Blog
Guest Quarters
Reading Time: 5 minutes Frank Lloyd Wright (left) with his wife, Olgivanna, and friend, writer Alexander Woollcott outside the architect’s home, Taliesin, 1935-43. Woollcott holds a baby goat. The west wall of a bedroom is in the background. This became Wright’s bedroom in 1936. My years of working at Taliesin Preservation gave me time to uncover the history of […]
Behold: The Wayback Machine
Reading Time: 5 minutes The image above is a screenshot from the home page of “The Wayback Machine“, which is explained below. Here’s part of the explanation of The Wayback machine in Wikipedia: The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web. It was founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library based in San Francisco, […]
A slice of Taliesin:
Reading Time: 6 minutes 1930 photo looking south in Taliesin’s Loggia. Notice the vertical water stain on the horizontal band of plaster in the background. Many photos taken inside Taliesin during Wright’s lifetime show water stains. That’s why I’m showing this photograph by Raymond Trowbridge again: it shows Taliesin’s Loggia with a vertical water stain in the background. Personally, […]
Old Dining Room
Reading Time: 5 minutes The photograph above shows the dining room areas, first built before 1920, then used by the Wrights and the Taliesin Fellowship. The area dining rooms were on the left, with the kitchen located behind the tower on the right. I have had the goal of figuring out the history of Frank Lloyd Wright’s home, Taliesin, […]
“This book is going to be big”
Reading Time: 4 minutes This photograph is looking from the Unity Chapel cemetery, which is the private cemetery of the Lloyd Jones family. Frank Lloyd Wright received permission to bury Mamah Borthwick here. You can see Wright’s home, Taliesin, against the hill. I wrote that in an email to Taliesin Preservation‘s Programs Director, as well as its Bookstore Manager. […]
Did Taliesin have outhouses?
Reading Time: 4 minutes A 1911 Taliesin floor plan showing Wright’s living room, kitchen, and his bedroom. The kitchen has a sink and his bedroom had a bathroom with a toilet, sink, and bathtub. This Taliesin I floor plan, 1104.003, is at the Avery Library in New York City and can be seen online at ARTSTOR. People want to […]
I looked at stone
Reading Time: 5 minutes A stone wall on the north side of Taliesin’s entry foyer. Based on the red wash across most of the stones, the bottom of the wall survived Taliesin’s 1925 fire. Sometimes, while working at Taliesin (as I wrote once before), my answer to the question, “What did you do at work today?” was, “I looked […]
“We like the way you write the history of Taliesin”
Reading Time: 5 minutes My photograph of the two signs that my coworker made for me Well, yes, of course. But in this case I’m paraphrasing what someone said to me after they’d read my submission for a preservation plan of Wright’s Taliesin structure. In this post I’m going to look again at some of my writing; in particular, […]
Exhibiting Patience
Reading Time: 4 minutes Taken in Taliesin’s Garden Court on September 10, 2008 looking toward Taliesin’s east façade. I recall that, around the year 2007, a discussion began: stage an exhibition for the 50th anniversary of the completion of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. 2009 was also the 50th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s death; concentrating on […]
“I’m just a tour guide”
Reading Time: 6 minutes A photograph looking (plan) northwest in Taliesin’s Living Room. Wright’s Bechstein piano is in the background. There’s a photo of him at this piano, here, at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation website. In 1994, when I was 26, I started giving tours at Taliesin. But, “I’m just a tour guide” is something I usually never […]
