VIDEO TOUR: Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin and Hillside School Complex

so we're here at frank lloyd wright's Taliesin his autobiography in wood and stone the place that is going to see some of the greatest ups and greatest downs of his life and we're actually on what we call the crown of the hill Taliesin is set on the brow of the hill it's set down from the top of the hill creating a brow and the word Taliesin is Welsh and it literally means shining or radiant brow like the brow before head frank lloyd wright's said in his autobiography that this was his favorite place to come to when he was a boy and so it seemed logical in 1911 as he is approaching middle-aged that he will come back here and he will build this house not on the top of the hill but on the brow saving the best part of it and here in Spring Green Wisconsin ok we're standing here in Frank Lloyd Wright's drafting studio and here are some of the tables behind me this studio was Wright's main drafting studio for about 25 years and if Taliesin has it's triumphs in its history this room is the site of some of those triumphs Frank Lloyd Wright in 1934 got a commission for a small house within sight of a waterfall and the clients came driving from Milwaukee after waiting for his designs for about nine months made the trip to Milwaukee then called Frank Lloyd Wright from there and said do you have the drawings for my house please and Wright said well yeah sure we got everything ready for you no problem he had nothing on paper and so Wright called his students in his apprentices and said get the drawing pencils and in two and a half hours he three floor plans and a section and then at the very end of that he wrote the word falling water down at the bottom and the client Edgar Kaufmann senior came driving up right at that moment and Bright's went down and met EJ as he called him and he said where have you been we've been waiting for you this entire time and he showed EJ the drawings and EJ said Frank don't change a thing and falling water when falling water was completed in 1937 that marked the beginning of the upper trajectory of Wright's career never again was he just going to be seen as an architect whose best work was behind him people were shocked and amazed and falling waters is considered to be one of the greatest buildings in the United States and it was drawn here the drafting studio is itself I think is just a beautiful space but I love the history that goes into it as well all of the stories that have to do with Frank Lloyd Wright as a person as an architect ok we're standing here in Frank Lloyd Wright's living room which has been called one of the greatest domestic spaces in America this is a space that continues to surprise and amaze and delight myself and people from all over the world there are some people who come to Taliesin who just want to be in this living room who've waited their whole lives to be here and photographs don't capture it when you come into the living room you come in on the corner and so you're getting the widest expanse of the room and over in the opposite corner you have two pieces of glass meeting each other at the corner so you don't have a corner to look at you're going from one space all the way out and then to the landscape beyond one set of windows the East shows us a close view it shows us back to the valley that Frank Lloyd Wright's grandparents had settled and another set of windows to the north it shows us this wide expanse and so it's like a pair of Japanese screens that are working together this room has no attic it's held up by a series of tricky engineering experiments that Frank Lloyd Wright was doing he's dropping weight down in unexpected ways there's stone piers throughout the room and also along these decks which are great for holding up artifacts so they're formed but they're really performing a function they're helping to keep this enormous ceiling standing up now when mr. Wright was here apparently he would use this space for dining with family back on the south wall and that was for family and friends but also every Sunday once he started the Taliesin fellowship frank lloyd wright's and mrs. wright old Gabbana Lloyd Wright would have all of the students come here and have dinner with the rites on little cocktail tables around the room that are just made out of plywood speaking of for two plates with silverware wrapped in napkins underneath and then at the end of this formal evening they would have music right it was a huge fan of music he said that music and architecture are closely related he called them sublimated mathematics so he played music all of his children played music and he encouraged a quartet and a chorus in the Taliesin fellowship we're standing here in frank lloyd wright's bedroom and this was his bedroom for about 25 years and one of his longtime apprentices West Peters once said that this bedroom has more square inches of architecture in it than any other room and on this entire estate mr. Wright lived here from 1911 through a fire in 1914 that totally destroyed the section of the house through a fire in 1925 then again completely destroyed this part of the house and then he rebuilt and this was his bedroom until 1936 and then this became the guest bedroom for everybody so potential clients and friends would come out here Salomon Guggenheim Alexander walk had the writer on Rand visited when she was commissioning a building from Frank Lloyd Wright there's also Carl Sandburg the poet was a friend of Wright's and used to come out here as well some of the features that are in the room will the there's a loft and we got a lot of questions about the loft why is it here what is its function we think it's in part to give you compression when you walk into the space Frank Lloyd Wright liked to play with different ceiling heights so you have a compression bringing you in and then an opening up of what we call expansion so the loft might be in part just kind of squeeze you into the space but it was also used for practical purposes for storage of some of his Japanese screen collection they could fit very nicely up there and it was used as a play space because Taliesin in addition to being the home in a studio was a place where Frank Lloyd Wright brought up his young daughter Jovana and she used to play up on the loft there and mr. Wright said that if she wanted to she could climb up the walls to get up there because the stones of his house pop out a little bit and they make very good handholds so the loft is something that causes a lot of curiosity the fireplace is something that's a real dynamic part of this room with the wonderful windows that pop up bringing in indirect light when you come in he also has a statue in the fireplace this is a statue that he had rescued from the ruins of Taliesin after it burned to the ground in 1925 red said he wanted to weave a tapestry of all of his tally essence into one and so he took out both the old statues and put them back and places in the walls of his house and he also took some of the stones of Taliesin Taliesin is made out of limestone and it's turned it turns red when it's exposed to fire and so at Taliesin wherever you see a rose or pink colored stone you know that that is something that went through one of the fires in addition to the history of the room this is still used as a guest bedroom today very often people who are friends of the Taliesin fellowship they can be invited out here and one of frank lloyd wright's grandson stays here several weeks of every summer well this room is is known as the loggia and it was the informal living room for Frank Lloyd Wright and his wife Olga vana it was a place where they would have early morning breakfasts and teas and sometimes they would practice musical instruments in here and it was also mrs. Wright's favorite room after her husband's death Frank Lloyd Wright always liked to have Japanese art against the south wall here so we have a a reproduction of a Japanese screen that comes from 1640 the actual screen is now in storage so you're seeing a photograph he had this Chinese rug put on the floor and probably the 1940s we know now that it is one of the largest if not the largest Chinese carpet in the world and it's 18 by 21 and a half feet it was handsome probably would have taken a group of workers about three years to make it it's about a hundred and fifty years old and one of the things that just tickles the heck out of me is that Frank Lloyd Wright cut this rug to fit it into the room there are two piers on the north and south sides of the room and he caught the right to fit around them he didn't move the rug in a certain area or move it out of the room he had a certain idea of what he wanted and he was going to use his work of art that way that's how he looked at art he said that you know why I put it behind glass why me why not make it a part of your life and if the art dies along the way well it's lived in a noble life in addition to this impressive rug on the floor there's also a Chinese scroll on the north wall of the loggia and that's about five centuries old and it was glued to a piece of plywood by Frank Lloyd Wright it was something he wanted he framed it in and actually the fact that it is here makes it much more valuable than it would be on its own well we're standing in what's called the Garden Room and that's because it looks out to the gardens on three sides and this room was the original Porte cochere for Taliesin Porte cochere basically means carport so this function very well you had this driveway going right through this part of the building and down a courtyard for many many years from 1911 until the mid 1920s and at that time we think that frank lloyd wright's got tired of having the driveway so close to his house and so he decided to make this into an outdoor terrace and this you had the roof over your head and yet stone under your feet and you being nice terrace to be and during the summertime it stayed this way until 1943 when Frank Lloyd Wright was looking at a commission for a museum called the Guggenheim Museum in New York it was going to be a big project and the client was going to come to Taliesin and stay for a couple of weeks and so frank lloyd wright's did what I call sprucing up the house he made about a half a dozen changes to Taliesin in one summer and this room was one of those changes he took what had been an outdoor terrace and he made it into a library and it was library for many years you can see also it's a sitting room as well the furniture in the room is a collection of furniture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright over many years you have plywood chairs with circular seats on them these were from his son David's house Frank Lloyd Wright designed as a house for his son David in Phoenix Arizona and there are other David Wright chairs around the room very low with sort of circular backs we call those the barrel chairs and I've been told they're very comfortable and then we also have a prototype of furniture in this room as well that was never produced well we're standing here outside of hillside and hillside is another Frank Lloyd Wright design on the Taliesin estate it was originally designed by Frank Lloyd Wright not for himself but for his two aunts Jenny and Nell Lloyd Jones and they ran a school here called the hillside home school from the 1880s until 1915 and when Frank Lloyd Wright gets to design this building for them in 1901 it was to have classroom spaces and a gymnasium and they did they built the structures and the ants then closed the school in 1915 Frank Lloyd Wright bought the buildings from his aunts and their land for $1 and he promised them that it would be continued to be a school and he got that chance in 1932 when he opened up the Taliesin fellowship and he brought his apprentices here to hillside to refurbish the buildings fix the roofs and also add on that long drafting studio off to the north in fact the apprentices still live in dormitory rooms on either side of the drafting studio available through the windows there well we're standing here outside of the Romeo and Juliet windmill Tower which was originally designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for his two aunts Jenny and Nell Lloyd Jones and their hillside home school it was designed in 1896 to pump water for the school so the aunts requested this design buy from Frank Lloyd Wright and they said we want to win milk and we want it to be pretty and so he gave them this design which was made completely out of wood and it's hollow inside and it stands about 40 feet tall and when Wright sent the drawings for this windmill Tower to his aunt's his uncle's thought that it would blow over in the first rainstorm and so the aunts wrote back to Frank Lloyd Wright and said what was what should we do and Wright sent a letter back to his aunts and he said I named this tower Romeo and Juliet and my Romeo and Juliet will stand through these storms because they stand for an undying principle love Romeo will protect Juliet and work day and night and Juliet will cuddle up to Romeo and support him and the ants loved the story and so they went ahead and they commissioned the Romeo and Juliet windmill Tower and it was built the next year in 1897 and it managed to stand much longer than Frank Lloyd Wright said it would he gave it about 25 years and Romeo and Juliet the original one stood for 90 years and finally then it started to twist at the top and it was completely dismantled and replaced with the replica that is there today but why is it able to stand well it is because of the two shapes that make up the windmill there is Romeo on the left and Juliet on the right Romeo is a diamond and he stands where the strongest wind storms come through in this part of Wisconsin and Wright called Romeo's Southwest side on the left there ray called that the storm prowl and he's able to sort of sail through the storms like the ship on a sea and Juliet as an octagon she is more stable and she's she embraces Romeo and supports him while Romeo is protecting his woman he also has all of the machinery in him so he did all of the work as well as protection and she supported her man and with the balcony she's pretty well this is the assembly hall at Hillside it was originally designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1901 for his two aunts Jenny and Nell Lloyd Jones and it's the room in which right said he broke the box of architecture he takes these massive sandstone corners on all four corners of the room and he uses them to do all of the work of holding up the roof and with the load bearing going to the corners he's able to fill up the walls with glass now the function of the Assembly Hall was a gathering space for the students in the hillside home school the school run by Frank Lloyd Wright's aunts and it was also a library up above and it's still a gathering place today when mr. Wright designs this for his aunts he wants to make it into a tribute to his grandparents and so he places two quotes into the room one along the bottom of the balcony and one into the fireplace the one along the bottom of the balcony was Wright's grandfather's favorite quote from the book of Isaiah writes grandfather was a Unitarian minister and was very strongly held in his belief and sort of gave that fit-choo Frank Lloyd Wright the quote that's in the fireplace is from a poem called elegy written in a country churchyard it was the favorite poem of Wright's grandmother Maui in addition to using the quotes around the room in order to signify his family Frank Lloyd Wright was also signifying the natural landscape around here he wanted to use local materials and so he used sandstone which was quarried just about a half a mile down the road and oak which was probably forested on the estate he felt that this made the building go with the the surrounding landscape a lot better and it's all part of what Frank Lloyd Wright called organic architecture pay attention to the local materials and the nature of the site that you're working with so the hillside assembly room is it's a very simple very beautiful room it's a it's an engineering experiment that I think works very well it's also a very good explanation of Wright's ideas about architecture that he brought with him throughout his entire life well this is the hillside drafting studio this was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1932 for students apprentices of his in the Taliesin fellowship he knew that he was going to be getting a lot of people working with him and he knew that his drafting studio at his house was not going to have enough room and so he designed this space which is 5,000 square feet and then apprentices in the Taliesin fellowship helped to build it over the next couple of years now again this is during the Great Depression starting in 1932 and Wright did not have a lot of money at that time and so they did things kind of on the fly a little little scrappy they used the forested trees themselves and put them right into the holding without waiting for them to dry to weather overtime so when people were working on the the wood trusses in the room they were there was actually kind sap coming off on their hands they also had to make all of the plaster walls they made them out of local materials because that's all that they could afford and they finally got some glass that was donated to them the glass is important at Hillside in the drafting studio for the way that it's oriented way the room is oriented is it's oriented towards the north and you have just a little bit of light coming in through glass on the east the north and the west and so that brings light in in the morning and then through most of the day and you get a nice northern light that's very even and then in the late afternoon you have western light coming in brightening up the space a little bit more this the studio is still being used today by students in the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture that is the dissents they're the descendant of the Taliesin fellowship people who worked under Frank Lloyd Wright eventually became some of the teachers in the School of Architecture and then these students come out and they live here for five months of every year working in the drafting studio working in these buildings living in these buildings and they studying architecture and then they will leave once winter comes and they go down to Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home Taliesin West which is outside of Scottsdale Arizona so it's the same group of people that moves back and forth and the great thing about the hillside drafting studio is that really you can see the structure the way that it's being held up it's a wonderful experiment for engineering and architecture and it's a it's a great thing for students in architecture to live in an experiment and to work in an experiment and learn from that year over here okay we're so we're here at the hillside theater and this is of course a Frank Lloyd Wright design he originally designed it for his two aunts as a gymnasium but he doesn't look like a gymnasium today but it had a running track and a little stage for school performances wooden floor all of the barbell equipment was in here that began to change when Frank Lloyd Wright started the Taliesin fellowship in 1932 he realized that his apprentices did not need more exercise they needed entertainment and so he turned what had been a gym into a little theatre called the Playhouse and he dropped the he dropped sections of the running track around he dropped sections of the stage he made it a very delightful sweet little place for people to go and people in the public could go they charged 50 Cent's and I think if you could watch a movie and you'd get a cup of coffee also well the Playhouse existed until 1952 and in that year a major fire hit hillside it destroyed this entire section in the theater almost all the way up to the assembly hall and Frank Lloyd Wright immediately redesigned - what you're seeing today he twisted things a little bit he moved out walls he dropped the floor there's very very little of that 1901 hillside building left over this space is still used as a community space it is open to the public several times a year for musical performances it's also open to the Taliesin chorus and that sometimes things for the public so it's a very active space that is used here at hillside well I'd like to thank you for coming out to Taliesin Taliesin really is Wright's autobiography in wood and stone and encompasses so much of his life his childhood here you come out to his uncle's farmhouse he would build for his aunt's out here and then of course Taliesin for himself and eventually transform the entire six hundred acre Taliesin estate Taliesin is considered one of the finest buildings in the world and it's very important to keep it going to preserve it and my group Taliesin preservation incorporated we are working to restore and preserve every building on the Taliesin estate Taliesin preservation is a nonprofit organization that takes all of the money that we get from tours and bookstore sales and it turns it right back into helping preserve and restore these buildings we give tours of Taliesin six months out of every year from May through October and you can find us on the internet at www.pedestrians you

Channel: Taliesin Preservation

Views: 123,388

Rating: 4.8742476 out of 5

Keywords: Frank Lloyd Wright, architecture, organic architecture, Spring Green, Wisconsin, Keiran Murphy

Id: nfc-EK6F7j0

Length: 28min 45sec (1725 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

TIL I've been working like Frank Lloyd Wright my entire career!

[u/elle_quay]

My boss calls meetings when he doesn’t have good plans to show “talkitecture meetings”.

[u/ArmpitNostril]

My guess is he spent those 9 months carefully designing and redesigning it in his mind

[u/Enough_Chemistry_569]

The owners didn't live there very long before suing the pants off FLW, too. The entire house leaked like a sieve.

[u/Pointlesswonder802]

He was most likely too busy screwing everything around him that moved and adding more chandeliers to the chandelier room in his mansion.

Not hyperbole. Dude was fantastically nuts

[u/verydangerousasp]

For those unfamiliar with Fallingwater: https://fallingwater.org/

Another little known fact, Frank Lloyd Wright's mistress, her kids, and several others were killed by an axe murder at the house in the video.

[u/jimthesquirrelking]

And it shows! Despite its nice looks that house is unlivable and damp

[u/SmokimusDankimus]

It's amazing what you're capable of when a fire is lit under your ass.

[u/theganglyone]

This narrator is enchanting.