Blog
Oh my Frank – I was wrong!
Reading Time: 6 minutes A bed in a room at Taliesin. I’ll explain more in the post below. About what? About a photograph. But, while I’ve been wrong sometimes about things with Taliesin, I haven’t usually communicated those things to other people. In this case, I was wrong about a photograph I put in a post of mine from […]
How I became the historian for Taliesin
Reading Time: 5 minutes Looking west at the Hex Room in the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center. I took this photo in February of 2005. You can see through the Hex Room, which is the room with the red roof and spire straight ahead of you. The clear view through the room is two vertical rectangles. If I had […]
1952 fire at Hillside
Reading Time: 7 minutes Looking northeast at the southern facade of the Hillside building while the smoke still looms in its April 26, 1952 fire. I don’t know who took this photograph. It came from a newspaper article that was given to the Preservation office probably in the 1990s. As someone who worked at Taliesin, you got used to […]
Bats at Taliesin
Reading Time: 5 minutes Last summer I wrote “A Slice of Taliesin“, which described some of the work done by the Preservation Crew at Taliesin. In fact, that work was about twenty feet to the left + 4-6 feet below where Preservation Crew member Kevin Dodds was standing when he took took the photograph above. Photograph above looks at […]
When did Taliesin get its front door?
Reading Time: 8 minutes My May 2004 photograph looking at Taliesin’s entry and entry foyer. I find humor regarding Wright’s placement of his own home’s front door, so my post today is going to be about that. I say “humor” because of how Wright is praised on his placement of the front doors of his homes. That he placed […]
1940s Change in Taliesin’s Living Room
Reading Time: 5 minutes Photograph from the 2000s taken by me in Taliesin’s living room. Looking toward the fireplace with the inglenook (the built-in bench). Today, I thought about photographs from the book, Apprentice to Genius, by Edgar Tafel that I recommended almost a year ago. Looking through the book reminded me of a change to the inglenook (the […]
First year of tours
Reading Time: 5 minutes I took this photograph in 1994 under the oak tree at the Taliesin Tea Circle. The room with the French doors near the center of the photograph is Taliesin’s drafting studio. Wright used it as an office after he moved drafting operations to Hillside. “1867. . . . 1886. . . . 1896. . . […]
Another find at Hillside
Reading Time: 6 minutes A photograph from 1910-1911 showing three structures on the campus of the Hillside Home School. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hillside building is on the left and behind it, with the hipped gable roof, is the dormitory for the high school boys. The third structure on the far right was known as the Home Cottage and was […]
Truth hiding in plain sight
Reading Time: 7 minutes This is a drawing of a building that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for his aunts and their Hillside Home School. They ran the school, which was south of Spring Green, Wisconsin, for almost 30 years. Wright designed this structure for them in 1901. This drawing was published in 1910. Previously, I wrote about the project […]
Gene Masselink
Reading Time: 6 minutes Abstraction looking (plan) north at Taliesin against the hill in Wisconsin. Pen, ink, and paint. By Gene Masselink. Eugene Meyer “Gene” Masselink (1910-1962): Taliesin Fellowship, 1933 until his death. This post will be about him, and why I like him. Gene was born in South Africa, then his family moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where […]
