Building Taliesin Page 5

  6. Both quotations are from Frank Lloyd Wright’s July 4, 1910, letter to Anna Lloyd Wright.

  7. Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key, undated letter from Pension Gottschalk, Berlin Ellen Key Archive, Royal Library of Sweden.

  8. Ellen Key, Love and Ethics (Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour Co., 1912).

  9. Frank Lloyd Wright to Anna Lloyd Wright.

  10. Ibid. The calculations for today’s dollars use the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Calculator and other online inflation calculators.

  11. Some years later, after a dispute with her brother, Jennie changed her son’s name to Franklin, according to Taliesin historian Keiran Murphy. Frank’s original name may have been Franklin, according to Brendan Gill, Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1987), 26.

  12. Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key from Taliesin, circa December 1911. Ellen Key Archive.

  13. Fici, “Frank Lloyd Wright in Florence.”

  14. Oak Park, Illinois, city directory, 1911, and Washington Irving Elementary School.

  15. Catherine Wright to Janet Ashbee, quoted in Gill, Many Masks, 213.

  16. Wright’s letters to Martin and Alofsin’s comment appear in Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 66–67, and the details of the German trip on 75–76.

  17. The land was purchased on April 10 but the purchase was recorded on April 22; Keiran Murphy e-mail to author, June 7, 2011. For a detailed account of the land transactions and evolving plans, see Alofsin, “Taliesin I: A Catalogue of Drawings and Photographs,” in Taliesin 1911–1914, Wright Studies, vol. 1, Narciso Menocal, ed. (Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 98–141.

  18. Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key, November 10, 1912. “My sister brought my children here for the summer during Mr. Cheney’s absence in Europe for his wedding trip.”

  19. While still technically Mamah Borthwick Cheney, she signed her name “Mamah Bouton Borthwick” on the guest book at Ellen Key’s Strand on June 9, 1911. She also used her maiden name on the title page of Love and Ethics, prepared in Italy, and in all of her letters to Ellen Key.

  20. “He has been building a summer house, Taliesin,” Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key, undated, circa December, 1911. The description of the Goethe Street plan is from Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the detail about the Dana House is from a visit by the author.

  21. Alan Crawford, “Ten Letters from Frank Lloyd Wright to Charles Robert Ashbee,” Architectural History, v. 13 (1970), 67.

  22. Claes von Heiroth e-mail from Helsinki, Finland, to Nancy Horan, December 1, 2010. Copied to author with von Heiroth’s permission to publish, January 2, 2011. He says his grandmother preferred the German spelling Mascha to the Russian Masha.

  23. Donata Mazzini and Simone Martini, Villa Medici, Leon Battista Alberti and the Prototype of the Italian Villa (Florence: Centro Di, 2004), 2. For a siting comparison and assessment of Taliesin and the Villa Medici, see Charles E. Aguar and Berdeana Aguar, Wrightscapes (McGraw-Hill, 2002), 152–156.

  24. Frank Lloyd Wright, Studies and Executed Buildings, A scanned edition of the original portfolio inscribed to Taylor A. Woolley by Wright on the title page is online at the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah.

  25. Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, makes this argument and declares Taliesin “the first natural house.” The author is not claiming originality here but seconding Levine’s assessment after having visited Tuscany and Taliesin.

  26. Lloyd Wright letter to Linn Ann Cowles, quoted in Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 41.

  27. The diary pages and a wealth of helpful family background information come courtesy of Claes von Heiroth, who lives in Helsinki. He was referred to the author by Nancy Horan. He wrote to Horan after his architect wife, Ilona, read Loving Frank and suggested that its author might like to know more about Wright’s Russian neighbors. His sister in France, Bianca Maria Andersen, retrieved the diary and scanned the entries.

  28. ”Alexander Geirot,” The Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com.

  29. It would be surprising if Wright did not attend. He loved speed, and his 1909 Gilmore House, perched on a rise in Madison, Wisconsin, was dubbed “The Aeroplane House” by fans of the Wright Brothers. He used the term himself. An Autobiography (New York: Horizon Press, 1977), 277.

  30. Lloyd Wright played the cello. This confirms that there was a cello and a piano in the home.

  31. Gertrude Stein writes of Mascha and Sasha: “There were amusing people in Florence… . There were the first Russians, von Heiroth and his wife, she who afterwards had four husbands and once pleasantly remarked that she had always been good friends with all her husbands. He was foolish but attractive and told the usual Russian stories;” The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 55.

  CHAPTER 2

  “THE BELOVED VALLEY”

  Fig. 28. An aerial photograph taken by Madison kite photographer Craig Wilson shows Taliesin III and the valley beyond in September 2008. Taliesin I was smaller and did not include the projecting “bird walk” that Frank Lloyd Wright added for his third wife, Olgivanna.

  “Life, love, and work to be transferred to the beloved Valley.”

  —Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography

  When the Jesuit explorer Jacques Marquette canoed down the Lower Wisconsin River in 1673, he saw a scene that is recognizable today. “[It] is very wide; it has a sandy bottom, which forms various shoals that render its navigation very difficult. It is full of islands covered with vines. On the banks one sees fertile land, diversified with woods, prairies and hills.”1

  Frank Lloyd Wright saw the same scene. In his essay “Why I love Wisconsin” he calls the river “this wide, slow-winding, curving stream in the broad sand bed, where gleaming sandbars make curved breaches and shaded shores to be overhung by masses of great greenery.” When Taliesin was built, the river bend was visible from the house.

  “I come back from the distant, strange, and beautiful places I used to read about when I was a boy, and wonder about; yes, every time I come back here it is with the feeling there is nothing anywhere better than this is,” Wright says. “More dramatic elsewhere, perhaps more strange, more thrilling, more grand, too, but nothing that picks you up in its arms and so gently, almost lovingly, cradles you as do these southwestern Wisconsin hills … So ‘human’ is this countryside in scale in feeling … more like Tuscany, perhaps, than any other land, but the Florentines that roamed those hills never saw such wild flowers as we see any spring, if the snow has been plentiful.”2

  Wright had lived in the hills of Tuscany during the spring and summer of 1910, but he had memorized the Wisconsin valley since childhood. As a teenager he had worked on his Uncle James’s farm and added the “Lloyd” in his mother’s family name to his own.3 The Lloyd Jones uncles put him to work in the barnyard, but the women of the clan gave him commissions. His first independent commission at age 20 was from his aunts Jane (Jennie) and Ellen (Nell) Lloyd Jones, for the main residence of Hillside Home School in 1887. He called the barnlike structure a product of “amateur me,” but made up for it in 1901–1903 by giving the aunts a Prairie Style building, Hillside, that looks modern today.

  Fig. 29. Spring Green, 1912, an oil-on-canvas painting by George Mann Niedecken, depicts a scene along the Wisconsin River in the vicinity of Taliesin. Pear and apple trees are in the foreground, with the river and a slough below. The ridge across the river shows an exposed rock outcropping of the sort that Wright wanted to imitate with “Shining Brow.” The painting was executed during Taliesin’s first year, when Niedecken, a Milwaukee furniture builder and designer, was working with Frank Lloyd Wright on the Avery Coonley Playhouse and Gardener’s Cottage in Riverside, Illinois.

  Jennie and Nell also launched a Wright legend by allowing him to build “Romeo and Juliet” (1896), an unorthodox, sculptural windmill tower. His skeptical uncles protested and scoffed and predicted it would blow down;
it outlasted them all, to Wright’s permanent satisfaction. In 1907 he built Tanyderi (“Under the Oaks”) for his sister Jane Porter, a shingle-style house where Mamah Borthwick stayed as a guest while waiting to move into Taliesin.

  For Wright, moving to the Jones Valley in Iowa County, Wisconsin, meant reconnecting himself to his maternal roots and the land where he had discovered nature—both the natural world and human nature. Wright opens his autobiography with a story of himself as a nine-year-old boy, walking through a frosty meadow and up a slope with his uncle John Lloyd Jones. While the uncle walks ahead, the boy scampers off, collecting dried weeds and grasses. When Frank catches up to his uncle to show him his treasures, the uncle reproaches him and points to his straight path, comparing it to Frank’s errant zigzag.

  The boy was crushed, and the experience made such a deep impression on Wright that he put an abstract rendering of it on the cover of his life story. It was his baptism in adult indifference to the natural world. The valley was his teacher.

  DRIFTLESS

  Taliesin is a unique creation in a unique landscape. The floodplain, prairies, and hills are part of the trench of a vast prehistoric Wisconsin River. The resulting sandstone and limestone ledges and outcroppings of the valley are hallmarks not just of a primeval riverbed, but of a quirk of nature: the Driftless Area.

  “Driftless” refers to the lack of foreign rocks and pulverized soil—drift—that glaciers collect and carry with them during their invasions and leave behind after their retreat. By accident, the Ice Age glaciers missed this area of Wisconsin, making it “famous the world over because it is completely surrounded by glaciated territory,” Lawrence Martin says in his Physical Geography of Wisconsin. “It preserves a large sample of what the rest of Wisconsin, as well as the northern and eastern United States, were like before the Glacial Period.”4

  This means Taliesin’s valley is older than old. Its landforms have been shaped since primeval times only by wind, frost, and thawing. It has a primitive, craggy solemnity.

  “I scanned the hills of the region where the rock came cropping out in strata to suggest buildings,” Wright says in An Autobiography. “How quiet and strong the rock-ledge masses looked with the dark red cedars and white birches, there, above the green slopes. They were all part of the countenance of southern Wisconsin. I wished to be part of my beloved southern Wisconsin and not put my small part of it out of countenance.”5 His home with Mamah would be their private rock-ledge and they would fit in unobtrusively, camouflaged as a part of nature. Or so he hoped.

  Fig. 30. A Craig Wilson kite photograph looks over Taliesin’s hill crown toward the bend of the Wisconsin River. In the far distance at left, the hills of Blue Mound can be seen. Taliesin embraces the hill crown and enjoys a commanding view of the valley.

  Wright captured the land in a striking portfolio of landscape photos in the winter and spring of 1900. They were published by his aunts in a promotional brochure for Hillside Home School that was sent to parents of prospective students. Wright’s son John remembered that his father developed his own plates in a balcony off his Oak Park studio.

  Asian art authority Julia Meech praises Wright’s landscape photographs in Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan. “The horizontal format and spare, poetic composition are reminiscent of Japanese ink paintings in the form of handscrolls,” she says. Wright was proud of them himself. “In mounting these almost forgotten little views of Hillside for a small Arts and Crafts exhibit I have enjoyed them so much—I did take them myself—that it occurs to me they might give you pleasure too,” he wrote to the mother of two former students. “If so, kindly accept them.”6

  FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S VALLEY PORTRAITS

  Fig. 31. In the winter of 1900, Frank Lloyd Wright positioned his camera looking northward up Jones Valley, in the direction of the Wisconsin River, from a location near the junction of Highway 23 and County T not far from Unity Chapel. The left-hand view, above, shows the hills where Taliesin would eventually be located. Fig. 31.a shows the valley between the hills. Fig. 31.b shows the hills across the valley, including Bryn Mawr. Knit together, they create a single panorama. (Fig. 31.c). Julia Meech, author of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan, says of these images: “Wright experimented … with Japonesque photographs of the scenery around the Hillside Home School… . The horizontal format and the spare, poetic composition are reminiscent of Japanese ink paintings in the form of handscrolls.”

  Fig. 31.a

  Fig. 31.b

  Fig. 31.c. Montage by Roger Daleden of Wisconsin Historical Society Photos

  Fig. 32. Whittier Hill (foreground) near Hillside Home School takes on a Chinese brushstroke quality in Wright’s photo. Fig. 32.a shows the hill from a closer perspective, at a different angle. John Greenleaf Whittier, a Massachusetts poet, hymnodist, and abolitionist, was admired by Unitarians.

  Fig. 32.a

  Fig. 33. Trees frame a view of the snow-covered skating pond at Hillside Home School. Farm buildings can be seen in the background at left.

  Fig. 34. “Romeo and Juliet” stands at the center of Wright’s view of Windmill Hill. The windmill now overlooks the Hillside buildings that Wright designed in 1901. Wright’s uncles were convinced the experimental structure would not stand, but the aunts stood by their architect. It was rebuilt in 1990 and remains standing.

  Fig. 35. Students and teachers play golf on Thomas Ridge near Hillside Home School in late fall or early spring.

  Fig. 36. Wright’s stark portrait of 1896 “Romeo and Juliet” windmill shows two people looking out from the windows of the tower balcony. The tower’s design consists of a diamond penetrating an octagon. It is believed that Wright reversed the negative when he printed this photograph, apparently preferring this view.

  Fig. 37. Golfers’ silhouettes dot the hilltop on Thomas Ridge. In the foreground, a young boy stands within the figure of an older man.

  VALLEY OF THE PROGRESSIVES

  Frank Lloyd Wright’s transfer of his life, work, and love to rural Wisconsin in 1911 brought him not just to a special place in nature—it brought him into a special family culture, at a special moment in Wisconsin history.

  He was settling with Mamah among the Lloyd Joneses, his mother’s people. Anna (Hannah) was one of the seven children who came by boat from Wales with Richard and Mallie Lloyd Jones in 1844. Three more children were born after they arrived and one died in transit. Five brothers and five sisters lived.

  “By the time Frank Lloyd Wright came to spend his summers in the Valley [as a teen] the brothers had filled the entire space around the home farm,” a cousin wrote years later. “Although each farm was average for the 19th century, collectively they made a dominating tract. The brothers and sisters continued to act as a unit, sharing labor and amusements and often money and credit.”7

  Wright’s sister Maginel remembered the Lloyd Joneses as “larger than life, the women as well as the men. They had a way of towering, in spirit if not in dimension.” They were “tall, vigorous, opinionated, lively people … high-minded, possibly high-handed too, now and then.”8

  Fig. 38. Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones, left, stands with Wisconsin governor Robert M. “Fighting Bob” La Follette during the annual La Follette Day celebration at Tower Hill about 1905.

  They were not quiet farmers or conventional Christians. In Wales they had defied the British and practiced their unorthodox Unitarian faith. Before they arrived in Spring Green and built Unity Chapel they had briefly attended a Baptist church but were expelled when it got a taste of their heretical views. They regarded the Bible as just one of many paths to God, were skeptics about the divinity of Jesus, and were as likely to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, or John Ruskin as scripture as they were the Prophets.9

  When it came to politics they could be resisters and dissenters, marching under a runic symbol that meant “Truth Against the World.” Meryle Secrest suggests that one reason they had to leave Wales was Richard’s involvement
with a night-riding group called the Maids of Rebecca. These guerrillas put on blackface and women’s clothes and burned the hated tollgates where British operators collected fees from farmers taking their produce to market.10

  Fig. 39. Jenkin Lloyd Jones preaches from his tree-trunk pulpit at Tower Hill on the Wisconsin River. His woodland camp was a summer meeting place for progressive Wisconsinites and Chicagoans. It also was the site of the annual Tower Hill Congress of state women’s organizations.

  It would not be a long stretch from riding with Rebecca’s raiders to rallying around a Wisconsin leader whose movement was built around restraining the rate-setting power of the railroads. That leader was Robert Marion La Follette Sr.—“Fighting Bob.” His followers called themselves Progressives, and their number included the Lloyd Joneses.

  “The Emerson Pavilion was packed when public assemblies were held. Robert La Follette Sr. spoke in a pavilion many times to groups far too large for the space.”

  —Jane Wright Porter

  When Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Bouton Borthwick came to live at Taliesin, Progressivism was at its height in Wisconsin, leading the nation in reform. The Lloyd Joneses formed one of its vital centers. They ran educational assemblies, women’s conferences, and La Follette rallies at Tower Hill. They educated new generations of Progressive leaders at Hillside Home School. They served on the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin, promoting “the Wisconsin Idea.” And they owned and edited the leading Progressive daily newspaper in the state capital. Jones Valley was a place of natural beauty, full of childhood familiarities for Wright. But it promised to be a stimulating cultural environment. He and his partner each would bring something contribute to the Progressive conversation. Wright was the leading voice of reform in domestic architecture. Borthwick was a translator and publisher of advanced ideas about women’s rights and roles. Wright came to believe she would make a good editor of the weekly newspaper.11