The long-time home of
architect Frank Lloyd Wright near
Spring Green,
Wisconsin, as well as a
spinoff
near
Scottsdale,
Arizona. In fact, all sorts
of things associated with Frank Lloyd Wright have the name "Taliesin" associated
with him.
In 1909, Frank Lloyd Wright, having made his reputation as a designer
of homes in Oak Park, Illinois, shocked the entire
community by leaving his wife and four children, and running away to Europe
with the wife of one of his clients, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. When
he returned in 1911, there was the problem of finding a place to live.
So he turned to the Wisconsin valley his mother's Welsh family had settled,
and near which he was born. He then set to building 'Taliesin',
a home and studio in the valley.
Wright was frequently gone while working on commissions, and it was
in 1914 that one of Taliesin's staff killed seven others (including his lover and two of their children) and burned the house to the ground. Wright immediately
rebuilt the house.
In 1924, Wright met Olgivanna Lazovich, their first child was born
in 1925. The same year, the replacement Taliesin II house was destroyed
by a fire started by lightning. He rebuilt again.
Despite great critical success, Wright's finances were a shambles --
the Bank of Wisconsin seized the house in 1926, the same year Wright
was arrested for violating the Mann Act. His clients and
friends couldn't bear to see this happen, so they bought the house in 1928,
the same year Wright finally married Olgivanna.
Wright's wife set herself to the goal of ensuring her husbands financial
security, as well as her own. In 1932 the pair created The Taliesin
Fellowship, turning Taliesin into a sort of architectural kibbutz. Young,
promising architects would live at Taliesin, feeding the house by working
in the vegetable gardens by day while learning architecture at night.
Wright constantly tinkered with the house, and it grew to an immense size,
37,000 square feet, to accommodate the Fellowship.
In 1937, Wright decided to build a 'winter camp' for his Fellowship,
and so Wright, Olga, and several of his students hopped in a car and drove
down Route 66 to Scottsdale, Arizona, where the students built Taliesin
West according to Wright's design. Unlike the first Taliesin, which
resembles the "Prairie House" styles of Wright's early career, Taliesin
West was designed to fit in with the Arizona mountains and desert, being,
in Wright's own words, 'a look over the rim of the world'. As Wright
experimented with the design of the house, Taliesin West, too, grew to
immense proportions to accommodate Wright's students. Wright lived
out the rest of his days with Olga at Taliesin West
Taliesin and Taliesin West are still both owned and maintained by the
Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. At Taliesin West, activity at the
Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture resembles the days when the Fellowship
lived and worked together.
History summarized out of
recollections from Ken Burns' film Frank Lloyd Wright
http://www.franklloydwright.org/02FLLW/chrono.html