Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Hill He Kept Rebuilding

Frank Lloyd Wright was born in eighteen sixty-seven in Richland Center, Wisconsin, and spent nearly his entire career in the state, first in Chicago, then on the sixty acres of hillside farmland in Spring Green that became the most famous private residence in American architecture.

Wright called it Taliesin, a Welsh word meaning 'shining brow.' He built the first version in nineteen eleven, retreating from Chicago after abandoning his wife and children to take up with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of a client. The scandal was enormous. The Wisconsin press was relentless. Wright built anyway.

On August fifteenth, nineteen fourteen, a servant named Julian Carlton set fire to the living quarters of Taliesin and waited outside with a hatchet. Seven people died, including Mamah Borthwick Cheney and her two children. Carlton swallowed hydrochloric acid before he could be fully questioned and died several weeks later, unable to eat due to the damage to his throat. No motive was ever established beyond what Wright himself described in his autobiography as a kind of inexplicable madness. The documents available do not answer the question of why.

Wright rebuilt Taliesin. It burned again in nineteen twenty-five, a fire caused by an electrical fault, and he rebuilt it again. The third Taliesin is the one that stands today, a complex of low stone and wood buildings flowing along the ridge of the hill as though the hill had grown them. Wright lived and worked there until he died in nineteen fifty-nine at the age of ninety-one, the same year he completed the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The Taliesin Fellowship he established there in nineteen thirty-two trained generations of architects in an apprenticeship model that owed more to the Arts and Crafts movement than to any university. The buildings, the landscape, and the philosophy are inseparable. Taliesin is a National Historic Landmark. Tours run through the warmer months. The hill still shines.