Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin estate survived fire and murder to become architectural icon
The sprawling estate in rural Wisconsin brings the aesthetic world of America’s first ‘starchitect’ to life, from his first commission in 1887, to his former home and its macabre past
So what is Taliesin? Taliesin was the home and architecture school of the late Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s most revered architect. He began to build the sprawling estate in 1909 in the farming valleys in which his Welsh grandparents had settled in the early 1800s.
Wright is known for his influence on everything from residential public housing and sumptuous private residences to open-plan offices and his last great edifice, the unique Guggenheim Museum, in New York, completed just after he died at the age of 92, in 1959. Thirty thousand people from around the world come to Taliesin each year to pay homage.
Why? Wright was the original “starchitect”. Long before the likes of Jean Nouvel, Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, his utopian Taliesin community of disciple-students created a personality cult that endures. For many visitors, this is a pilgrimage to witness the utopian reality of Wright’s pioneering “prairie” architecture; sustainable urban buildings effortlessly blending into a bucolic rural landscape.
What is there to see? In the heart of rural Wisconsin, a three-hour drive northwest of Chicago, the estate spreads over 800 acres of idyllic rolling wooded hills and farmland. Small groups are driven around in a bright red minibus on a tour that visits a series of signature buildings, including Wright’s earliest commission, an 1887 wooden windmill called Romeo and Juliet; a house built for his sister; the ground-breaking open-plan architecture school, which still functions as such; and his sprawling home, the original Taliesin.
Named after Taliesin in Wales, where his grandparents emigrated from, the house stands atop a hill and remains as it was in Wright’s time. It is furnished with more than 200 pieces from his spectacular collection of exquisite Asian art – intricate Japanese screens, delicate Chinese porcelain, Buddhist carvings and statues – probably the largest in America amassed by a private individual. Wright’s work was clearly influenced by his travels to the East, including a stay in Japan, during which he designed Tokyo’s original Imperial Hotel.
