Taliesin

Taliesin was where Frank Lloyd Wright retreated to remake both his personal life and his architecture, building a home into the very hillside of his family's ancestral Wisconsin valley. It became his primary residence, working studio, and architecture school for nearly five decades, and the site of one of the most horrific tragedies in American architectural history. Rebuilt twice after fire, Taliesin embodies both Wright's philosophy of organic architecture and the turbulence of the life he lived pursuing it.

Frank Lloyd Wright built Taliesin in 1911 on land near Spring Green, Wisconsin, that had belonged to his mother's Welsh family for generations, retreating there amid a personal scandal after leaving his first wife for Mamah Borthwick Cheney. He named the estate Taliesin, Welsh for 'shining brow,' reflecting his design philosophy of building structures into hillsides rather than atop them.

On August 15, 1914, while Wright was away in Chicago, a servant set fire to the living quarters and murdered seven people with an axe, including Mamah Borthwick and her two children. Wright rebuilt the house, called Taliesin II, but a second fire caused by an electrical fault destroyed much of it again in 1925, prompting a third rebuilding, Taliesin III, incorporating stone, wood, and glass in the organic style Wright continued refining for the rest of his career.

In 1932 Wright and his third wife, Olgivanna, founded the Taliesin Fellowship, an apprenticeship program that brought aspiring architects to live and work alongside Wright, blending architectural training with farming and communal living. Wright split his time between Taliesin and its winter counterpart, Taliesin West in Arizona, until his death in 1959. Taliesin is now preserved by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976.