Many mourn loss of Wright’s Taliesin, his school that also created community
When the news broke Tuesday that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin architecture school would shut down after 88 years, architects and architecture buffs shuddered. Some probably even cried. Why?
Because in addition to the transcendent, nature-inspired beauty of its campuses in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and Scottsdale, Arizona, Taliesin was a community as well as an architecture school.
For years, its students raised crops, cooked meals, cleaned house and built the structures of the ever-growing compounds, including its magnificent skylit drafting rooms — all under the direction of Wright and his third wife, the domineering Olgivanna. The students even traveled together between the two Taliesins, driving in caravans from the one in the softly rolling hills of southwest Wisconsin to spend the winter at the architect’s desert encampment in Scottsdale.
One of those students, or “apprentices,” was a shy, hardworking kid from Evanston, John Howe, who came to Spring Green straight out of high school to join the first group of Wright disciples in 1932. Like many affected by the Depression, Howe couldn’t afford the tuition, so Wright gave him the job of keeping all the fires lit in the fireplaces of the main house. While other students were out chopping wood, Howe was near Wright’s studio, sopping up wisdom from the master.
Within five years, he was running Wright’s drafting room, according to Minneapolis architect Tim Quigley, co-author of a book on Howe. “He was a boy wonder, a sponge who was incredibly talented,” Quigley said in an interview. “He was literally Wright’s right-hand guy.”
Like all the apprentices, Howe did chores, attended black-tie Sunday dinners at the main house on the Spring Green campus, and went to lectures by Wright as well as the musical productions and foreign film showings that peppered the vital Taliesin scene.
Citing this wealth of activities, some have characterized the Taliesin campuses as artistic communes of the highest order. A less sympathetic take is that the compounds, which provided Wright a source of income and free labor during the Depression., were not-so-benign dictatorships where Wright and Olgivanna ran all aspects of the apprentices’ lives, even telling them whom they could — or could not — marry.
However one perceives the Taliesen campuses, they were, like Wright himself, utterly unconventional. At a typical architecture school, students toil away in the design studio until the wee hours of the morning, then return to their cheap rented apartments. Wright, who had left the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1887 without a degree, “didn’t have much use for traditional schooling in any way, shape or form,” Quigley said.
Yet like so many enterprises
that revolved around a single charismatic figure, the school ultimately did not last. The author and architecture critic Aaron Betsky, who was named the school’s dean in 2015 and later became its president, tried to infuse it with new ideas, yet, some say, he encountered resistance from Taliesin’s old guard.
“The animosity was that the school, I think, was trying to achieve something new and taking the core ideas of why there was a program at Taliesin and bringing it into the 21st century,” said Chicago architect Brad Lynch, who taught at the school in 2017.
Why it all came apart is the subject of finger-pointing between the Scottsdalebased Frank Lloyd Wright
Foundation, which owns the Taliesin properties and seeks to preserve Wright’s legacy, and the leaders of Wright’s former school.
Now called the School of Architecture at Taliesin, the accredited private graduate school broke from the foundation in 2017.
The combatants issued dueling news releases Tuesday and disagreed whether the school, which had 30 students, had a sustainable business model. Whoever is right, Tuesday was a sad day for architectural education, marking the loss of one of its mythological touchstones.
The school, whose former students included E. Fay Jones, the Arkansas architect who won the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal in 1990, will close at the end of June.
While activities like public tours at the two Taliesins will continue, the school’s absence will likely be keenly felt. Both campuses integrated working, living and learning. (The one in Scottsdale got its start in 1938, six years after Wright began the apprentice program at his Spring Green home.)
“The students were always around, helping, even doing menial tasks like cleanup,” said Chicago architect John Eifler, who has worked on the renovation of both properties. “It was always a real pleasure to see that tradition being continued through the years. I think it’s going to be quite a loss as far as just the vitality of the place.”
Anticipating such a concern, the foundation and its president, Stuart Graff, said in its news release that it would expand Taliesin’s educational programs for design professionals and others to “keep the Taliesin campuses vital places.”
Time will tell if the approach works or is a mere a Band-Aid. “I hope that Stuart and the foundation are committed to inhabiting both sites in an educational, community way — that they be used as they were intended,” Eifler said. “It would be sad if they became a ghost town of tours.”