I picked up a book in a Portland bookstore a few years ago because it had a great cover. The title was "House on the Rock" and its cover photograph showed a wildly idiosyncratic house sprawling over the top of a 60' high rock formation. Some guy had built it around 50 years ago and it was open to the public.
Jump forward a couple of years and Spring Green, WI was the first of our road trip destinations because Frank Lloyd Wright had created an estate there called Taliesin. It was his home, studio and architecture school. I mentioned our plans to someone who mentioned back that there's a strange thing to see in Spring Green called House on the Rock. I immediately added it to the list as a Spring Green two-for. When we started mentioning House on the Rock to other people who had heard of it before, we got two reactions: eyes lit up bright, or eyes rolled back into their head. Our eyes did both when we got there.
Our eyes lit up when we saw the house itself.
It is a bizarre maze of uniquely designed rooms spread over many levels, each filled with an infinite amount of "stuff" ranging from Tiffany lamps to 19th century doll collections, to assemblages of mechanically operated musical instruments that performed Stars & Stripes Forever and other compositions. In addition to the usual player piano and simple percussion instruments, the assemblages included Rube Goldberg-like instruments like violins that had 4 small bows, one resting on each of the strings, and many plungers that were positioned to press any of the strings against different positions along the fingerboard. Each of the individual bows and plungers was connected to its own mechanical link that operated off a master system. And all the various instruments were coordinated to create music. This was clearly the work of an obsessed, creative genius.
However, our eyes started to roll back when I got the sense that maybe there was no sound coming from the little bows moving back and forth across the violin strings. A tired attendant nearing the end of his shift answered my question by saying that he had to hit the "play" button on a CD player many times over the course of a day. So it seemed the obsessed creative genius was also a scam artist.
Here is a video of one of the musical instrument assemblages
On to a more substantial topic: Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin. I can't write a travelogue-type posting about Taliesin, and if I tried, you wouldn't want to read it. So, to learn about the place or the man, or about Taliesin West in Scottsdale AZ (which we'll be visiting next month), go to franklloydwright.org. What I can do is simply relate some of the stories we learned from our fabulous guide Jill and from some of the other people on the tour who were Wright aficionados.
But first, here's a photo of Wright's home at Taliesin, and a shot out one of the windows that shows how beautifully Wright integrated his home with the site. The photos don't begin to do justice to the place, but I feel compelled to show you something and this is the best I can do.
This is the third house to sit on the site. The first was hit by lightening and burned to the ground. The second was doused in kerosene by a gardener who disapproved of Wright's lifestyle. He did this while the family and several workers were in the house (but, by happenstance, not Wright himself). Two workers saved themselves by jumping out a second floor balcony. The wife and children and others ran out the front door (the gardener had locked all the others), and as they emerged the gardener was waiting for them with an ax. The irony is that the chief "lifestyle" offender survived by not being home
I also want to show you "Romeo and Juliet," a windmill that Wright built at Taliesin. It's called "Romeo and Juliet" because it has a Juliet balcony and one can imagine the structure as being two people, one taller than the other. I'm including three different views because I like the windmill so much, and because it's hard to picture the three views as being the same structure.
We've mentioned in prior postings the initials FLLW. Here's the back-story. Wright was born Frank Lincoln Wright. There was a very strong bond between him and his mother, and a lesser relationship with his father that was further strained when his parents divorced soon after he was 14. This led him to change his middle name from Lincoln (which had some association with his father) to Lloyd (which was his mother's family name). Thus the initials FLLW that you will sometimes see instead of FLW.
In the Racine postscript posting I told one story that illustrates FLLW's arrogance -- his telling a client to "Change seats" when the client called to complain that water from a leaking skylight was dripping onto his head at the dinner table. Here are two other examples we learned from our tour guide at Taliesin.
Wright and his family and students spent winters at his home and studio at Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, AZ. Upon returning to Taliesin (Spring Green) one spring, Wright discovered that during the winter a telephone line had been strung along the road in front of his estate. The poles were visible from one of the Taliesin buildings and offended his sense of purity of design and nature. So one night he sent his staff to cut down the poles. Wright being Wright, the poles remained down.
Another example is Wright's belief that he was of the perfect height. This was reflected in his architecture in two ways. First, there are parts of his house that have very low ceilings (the "embracing" areas, as opposed to the "soaring" areas that have ceilings as high as 25-30', like Wingspread's Great Room.) The "embracing" areas can be so confining that a tall guy in our tour -- about 6' 2" -- had to walk in some of them with his head bent over. The second way it came out is in the furniture. As Wright aged, his height diminished, which is reflected in some very small furniture in his home. He carried this feature over to his other buildings since he built them to suit himself. According to one supposed incident I found on the Internet, someone once said to him, "'Whenever I walk into one of your buildings, the doorways are so low my hat gets knocked off.' Wright calmly replied, 'Take off your hat when you come into a house. Our guide also likened Wright to Donald Trump, because Wright did his best not to pay taxes, and he had three wives and was a philanderer. Examples of the last of those traits: He started an affair with the wife of one of his clients while the client's house was still under construction; and he and his then current lover abandoned their families and went off to Tuscany to live for awhile.
Finally, some nostalgia. During a road trip through Oklahoma, we passed through Bartlesville. Wright designed a 19-story office building, the Price Tower. (His only other high-rise building was the Johnson Wax Headquarters building in Racine.) The tower now has 8 hotel rooms and we stayed there on our road trip. All the furnishings are Wright reproductions or in his style. Here is a photo of the building, and of Bartlesville's not-a-car-in-sight main intersection at 10:00 am on a Sunday morning.
