Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t care much about gutters. “It is not the deluge of water in a storm that hurts any building,” he wrote in 1938. “It is ooze and drip of dirty water in thawing and freezing, increased by slight showers.” But in the case of Taliesin, Wright’s iconic home in Spring Green, Wisconsin, 200 miles northwest of Chicago, he might have been wrong.
Taliesin (“shining brow” in Welsh) rose in stages to crown a lovely hill. The 37,000-square-foot home dominates an estate of six Wright buildings (the Romeo and Juliet Windmill, Hillside Home School, Tan-y-deri, Midway Farm, and Riverview Terrace) built from 1897 through 1953 on 600 acres the architect had received from his family and through additional purchases. The Taliesin site, he wrote in 1914, was “one of my favorite places as a boy, for pasque flowers grew there in March sun while snow still streaked the hillside.”
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The landscape of southwestern Wisconsin inspired the design. Spring Green (population 1,200, lying 20 miles east of Richland Center, where Wright was born in 1867) is one of several small towns scattered along Highway 14 west of Madison on land contoured by erosion thousands of years ago. Houses and barns peek out from the hills and valleys and here and there stand guard over farmland that stretches to the horizon. Wright noted “the hills of the region where the rock came cropping out in strata to suggest buildings,” and he built Taliesin into its hill to look the same, its grand protrusions cantilevering over the terrain. The house’s single level winds along intricate, almost mysterious passageways and transitional spaces that become the equivalent of a nature walk, with stone paving underfoot.
In 1932 Wright and his wife Olgivanna came up with the idea (many say it was hers alone) of offering “fellowships” to students who’d pay to come and learn from Wright while providing him with a ready source of labor. Brendan Gill wrote in his biography Many Masks that Wright ruled like a monarch over those apprentices (eventually numbering 450), who cleaned, cooked, repaired, and twice rebuilt Taliesin after fires. When Wright died in 1959 Olgivanna continued the program (which exists today as the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture). But she preferred to live at Taliesin West, the winter retreat built in Scottsdale, Arizona, in the late 30s, and neglected the much larger Wisconsin estate.
“We are at the intersection of a county road and a state highway,” she continues, “an hour away from the closest interstate highway. The expectations the loan was based on were that we would draw more people than Fallingwater [the Wright house outside Pittsburgh], Taliesin West, or Wright’s home and studio in Oak Park. But they each have major metropolitan areas close by, and we’re not Six Flags. Our reality was quite different. We’re not proud about what happened to the loan, but it was used for a good purpose. Some of the problems we corrected were close to irreversible. The state and several departments have actually been very good partners for us. We really couldn’t ask for more. We just have to do more on a broader scale.”
Aulik has no doubts. “Given everything that’s possible in America, Taliesin can be restored. Of course it won’t be easy. We have to raise money to put together the team of people who can do it. There is an extraordinary amount of wealth in this country, and Taliesin ought to be someone’s legacy.”
Aulik says a small base of donors is committed to Taliesin. Her big news is that Hanley-Wood, a publisher of trade magazines (Builder, Residential Architect, and Old House Journal among them), has pledged to raise the visibility of Taliesin and rally the building industry behind it.
