Week 3

This week, my research about Taliesin in Wisconsin and my experience with middle school students at Taliesin West illustrated the life that transpires inside Wright’s buildings. Moreover, my Week 3 focus on Taliesin proved to be ideal timing because it coincided with my meeting with Ms. Caroline Hamblen, the Taliesin Program Manager, during her visit to Taliesin West this week. Ms. Hamblen shared her Taliesin lesson plans and put me in contact with another educational director at the David Wright House in Phoenix to set up a visit.  

On Tuesday, accompanying 3^rd to 8^th grade students from Sacaton, a Native American reservation in Pinal County, on a tour of Taliesin West offered me new insights into how to capture the attention of the very children whom I am trying to engage with my lesson plans. They eagerly explored the visually dynamic rooms, excitedly asking questions and pointing out the elements that they had discussed in previous “Design Your Dream Space” architecture lessons with my on-site mentor. Their desire for hands-on learning inspired me to incorporate Wright’s elements of simplicity and tactility into my own lesson plans. Through observation, I witnessed that children were most drawn to Wright’s colorful, graphic designs, such as the abstract mural of the Midway Gardens adorning the music pavilion. Coincidentally, the Frank Lloyd Wright building that I was researching this week was Wisconsin’s Taliesin, which prominently features geometric motif.

Taliesin West Pavilion mural “City by the Sea.” Source: The Wright Library

The children’s enthusiasm was encouraging since I had just devised a geometry-based lesson plan exploring the Robie House’s stained glass windows, instructing children to discover the geometry in Wright’s window designs, as well as use complementary and supplementary angles, quadrilaterals, triangles, and parallel and perpendicular lines.

Wright's Robie House Window

This geometric theme would continue in a different medium and with a circular motif in my next building of study: Taliesin. 

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TALIESIN

My sketch of Taliesin

Originally designed in 1911 and successively rebuilt and redesigned after two fires, Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, was Wright’s summer home and studio. Wright returned to the beloved Wisconsin hills of his boyhood to build his home and farm, feeling a special affinity with nature there. Following the tradition of his mother’s Welsh family, Wright named the multi-building compound Taliesin, which is Welsh for “shining brow,” due to its position on the brow of the hill. Wright believed that “no house should ever be put on any hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it, so hill and house could live together each the happier for the other” (Pfeiffer, Frank Lloyd Wright: Taliesin). 

Taliesin. Source: Chicago News Bench

Instead of the horizontal lines of his Prairie style houses, Taliesin radiates gracefully—it “unwinds clockwise, spiraling around the hill and out to the original entrance.” Its vertical belvedere anchors the cantilevered terraces hugging the hillside. A spectacular 12-meter observation deck juts out perpendicular to the hillside. Diagonals dominate the building’s design. Like all Wright’s homes, the entrance is tucked away inconspicuously. Diagonal axes of the floorplan fit the hillside site; rooms are entered and exited at the corner; lines of sight extend diagonally out to the landscape through the windows. Wright designed the entire site, planting formal gardens and damning the creek below to form a pond (“Key Works of Modern Architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright”).

Like Taliesin West would later incorporate local boulders into its desert masonry, Taliesin adopted local limestone into its exterior and interior, blending inside and outside, stone and wood. Wright desired for it to be “a natural house, not natural as caves and log-cabins were natural but native and spirit and making, with all that architecture had meant whenever it was alive in times past” (Pfeiffer).

Taliesin Lake View. Source: Charles Sholton

Taliesin’s history, however, is scarred by tragedy: two fires, both of which reduced the buildings to cinders. The first fire, started by an insane servant who murdered Wright’s mistress Mamah Borthwick and her two children along with four others, enflamed Taliesin in the summer of 1914. However, Wright redesigned and rebuilt Taliesin, so that it was not identical to the original; Wright, and, consequently, the house had evolved. He doubled the size of the drafting studio and added the western portion of the Taliesin to house the farm animals and equipment. Unfortunately, another fire from faulty wiring ignited in April 1925, incinerating Taliesin’s residences. Wright once again refused to surrender, rebuilding and even integrating the fire-singed stones into his new buildings. In this way, Wright never truly ceased building Taliesin. He almost constantly modified the outer buildings and landscape, expanding the residential quarter and gardens and paving roads once the Taliesin Fellowship was established to accommodate the new students (“Key Works of Modern Architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright).

Taliesin burned down. Source: WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY, IMAGE ID: 55870

Taliesin side view. Source: american-architecture.info

One room in particular articulates Wright’s design artistry. The living room is a celebration of Wright’s manipulation of interior space—soaring multi-storied levels, marriage of stone and wood, tented wood beams of the ceiling, horizontal pot shelves—and conjures up a sense of diagonal movement, which is enhanced by the golden tones of the wood and natural lighting (Maddex, 50 Favorite Rooms by Frank Lloyd Wright). The highlight of the room is the almost-room-sized carpet sporting a circular, geometric motif in muted tones of red, blue, gold, and olive green. Barrel chairs echo the circles in the carpet below (Lind, The Wright Style).

Living room carpet. Source: The Wright Library (left), archdaily.com (right)

To explore both geometry and texture, I developed lesson plans for grades K-4, 5-8, and 9-12 to introduce Frank Lloyd Wright’s geometrically-patterned textiles, especially the room-sized Hoffman carpet in Taliesin’s living room. While the K-4 lesson plan focuses on geometric shapes and colors, the 5-8 plan explores the geometry of circles: area, circumference, sectors, arcs, and chords. Lastly, the 9-12 plan digs deeper, asking students to draw from their surroundings to create a textile pattern based on abstractions of natural elements, such as leaves or saguaros, using concentric circles, arcs, chords, sectors, and squares to achieve aesthetic harmony.

Wright's organic architecture incorporated the same design from furniture to floorplan. Older students can practice these principles by learning about and inventing grid patterns, which can be overlapped and extended. Moreover, students will learn how to minimalize landscapes into a grid pattern to further harmonize nature and building. 

Source: Kevin Nute, “Frank Lloyd Wright and “Composition”: The Architectural Picture, Plan, and Decorative Design as “Organic” Line-Ideas.”