The Fellowship

The Fellowship
Author: Roger Friedland
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 706
Release: 2009-03-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0061875260

Frank Lloyd Wright was renowned during his life not only as an architectural genius but also as a subject of controversy—from his radical design innovations to his turbulent private life, including a notorious mass murder that occurred at his Wisconsin estate, Taliesin, in 1914. But the estate also gave rise to one of the most fascinating and provocative experiments in American cultural history: the Taliesin Fellowship, an extraordinary architectural colony where Wright trained hundreds of devoted apprentices and where all of his late masterpieces—Fallingwater, Johnson Wax, the Guggenheim Museum—were born. Drawing on hundreds of new and unpublished interviews and countless unseen documents from the Wright archives, The Fellowship is an unforgettable story of genius and ego, sex and violence, mysticism and utopianism. Epic in scope yet intimate in its detail, it is a stunning true account of how an idealistic community devolved into a kind of fiefdom where young apprentices were both inspired and manipulated, often at a staggering personal cost, by the architect and his imperious wife, Olgivanna Hinzenberg, along with her spiritual master, the legendary Greek-Armenian mystic Georgi Gurdjieff. A magisterial work of biography, it will forever change how we think about Frank Lloyd Wright and his world.

"At Taliesin"

Author: Frank Lloyd Wright
Publisher:
Total Pages: 354
Release: 1992
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

Collects newspaper columns written by Wright and his assistants on their work and their ideas.

Wright and New York

Wright and New York
Author: Anthony Alofsin
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 463
Release: 2019-05-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0300243804

An “immensely valuable” dual biography of the iconic American architect and the city that transformed his career in the early twentieth century (Francis Morrone, New Criterion). Frank Lloyd Wright took his first major trip to New York in 1909, fleeing a failed marriage and artistic stagnation. He returned a decade later, his personal life and architectural career again in crisis. Booming 1920s New York served as a refuge, but it also challenged him and resurrected his career. The city connected Wright with important clients and commissions that would harness his creative energy and define his role in modern architecture, even as the stock market crash took its toll on his benefactors. Anthony Alofsin has broken new ground by mining the Wright archives held by Columbia University and the Museum of Modern Art. His foundational research provides a crucial and innovative understanding of Wright’s life, his career, and the conditions that enabled his success. The result is at once a stunning biography and a glittering portrait of early twentieth-century Manhattan.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship

Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship
Author: Myron A. Marty
Publisher: Truman State Univ Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 1999
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

This book tells the story of the Taliesin Fellowship, created by Frank and Olgivanna Lloyd Wright in 1932, in the words of men and women who joined the Fellowship, some as early as the 1930s, and remained with it into the 1990s. Many of the storytellers worked side by side with Wright, who died in 1959, and almost all of them lived and worked with Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, who survived her husband by 26 years. The Taliesin fellows are joined by other storytellers who have been their partners in recent years and who know the Fellowship well. The Fellowship's origins and milestones in its history are documented here, as well as the dynamics that shaped its progress, its character, and its story. Readers will gain fresh and provocative insights into the genius and mystique of the Fellowship's creators and an understanding of Frank Lloyd Wright's amazing productivity, particularly in the last decade of his life. These stories will debunk some of the common caricatures that are a part of his legacy.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin and Taliesin West

Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin and Taliesin West
Author: Kathryn Smith
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 168
Release: 1997-09
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

A special highlight is the chapter on Wright's collection of Asian art, which was reputed at one time to be among the largest and finest in the United States, and today consists of screens, woodblock prints, sculpture, ceramics, rugs, and textiles.

The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright

The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright
Author: Olgivanna Lloyd Wright
Publisher: Antique Collector's Club
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Architects' spouses
ISBN: 9781939621597

Weaves a narrative from Olgivanna's previously unpublished autobiography, together with vignettes from her other writings books, newspaper columns, and presentations.

Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin

Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin
Author: Frances Nemtin
Publisher: Pomegranate Communications
Total Pages: 88
Release: 2000
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

Taliesin -- the country estate built by Frank Lloyd Wright between 1911 and 1959 -- has been a self-sufficient farm complex, a boarding school, a world-class architectural studio, and a fellowship for the study of architecture. What was it like to be a part of this vibrant community, to work in close association with the preeminent American architect? Author Frances Nemtin, currently the long-time manager and designer of the Taliesin flower gardens, joined the fellowship in 1946 after she met Wright while arranging a show of his work. Rich in anecdote and precise in description, her charmingly discursive tour of the fellowship includes rarely seen photographs and paintings from the fellowship archives evoking the beauty of Taliesin in all seasons, and the excitement of living in proximity to genius.

Death in a Prairie House

Death in a Prairie House
Author: William R. Drennan
Publisher: Terrace Books
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2007-01-18
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780299222109

The most pivotal and yet least understood event of Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated life involves the brutal murders in 1914 of seven adults and children dear to the architect and the destruction by fire of Taliesin, his landmark residence, near Spring Green, Wisconsin. Unaccountably, the details of that shocking crime have been largely ignored by Wright’s legion of biographers—a historical and cultural gap that is finally addressed in William Drennan’s exhaustively researched Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders. In response to the scandal generated by his open affair with the proto-feminist and free love advocate Mamah Borthwick Cheney, Wright had begun to build Taliesin as a refuge and "love cottage" for himself and his mistress (both married at the time to others). Conceived as the apotheosis of Wright’s prairie house style, the original Taliesin would stand in all its isolated glory for only a few months before the bloody slayings that rocked the nation and reduced the structure itself to a smoking hull. Supplying both a gripping mystery story and an authoritative portrait of the artist as a young man, Drennan wades through the myths surrounding Wright and the massacre, casting fresh light on the formulation of Wright’s architectural ideology and the cataclysmic effects that the Taliesin murders exerted on the fabled architect and on his subsequent designs. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Association

Under Arizona Skies

Under Arizona Skies
Author: Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer
Publisher: Pomegranate Communications
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Architecture students
ISBN: 9780764959592

Nestled among the cactus thickets and dry washes of the Arizona desert lies an intriguing landscape of architectural experiments. Sometimes encompassing a paloverde tree or suspended many feet above the desert floor, these small dwellings, conceived by architecture students as alternatives to tents and dormitory rooms, embrace¿and in their own way, celebrate¿the natural, rugged terrain surrounding Frank Lloyd Wright¿s Taliesin West. The earliest shelters were created by adventurous apprentices at the Taliesin Fellowship, a school for architects established by Frank Lloyd Wright in the mid-1930s. After Wright¿s death, a more conventional school¿the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture¿was established, and the practice of designing and building a personal dwelling became a unique feature of the school¿s curriculum. Wright insisted that there would be no armchair architects at his school; apprentices would learn through hard work and first-hand experience. The response to this directive has been astonishingly creative. In addition to honing their design and drafting skills, students comb the desert for dwelling sites; consider the effects of extreme temperature change and winter rain; gather construction materials from surrounding hills and dry riverbeds; and thoroughly explore what Wright termed organic architecture. Collected in Under Arizona Skies are photographs and architectural plans of the most exemplary student shelters built at Taliesin West, as well as personal accounts written by Victor E. Sidy, Dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives.

Working with Mr. Wright

Working with Mr. Wright
Author: Curtis Besinger
Publisher:
Total Pages: 313
Release: 1997
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780521587143

Working with Mr Wright. is a personal recollection by one of Frank Lloyd Wright's former apprentices of his years at the Taliesin Fellowship. Curtis Besinger provides a lively account of daily life in this community of architects established by Wright in Wisconsin and Arizona. An apprenticeship with the Fellowship entailed architectural tasks, such as drafting, designing, and overseeing projects, including the actual building of Taliesin West; as well as humbler assignments - from milking the cows to harvesting wheat - related to maintaining the farm that surrounds the Fellowship in Wisconsin. The social life of the Fellowship, filled with music and film, and planned in detail by Wright himself, is also recounted with wit and humor. Through these engaging recollections, illustrated with photographs, plans, and drawings made during Besinger's years at the Fellowship, Wright's eccentric personality, his working practices, and his unique creative vision emerge, along with a host of personalities who contributed to the unique Taliesin experience.