The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship

Frank Lloyd Wright's Wisconsin estate, Taliesin, gave rise to a fascinating and provocative cultural experiment: the Taliesin Fellowship, an extraordinary architectural colony where Wright trained hundreds of devoted apprentices, while using them as the de facto architectural practice where all of his late masterpieces--Fallingwater, Johnson Wax, the Guggenheim Museum--were born. This book draws on hundreds interviews and countless documents from the Wright archives to create a portrait of Taliesin and the three mercurial figures at its center: Wright, his imperious wife Olgivanna Hinzenberg, and her spiritual master, the Greek-Armenian mystic Georgi Gurdjieff. The authors reveal how the idealistic community became a kind of fiefdom, where young apprentices were both inspired and manipulated by the architect and his wife. They trace the war of wills between Wright and Olgivanna, in which organic architecture was pitted against esoteric spiritualism in a struggle for the soul of Taliesin. They chronicle Wright's perennial battles with clients, bankers, and the government, which suspected him of both communist and fascist sympathies. And they tell the stories of Wright's devoted apprentices--many of them gay men--who found an uncertain refuge in the architect's Wisconsin and Arizona compounds, and who helped the master realize his dreamlike architectural visions, often at great personal cost.--From publisher description.… (more)