing the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo Japan.
He left the states to oversee construction in Japan and acquired a vast Japanese Art
Collection which he sent back home to Wisconsin, essentially using Taliesin not as a home,
but as storage for his art.
All the while, Frank’s first wife had never granted him a divorce, which she finally did
in 1922 allowing Frank and Noel to marry each other.
Not even two years later, Noel was diagnosed with Schizophrenia and the couple separated.
In the divorce proceedings she took a large portion of his finances with her.
The following year, as a lighting storm raged over Taliesin, a fire started from the telephone
next to Frank’s bed, destroying the living quarters once again.
The fire destroyed many of the sculptures which he had collected in Japan, leaving them
in charred fragments.
But seeing the beauty in everything, he used these fragments to rebuild Taliesin the Third,
saying, “…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.”
Wrigt was already in debt following the divorce, but went to work rebuilding his home yet again.
Unfortunately, by 1927, his finances were completely tapped out, leading the bank to
foreclose on Taliesin the Third.
But it was saved by his former client and long-time fan, Darwin Martin who raised money
to purchase the home from the bank and return it to Frank.
The interior was the culmination of 3 separate architectural renditions, all building on
each other with tragedy forcing their refinement until the interior space measured approximately
37,000 square feet.
The vaulted living room ceiling was lined with geometric trim traversing the facets
of its faces above furniture which Frank had designed to be perfectly placed and arranged
on the hard wood floors.
Every window had been placed with care to allow sunlight to penetrate the space at all
hours of the day.
Heavy stone walls were accented by linear wood elements which pointed towards the outdoors,
meandering and tangling with each other to create more intimate spaces such as the dining
area which was decorated with Japanese art and pottery.
Nestled in the folds of cold stone, warm light radiated from the corner’s geometric lamps
extending floor to ceiling.
Everywhere you looked, each site line was so masterfully controlled, manipulating natural
light to contrast with shadows disappearing out of sight.
The hearth became monolithic, using larger blocks than the straight and narrow ones which
composed the walls, granting hierarchy of scale, mirroring natural rock formations found
around the property.
Traveling throughout the house you would encounter nooks, framing views of the rolling hills
as the ceiling appeared to detach from the walls to continue outside.
To further blur the lines of indoor and outdoor living, curtain walls could be found with
retractable glass doors allowing the buffer from indoor to outdoor to be removed completely.
Intricate connections could be found throughout with shelves following the windows’s alignments
allowing items to become silhouetted as the sun shown behind them.
The library contained floor to ceiling book shelves which transitioned to half height
below windows as they wrapped around the room with a skylight thoughtfully placed directly
above a desk, offering several options for seating, accommodating comfort with any creative
or academic activity.
The studio, painted in Frank’s signature Cherokee Red, opened up with natural light
reflecting from the ceiling’s carefully planned wood beams.
Linear elements extended, stretching from end to end delineating spaces for separate
activities, offering minimal form to conceal their intended functions.
Unembellished posts punctured the ceilings to disrupt carefully planned windows to allow
for perfect lighting while built in seating created more intimate areas along the hearth.
Along one wall, below windows, drawings could be showcased in natural light.
While along another wall, a desk stretched from side to side with built in shelves extending
from the windows.
It was in this studio that Frank Lloyd Wright designed some of his most iconic buildings,
such as Falling Water which we featured recently in a video.
Frank was able to live out the rest of his life in the house, traveling back and forth
to Taliesin West in Arizona with his third wife Olgivanna.
When he passed away in 1959, Taliesin the Third was willed to The Taliesin Fellowship,
a non profit which Frank had established to continue the legacy of his home later host
The School of Architecture which was established by the fellowship.
By the 1990s, the house had fallen into disrepair with significant wood rot and structural issues
prompting a new non profit group to be formed, the Taliesin Preservation, Inc, to address
costly maintenance.
By the late 90s, a lot of restoration work had already been completed before a severe
storm caused one of the Court Yard’s Oak Trees to some crashing down through the house.
The following year, one of the tunnels below the house collapsed.
Since 1998, the modern day equivalent of nearly 20 million dollars has been spent restoring
the home and making repairs caused by natural disasters.
Thankfully, with the commitment of the homes curators to keep the Taliesin the Third restored,
the house has been opened to the public for tours and continues to welcome 10s of thousands
of visitors every year.
If you have ever visited, I would love to hear about your experience down below in the
comments section.
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