Interview With Keiran Murphy on frank lloyd wright’s taliesin fellowship

Listen to the Podcast Episode:

Hi, my name is Mitchell Rocheleau. I'm the Principal Architect at Rost Architects. Today, I had the privilege of speaking with Keiran Murphy. She's a historian at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin. I had a fantastic discussion with her. She goes over an overview of what Taliesin was, what the fellowship was, talks about some of Wright's work, and what some of the apprentices have done, and how the Taliesin Fellowship and Wright's work have impacted American culture and architecture at large. So it was a great discussion and I hope you enjoy it.

Mitchell: Keiran, thanks so much for joining us today. I wanna jump right into it and ask you, can you briefly give us an overview of the Taliesin Fellowship and how it got started.

Keiran: Yes. Simple story about the Taliesin Fellowship was that it was started in 1932 by Frank Lloyd Wright and his wife, Olgivanna at his house Taliesin in Wisconsin. It was for men and women, and that's the start of it. Then, Frank Lloyd dies in 1959. After his death,members of the Taliesin Fellowship started Taliesin Architects, and then the fellowship became the Frank Lloyd School of Architecture in the 1980s. And it is now the school of architecture. They don't live in either of the Taliesins. But like I said, that's the simple answer. But I haven't really explained what the fellowship is. They were a community

surrounding Frank Lloyd Wright. And the idea was that they would participate in almost every aspect of his and his wife's life. They ate together, worked together, they worked in the front fields of Wisconsin, they worked in the drafting studio, both studios, eventually doing like music and movies or watching movies, they, and then they built his summer home, Taliesin West, which is in Scottsdale, Arizona. And members of the fellowship, they were eventually up to 70 or actually close to a hundred people at one point. So, at one point, like in the 1950s, after World War II, when there were former soldiers, you know, through the GI Bill, they were living at Taliesin or Taliesin West, and there were more people than they had spaces for it. So, he actually had to rent a couple of buildings like in Wisconsin where members of the fellowship lived and they married and they had kids. There were kids growing up in group also. So that's how it gets really big.

Mitchell: Super interesting. So, it was basically an organization where there was a value exchange so the apprentices would pay for the pay tuition for the opportunity to be close to and in proximity work with and learn from, you know, an American master architect.

Keiran: Yes. Yeah. I mean, that's the, he was with them in the drafting studio all the time. Once they got into the drafting studio. You had sort of an informal testing period of around six months at least where you would be working in the kitchens, sometimes serving food on formal evenings which were held every Sunday for years. And you were working in the fields. And, you know, so there were some people who came and they wanted to work in the drafting studio and write and let you in the drafting studio. You had to be part of the community. And so they would be like, this is, you know, and they were paying money for this.

Mitchell: True.

Keiran: So they might be paying $1,200 and be there for three months, six months and not get into the studio. And they would be like, this is BS and they would leave. So other people stayed for decades.

Mitchell: And many of that, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think many of the those initial months were also helping to build onto the existing buildings, whether that be Taliesin or Taliesin West, doing physical construction as he believed that he had to kind of learn by by doing, I think was his his quote.

Keiran: Yeah, yeah. So yeah, that would be one of the other things. So you got practical experience learning by doing and worked building furniture also working on the structures so that you were doing stonework and plasterwork. So they were learning, the idea was that you were learning everything from the job but. And they wrote, in the 1930s, they wrote a bunch of newspaper articles. They were published in them once a week. It came to known as “At Taliesin”. And you would read these kids, I mean, these people in their 20s. And they would be talking about like, you know, when the plumbing breaks down, we're the ones who have to fix it. So they were learning, you know, learning by doing and sometimes you were doing, you know, like they, you know they were getting like the cold lines and the hot lines mixed up and they were doing the electricals which could be a little dangerous and in fact yeah there were some areas of preservation I've seen at the residence Taliesin when they, they took off some drywall that was added later, and there were scorch marks on the walls, from the electricals.

Mitchell: From hot wires in the wall?

Keiran: Yeah, yeah, from the hot wires.

Mitchell: That's interesting. So, he's building a culture. He's really bringing young people in who want to be architects, want to kind of learn his philosophies. He's building a culture starting from the ground up, from the way of living, from working, And then they have this process they need to go through to get into the drafting studio to ultimately begin to work and learn the architectural drafting design skills side-by-side with him, so it seems like this is quite a process and many people stayed there for a couple months, but then seems like others stayed for lifetime a lifetime as well

Keiran: Exactly. Yeah and I was thinking about the culture this morning that Frank Lloyd Wright did create this culture. It was really interesting when I first started working at Taliesin in the 1990s, thinking about the fact that there was this entire culture. They, you know, they were still having formal evenings every Saturday. And they did, you know, particular things around the 4th of July and they did, they also had, what we're called the box projects.

Mitchell: Can you tell me more about those?

Keiran: The box projects. That was also an interesting story. The apocryphal story that we were all told as dives was that in the 1930s, the apprentices wanted to give Frank Lloyd Wright something for his birthday and Mrs. Wright, that is, Olgivanna, suggested that they make him a box and put inside the drawings that they had done because he loved working and looking at their drawings. So this became a, actually bi-yearly event called The Box Project. And one was right around his birthday, which is June 8th and then there was a Christmas box. So apprentices would spend time creating these things. They were not just drawings, they were also poems or plans. They were usually just theoretical spaces, not for actual designs. Sometimes they were poems or Christmas cards and Frank Lloyd Wright would receive the boxes and one apprentice would design and build a box. The other apprentices would put their plans inside of it and then Frank Lloyd Wright would open it and then he would make comments or he would look through all, everything that he was given from all of the premises and he would make comments and that was pretty much the only way they had of knowing like their progress over, over the years. Box Projects were still going on around Wright’s birthday and Christmas when I first started. But the fellowship was also moving back and forth between Wisconsin and Arizona. So if you were an apprentice and you were building a model for your box project, and you were down in Arizona in May, and you had to drive up in the van to Wisconsin, your model might get smashed, or your computer files will just, you know, disappear and not be able to find them. So, they switched the box projects so that the presentations went on in April and October, that was still consistent. Yeah.

Mitchell: So these are these are projects that Wright genuinely liked to kind of observe just because of his pure appreciation for art, aesthetics, beauty, but then also they were away from what you said to kind of gauge the individual apprentices’ progress in the in their apprenticeship. That's interesting.

Keiran: Yeah and you hear from some people like you read in various things that apprentices knew that Wright really liked The Box Projects. Although sometimes he would complain because he was like you're just giving me a Box Project for my birthday and you're not giving me an actual present. And they just spent like three weeks you know working on this and sorry that you’re not getting, you know, but.

Mitchell: He seems a bit hard to please, maybe.

Keiran: A little bit. Yeah, that was another thing I was thinking about, too, about hard to please. It was very difficult to please because they would do these Box Projects, and if the work, if the drawing, if the plan looked too much like his own designs, he didn't like it. He didn't like the idea that people were just copying his work. But if it was too individual and too unique, he also didn't like it because then that apprentice with competition. So, apprentices had to kind of work through things. And one apprentice, Edgar Tafel, I think it was the one who said it. The apprentices basically learned, they told one of Wright's biographers this, they learned that the best thing you could do was to get kicked out of the fellowship for some minor reason for being heard to complain about, you know, the dinners that the Wrights got to have and you as an apprentice maybe didn't get to have the same food. Make sure that you were heard complaining. And then Frank Lloyd Wright or Olgivanna Lloyd Wright might kick you out. And then Wright would feel guilty or he would miss you within a couple of weeks to a couple of months. And then he would get in touch with you again. So that is why Edgar Tafel, I think, kept in contact with Frank Lloyd Wright because he left for one reason or another, but then he had a relationship with Wright through the end of his life. So, they got back in touch.

Mitchell: Now was this, this strategy to kind of be released out of the reigns of Wright and go out on your own in a way?

Keiran: That was, yeah, for the apprentices who wanted to get out. I know also, at least from one of Wright's grandchildren, his name is Brandoc, he told us as guides, he said that when Wright received a commission, the idea was that the apprentices would work on the plans and drawings, and then when it was about to be built, one apprentice would be sent out to supervise the construction. So that was a pretty good idea. And the idea that Branduck said was that if you're working on construction, building a building in Indiana or whatever you're gonna get to know the actual people in that town who are doing the actual construction and you're working as like supervisor and that would give you a contact, but after you left the fellowship, you knew some names that you could work with, you could move maybe to that town and work in construction.

Mitchell: What that makes me think about is Rudolf Schindler working out in L.A. in our area. I think that's a prime example of that. He sent him to work out on the textile blockhouses out here

Keiran: Yeah.

Mitchell: Can you tell us about maybe a day in the life of Taliesin, a typical day? What would that look like?

Keiran: Yeah. When Wright and Olgivanna first started the fellowship, hey had rules and ideas and in the ideal, breakfast was at 6:30am to 7:00am. That was one thing that was consistent through all of the years, as you can imagine, getting breakfast 6:30am to 7:00am. And then there was choir practice, also, maybe 7:30am to 8:00am. And then work in the gardens. And then you would get into the studio around 9:00am to 9:30am. Wright would come in. And then you would have lunch around lunchtime and then go back into the studio and then you would meet again as a group at four o 'clock in the afternoon for tea. So there was daily tea. And then you would leave again have a little bit of time on your own, then then get ready for dinner, and maybe people were preparing dinner, and then you would have dinner from like 6:30pm to, you know, for like an hour. And then on your own again, and then lights out at 10:00pm. So ideally, they start at 6:30am, ends at 10:00pm. And then they had one day off a week where they could do their own things, usually go to town. When they were in Arizona in the earliest years, before there was a consistent water supply, getting into town was the only chance they had to actually bathe. But I don't know how long it took them to get water. Yeah. So by the 1960s, yeah, that was a pretty consistent routine. They were still 6:30am to 7:00am, gardening or choir practice, studio in the morning, lunch in the afternoon to the afternoon, tea at the four o'clock. They were still doing that. Yeah, then getting ready for dinner then dinner then on your own time until 10:00pm.

Mitchell: Yeah, it seems like some of these, the evenings were important to him and I know that he you know enjoyed piano music and at least from my recent visit at Taliesin West, they had mentioned, you know, he had different apprentices play piano before dinner, they had, you know, drinks, host of guests, that type of thing. So it seems like that was an important, important part of the schedule as well.

Keiran: Yeah. Yeah. And movies also, which is why I don't, you said you went to Taliesin West, and West, there's actually three theaters at Taliesin West. And in Wisconsin there's one theater also. And he would have, he set up things at both theaters where you could eat and watch a movie. And they had public movies also. So, they would all watch a movie together on Saturday nights. They would get it from Spring Green. They had a movie projector, of course. And then the next day, the next afternoon, they would show it to the public for 50 cents. And for an additional dollar, you would get a tour from an apprentice. So, giving tours were also part of the fellowship. So, apprentices, you know, showing around the public and hopefully showing the new projects that Wright was working on. And it also, I think, gave them the opportunity to know how to give presentations to people to talk about spaces and see how people interacted with the space. And one of the other routines for years was also rearranging the dining room furniture. I don't know how cast in stone this was. I don't know if this was just part of your general work, but yeah, they would redesign and move around the furniture and redecorate once a week. They were still doing that when I started in the '90s.  

Mitchell: It’s so interesting, you know, my original perception of Taliesin, maybe back in school before reading about it and learning more about it, was that it was this kind of working office only in that, you know, the apprentices would come and go work their hours and then leave, you know, that was my original perception of it. But, you know, after learning more about this, this is a fully functioning community. This is a place that people stay, they live real lives were lived here, like you had mentioned at the beginning. Children were born here. It's just, it's so interesting to think that this was a little isolated community. And then he, just like he designed his buildings, and he has this kind of reputation of designing, fully designing a house down to the furniture. And even I think dresses, I believe, he basically built, designed this community, showing or illustrating the way he wanted to live. So it's just fascinating.

Keiran: Yeah, I think that's one of the concepts. I was reading a book called "The Lost Years." Frank Lloyd Wright "The Lost Years" by Anthony Alofson. And he's looking at Frank Lloyd Wright from 1910 to 1922. And I was surprised reading the book, which I'd heard about for years, Wright's idea of having a community at Taliesin literally went back to 1911, 1912, like he was thinking about having a community and teaching people right beside him. And he never really, I don't think he ever really wanted, like his draftsmen and draftswomen to leave. Like he wanted them living with him so that they could live in these beautiful spaces. And it's not like you leave the drafting studio and go back to a little dinky apartment someplace like.

Mitchell: Right.

Keiran: Yeah.

Mitchell: Now was this in maybe letters that he had suggested this interest in having kind of the building the community or was this comments?

Keiran: It was in some of the writing he did and published something in 1911 and that's when it starts to come up. And it is also in letters. He wrote to another architect named Ashby, who was in England about wanting to create this community. It's just that if you follow him throughout over the years, you realize that he didn't come up with the fellowship just because of the depression, that and he didn't come up with the fellowship just because his career was in a bad place in the late 1920s, that the stuff had been brewing in his head for years. And like he said, having a, having things going on in the community, having movies, music, music, choir, oh, and having tea every day at four o 'clock, that was another thing that he really liked. Some people said that he really appreciated hanging out with the apprentices because they could talk about events of the day, he could talk about his ideas. That went on for years. Then in the 1950s, it became much more formal. If you can call anything in the fellowship formal. Wright began having these, not lectures, but he would get together with the apprentices on Sundays, and he would talk, and they began having recordings of him, recordings and speeches, and if you come across any of the speeches, you'll see a lot of the ideas, you know, in the 1950s, you can see the origin of the ideas going back to the 1920s.

Mitchell: On a high level, roughly, what were those topics about that he lectured on or discussed?

Keiran: He was very much into talking about education. He really disliked professional education systems, he disliked colleges apparently. He really, really had a problem with tests.

Mitchell: It makes sense. He's established this community as a way as a different way of teaching or educating young people. So that that makes perfect sense.

Keiran: Yeah. And you can hear him talking about he did a lot of interviews in the 1950s and you can hear some of these same concepts. And when you do read these things or come across these things, it makes a lot of sense that people thought Frank Lloyd Wright was a communist, that they thought the fellowship was a communist system, that they thought Frank Lloyd Wright was an American, that they thought he wasn't a capitalist. He very much liked capital. And yeah, and very much liked America. But because he lived in with this group of people, people thought the fellowship was a commune. And they thought it was a little odd, you know, particularly when you would come to the, if you took a tour in the 1950s and I get the sense that some of the apprentices would speak about Frank Lloyd Wright in kind of hushed tones, you know, and also one of the well, for that, was that a lot of these apprentices in the 1950s, he was in his 80s. They were in their 20s. And he was, you know, the man who designed Fallingwater was right over there in the studio, you know, working. So they did have a lot of reverence for him.

Mitchell: Now, speaking about the apprentices, can you give us some more perspective of kind of the reflections of some of the past apprentices? What were their experiences like? It seems like you've spoken to a couple of them, read some accounts. What do they have to say about the experience?

Keiran: They all have, well they all have very interesting things to say. They did respect him very much. There was one former apprentice named Kamal Amin and he told a biographer of Wright’s, he said being in the studio was, such an incredible experience because you never knew what Frank Lloyd Wright was gonna come out with. You never knew if there was going to be another drawing like Fallingwater or the Greek Orthodox Church outside of Milwaukee, and if Kamal was at his drafting table working, Frank Lloyd Wright would just come and sit down next to him, have him move aside, and then he would like make changes on the drawings. He was usually, you know, adding trees, or sometimes he was moving walls around on the drawings and Kamal told the biographer he said that it's, it still was so exciting for him, and this was decades later Kamal said it still made him like shake with excitement. For me, without a doubt Frank Lloyd Wright is one of the greatest architects who's ever lived. And that's not me saying that. Well, actually, that was just me saying that. But what I'm saying is like, if you look at the greatest architects in the history of the world, Wright's gonna be on the list, probably in the top 20. And he lived right across the river from me. And these apprentices were interacting with this man who just designed these spaces that people are still trying to figure out how he created the space, how he created these spaces that give you this sense of sense when we walk inside. That's, as someone once said to me as more than some of their parts. But to get back to what you were asking me about, about the apprentices and some of their writings and remembrances, aside from what I just spoke about with Kamal. I was thinking about some of the books from different apprentices. If a person was really interested in trying to figure out what is this group like I thought of four books that give you different aspects of the group. There's Apprentice to Genius by Edgar Tafel. That's a really great book, you can just read that and have a sense of the fellowship and you don't have to read anything else. It's an overview of Wright's life. Edgar became an apprentice in 1932. He was there all the way until 1941. He was there apparently during the drawing of Fallingwater, that event of Frank Lloyd Wright drawing this amazing building in two and a half hours. He also shows a lot of humor over the whole thing. So that's one book to look at. And then kind of a companion to that, but much different is Working with Mr. Wright by Curtis Besinger. Besinger was in the fellowship from 1939 until 1935, so he overlapped with Edgar and he is much more specific about he takes it year by actually season by season he talks about the differences between Wisconsin and Arizona the movements he has one whole chapter about movies and music and then he talks about why he ended up leaving, which actually has to do with Olgivanna. So that gives you a sense of how one person felt about Olgivanna. He had major problems with her. And then there is A Taliesin Diary, which was written by Priscilla Henken. She was in the fellowship with her husband, David, in 1942 and '43, and it is literally a diary. It's a diary that she kept. It was published as a book over 12 years ago. And so, you're reading a daily diary from someone, so you get all of the particulars of this very, very small group at that point, of course, with World War II going on, the group was smaller, they were confined to Taliesin because, you know, because of rubber rationing and gasoline rationing and they couldn't make the trip to Arizona. And so there was, you could see a lot of the conflicts going on. And Priscilla also ended up really disliking Mrs. Wright. And then, and then on a continuation of Mrs. Wright's, there is the book by Kamal Amin, which is Reflections from the Shining Brow, and Kamal was in the Fellowship for 27 years. And he had, yeah, so he was actually in the fellowship longer under Mrs. Wright than he had been under Mr. Wright. He only worked under him for 7 years. And he was the guy who I mentioned, you know, who was shaking with the idea of Frank Lloyd Wright sitting down next to him in the studio. But Kamal understood Olgivanna very well, and if you've got a problem with Olgivanna, which people who study the fellowship, they get certain feelings about Mrs. Wright, I think Kamal gives a really good explanation of her, and the good and the bad parts of her. And the good part, he said, is that she's responsible, in a lot of ways, for Frank Lloyd Wright, by living as long as he did, and having such a resurgence later on in his life because she took care of the fellowship. She made sure that those apprentices were working in the fields and in the kitchens and doing music and setting up the movies. So, Wright didn't have to deal with the day-to-day everyday things of life. He just had to create and be himself and be appreciated for that.

Mitchell: Sure, and probably relieved him of a lot of just daily stress and allowed him the space to be free to do it and to do what he does best or do what he did best.

Keiran: Yeah.

Mitchell: With Olgivanna, correct me if I'm wrong but she had experience organizing in a large group community before they establish the fellowship. Is that right?

Keiran: Yeah, yeah. Do you want to know about that?

Mitchell: Sure, yeah, I'd love to hear about that. Or do I? Do I want to know about that?

Keiran: No, no, I can tell you about that. I'm just laughing at my own like I'm dragging you into all this information.

Mitchell: Oh, that's great.

Keiran: The community that she was involved with was very interesting. It was the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. And that was a community that lived in France under the direction of a man named G.I. Gurdjieff. And Gurdjieff was Turkish. And he, I mean, he had a lot of control over these people. And they were also, they would get up at like 4:30 in the morning and work all day long and maybe go to bed at 10:00pm. And Olgivanna was with the group for, I think, five and a half years.

Mitchell: Interesting.

Keiran: And then she, the group broke up and Olgivanna was divorcing from her first husband. Her first husband was in the United States. Olgivanna was in France. She was encouraged to figure out her marriage. She was encouraged by Gurdjieff to do that. And she came to Chicago, decided to, she should divorce her husband, Vladimar, or called Vladimar. And she was going, starting to go through the divorce, and that's when she met Frank Lloyd Wright by chance. So yeah, she had that very much.

Mitchell: So she had, she had been a part of this group and, and maybe it's interesting what you said earlier that a lot of books, articles, maybe paint the picture that Wright and Olgivanna devised the fellowship primarily to remedy financial woes that they were going through as a result of the depression. But you had mentioned that, you know, this idea was brewing in a Wright's mind early. And then you bring Olgivanna into the equation, and she has had this past experience. And they bring it to, you know, reality. But yeah, I thought that it was really interesting how many books paint the picture that, or at least some of the ones that I've looked at, they paint the picture as though this was a, this was kind of a desperate tactic to keep his practice running in a way.

Keiran: Yeah, I think that there was definitely a practical aspect to it. I mean, because in 1931, 1932, nobody was commissioning Frank Lloyd Wright, and actually and actually he was obviously nobody was commissioning anything because it was the Great Depression, but he was seen as an old man. I've come across some newspaper articles in the early 1930s, where he's referred to as like a writer, a philosopher. They don't talk about him as an architect by that time. So, yeah, there was definitely the need to get some money in. And I think, as I've said with Frank Lloyd Wright, there's always a difference between the ideal and the reality. The ideal was that he wanted this group of creative people to create a beautiful life around him. But the reality was they needed money and he had lots of buildings at the time. And in Wisconsin, he had his home Taliesin, but he also had an entire estate. He had over 300 acres, maybe 400 acres in 1932. And he also owned an old school building that he had designed 30 years earlier, designed and built around 30 years earlier called Hillside. That was just sitting there. It was a beautiful building. And he figured, well, I can use that building. And we can fix it up. And we can put these apprentices into it. And that will be part of the Taliesin stays. Part of the practical.

Mitchell: Right, right. So, you mentioned that, I think, in one of your articles that he really envisioned Taliesin as a self-sustaining community. Now, functionally or practically, how does this work? This is him, you know, bringing an income from the commissions on his design work and being able to support the fellowship and his properties through that income. And this kind of cycle happens. Is that a fair way to look at it?

Keiran: Yeah, yeah. I think that's what it became. I think originally when he first talked about it, I think he thought about apprentices coming and creating things and that they could sell them. But that was never practical and it was never done. So it really just became him getting commissions and the apprentices paying tuition, and the tuition just paid for food, and lights, and heat.

One of the tricks, though, with the fellowship, when we start talking about the practical, and when it started in 1932, that brings up the issue that people think that the fellowship was influenced by the Bauhaus in Germany.

Mitchell: So in what way do you think the Taliesin Fellowship inspired, added value, brought light to you know, the world and then in a similar manner kind of what's what was the, let’s say not so pleasant or darker side of the of the fellowship.

Keiran: The way it brought light was the construction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture with those apprentices. Wright could get a lot more buildings through the studio. I was told that one third of his designs were executed during like the last 10 years of his life. And that was in large part because the apprentices, he could get a commission, apprentices could do all of the drawing for it.  He generally could work up a small sketch, give it to an apprentice. They could do all of the drawings for it. He would take a look at the sketch before it went out. He would sign off on it and then it was done. So what way would his work with the fellowship ring right into the world? And I have to say it's, you know, his buildings.

Mitchell: Yeah, yeah. Seems like there's a bit of this.

Keiran: And the buildings by people, yeah, the buildings by people who left and had their own careers. And they've gone, there are a lot of former apprentices who are still practicing. I've been into a couple of the buildings by former apprentices, and some look very much like Frank Lloyd Wright's structures, and some you can definitely see that's influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, but totally is not something by him. Oh, and then there's one architect you probably know of. His name was John Lautner.

Mitchell: Absolutely. That was in my head right when you were talking about this. So yes.

Keiran: Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about his work. I mean, Lautner's work, he worked a lot with concrete, I think. And so his buildings don't look really anything like Frank Lloyd Wright's, but he took the ideas in some way and he made them into those structures. But yeah, anybody who's watching or listening to this right now, if you don't know Lautner's name, you know his work because it's been in movies. Most famous one is in Diamonds Are Forever, James Bond movie and…

Mitchell: Probably Big Lebowski.

Keiran: Big Lebowski. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Mitchell: I've been fortunate enough to go into several of Lautner’s buildings and they are unique and they're more formal than Wright was, you know, like these interesting shapes out of concrete, but you can still feel that he does have this kind of resonance of some of these principles that Wright established, like the connection with nature indoor outdoor flow, you know broad sweeping spaces of definitely breaking the box. I mean all these things are present in his work but Lautner’s work is incredible. He’s phenomenal. I'm glad you brought him up.

Keiran: Yeah, yeah, and he was actually in the fellowship for six years, which he's one of the rare apprentices who spent that long with Frank Lloyd Wright who is known just on his own as a great architect. There are a lot of wonderful former apprentices Wright’s and from the fellowship who are throughout the world, but there's none that is as famous as Frank Lloyd Wright. John Lautner is one of the few who's a name that you know. There's also Faye Jones who do these beautiful chapels.  Then there's a man who's alive right now. His name is Arthur Dyson who does some really cool stuff and there's probably a few others who are pretty well known.

Mitchell: So, the lighter side of the fellowship is kind of allowing, let's just say, nurturing the careers of many of his apprentices, allowing them to go off and do their own work, integrate some of these philosophies about a new lifestyle, living, new architecture into the world, and then also, like you had mentioned, the productivity of his studio in the last 10 years was just kind of through the roof, allowing him or being this mechanism to allow his work and his ideas, philosophies to get out into the world. That makes complete sense. And I think that if you look at it in that light, or look at the fellowship in that light, I think people can see a lot of positives. And that this thing was, I think a very productive mechanism to allow a person who had some sort of connection or an insight into the way, an imager of a belief in the world that he wanted to get out and clearly affected people. So that's, yeah, what about the darker side? What do you think? And not to go into it in too much detail, but.

Keiran: Oh, yeah. Yeah, the darker side that diary that I mentioned by Priscilla Henken, that gives you a pretty good idea. The darker side was that you had young men and women. Some of them not, you know, some of them were in the fellowship for years. So, by that time, we were in their forties or fifties, but you had these young men and women in this small, intense community that moved back and forth. So, you know, if you were a young man and you started dating a young woman in Scottsdale, Arizona, you couldn't really keep a relationship going because you would be leaving for six months of every year. I mean it's possible you could keep it going. So, there was that that you had this small group. There could be a lot of backbiting. There could be people who I think wanted to be closer to the Wrights and from what I've heard you know there would be, you know, a lot of talking behind people's backs and I've read somewhere that there was something called the kitchen talks in the 60s and 70s maybe that apprentices would go and they would talk to Mrs. Wright in the kitchen and sort of unburdened themselves of whatever things that they did that were not allowed. If you wanted to get a sense for that, you should read Kamal Amin’s book, but yeah.

Mitchell: Sure. A bit of drama.

Keiran: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think I've thought about it too like when I first started working and giving tours like I was 26 years old, so I was not that far from college and I remember thinking about the fellowship. It's like yeah, of course it like I remember what college was like we were all dating each other or all hating one person as part of our group. And it was no problem. It was no fault of that person. It's just, you know, we just got into it. There's a lot of drama.

Mitchell: Yeah, yeah. Emotional instability in our minds at that age, I think, are not, or our brains at that age are fully developed, especially for men.

Keiran: So. Well, and I think the worse, at least in terms of the architecture, some of the architecture was like became like Frank Lloyd Wrigh. That's what a lot of people have problems with fellowship architecture in the 60s and 70s. I don't know because I've not seen those buildings and I don't have anything in my mind, but some people thought that Wright's ideas and architecture were sort  of frozen by people who were not as good as him. But then again, I've been in buildings that were designed by former apprentices and those buildings were built in the 60s and 70s and they're really cool. So I've not had an experience walking into a building by a former apprentice and being like, "No, that's a bad pastiche of Frank Lloyd Wright." That's it.

Mitchell: Well, what would somebody outside of the architectural world, or why would somebody outside of the architectural world be interested in Wright in the fellowship, and is there something that we can learn from himself and the fellowship?

Keiran: Well, there's so many things about Frank Lloyd Wright that could be interesting to a person. I think one, just that he had so many highs and lows and he kept working and he was not a bitter angry person. And I think in part because he did get things from his apprentices. He wasn't like a succubus. I mean, it was the idea of a life and a community together.  Someone pointed out to me that the fellowship really went on for at least 85 years. And it was one of the longest intentional communities that had ever lasted.

Mitchell: Yeah. So on a maybe more of a individual level, you know, or a personal level, use looking at front, somebody from the outside can look at Frank Lloyd Wright as a model that’s somebody who displayed an extreme resiliency and this kind of unwavering, relentless ambition to pursue this vision or these things that he believed in deeply. Maybe that could be some way that somebody from the outside can look at this person and not look at him as an architect or maybe for the work he did, but more on an intellectual or psychological level is to this person's personality. And I love how you said that he was, he just, you phrased it differently, but how he did not give up. He went through so many setbacks, deaths, fires, all of these things. And he did not give up. Now, I find that admirable.

Keiran: Yeah, yeah, it's incredible. In fact, in a couple of months, we are going to be upon the 100th anniversary of the second fire at Taliesin, and that happened in April of 1925, and so the thing that, I mean, there were two fires at Taliesin, the first one was in 1914, which included murders. In 1925, there was the second fire. Both fires completely destroyed the living quarters of Taliesin and the real tragedy of the second fire was that Frank Lloyd Wright lost most of the art that he had collected while working on a project in Japan called the Imperial hotel. He made $300,000 off of that commission. He spent most of his commission on art, and most of that art was in the house on the day of the fire. So, he lost most of it. I mean, there were still, you know, some things and there's still things, you know, around there were things in his vault but yeah and so and at that time he's 56 almost 57 years old he had spent like seven or eight years working on the Imperial Hotel which was a hard commission and then it was gone, all of this stuff.

Mitchell: That's devastating.

Keiran: Yeah, he says in his autobiography, that you know, he stood there like on the crown of the hill over Taliesin. Wearing, you know, he had burned the soles of his feet, he was wearing like pants and shirt and everything else was gone and he said that Olgivanna, he said she came out of the shadows and told him “Taliesin lives wherever you stand.” And so he went back and he actually took some of the artifacts that's survived or artifacts that he found in the ashes and he put them back into the stone wall. So, if you go to Taliesin in Wisconsin today they'll show you where there are statues or little pieces that are now within the masonry and that's from the second fire. Yeah, I have no idea.

Mitchell: Yeah, it may have been though some of these, the tragedies and the repeated kind of setbacks that he had to go through that was precisely the thing that allowed him or motivated him to put beautiful spaces into the world. You know, he saw many dark things in his life, and he thought maybe, you know, in a way, and I'm just, I'm completely, you know, putting words in his mouth and projecting at this moment, but this may be, my work may be the mechanism to contest and battle, counterbalance those darker moments that I've seen. And yeah, that could be a, you know, that may have motivated him, I guess is what I'm saying. Those setbacks.

Keiran: Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I studied the, I'm still studying the history of Taliesin, the house. And this, and the man made changes constantly to that building. But he did not, as far as I can figure it out, he didn't make any changes to the house from, like, 1947 to '48, because, I think, because his daughter, Svetlana, died in a car crash in late September of 1946, and I don't know if it was like he just didn't want to do anything or I found it really interesting when I realized like “Wow, you know he was constantly making changes to Taliesin” and then during this one period of time he didn't and all I could all I could link it to was the death of Svetlana. Yeah.

Mitchell: Well, thank you so much, Keiran. Is there anything else that you would like to add that you feel is valuable, valuable information or important?

Keiran: No, I think you asked wonderful questions. Oh, and I mentioned in the very beginning the fellowship became the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. It is now The School of Architecture. The School of Architecture does not live at the two Taliesins. They live in Arizona, and they're a small group. And when you meet when you see the students, they are now students, they are now not apprentices. They're very much, it’s very much like the same group of people. They, you know, very open, very helpful, very friendly, and very creative, and still working on building things.

Mitchell: And this is an accredited program now, if I'm not mistaken.

Keiran: You are. You are correct. It's called the School of Architecture, and they are accredited for master's degrees.

Mitchell: Fantastic. All right. Well, thank you so much, Keiran. That was, yeah, super informative and got a lot of good insight and learned a lot. So, thank you so much.

Keiran: Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much.