“Falling water was designed at this desk,” said Mrs. Hamblen, referring to Wright’s masterpiece in Pennsylvania, placing her hand on the huge wood top.
Just a few hours earlier, this system had begun on a practical level when our class of nine met on the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center – a constructing in Wright’s signature prairie style characterised by strong horizontal lines and organic materials comparable to stone and wood – where a window image of overlooking the Wisconsin River. There, Wright’s framed essay titled “Why I Love Wisconsin” praised the people, barns, and hilly landscape “that takes you in its arms and rocks you so gently, almost lovingly.”
“I like her,” he wrote, referring to Wisconsin, “because there aren’t that many snobs.”
His grandparents, Richard and Mallie Lloyd Jones, probably not snobbish, bought land in 1863 along the Wisconsin River in Drift-free areawhere unglaciated rolling hills escaped the Ice Age debris that leveled much of the Midwest.
Wright was born in nearby Richland Center in 1867, and though he later became famous in Chicago by founding Prairie style architecture, he often returned to the family estate.
In 1911, when Taliesin finished, Wisconsin was a refuge from the scandal of leaving his wife and kids for Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the client’s wife. (Her life ended abruptly when a servant killed her and 6 others and set fire to Taliesin in 1914; it was rebuilt persistently after one other fire in 1925.)
Today, many of the greater than 25,000 visitors annually take one to 4 hour tours of the estate, where seven Wright-designed buildings share 800 acres of farmland and oak savannas. But on this major fall weekend, with Saskatchewan to New York license plates filling up the parking zone, myself and 4 couples from Wisconsin and Illinois arrived with duffel bags and various bread-making experiences, drawn primarily by the chance to spend the weekend at Taliesin.
The group divided the mansions into estates between Tan-y-Deri, a 1908 home that Wright had built for his sister Jane Porter, and his 1949 Midway Barn, remodeled into rooms with basic amenities. My third-floor bedroom with shared bathroom in Tan-y-Deri, with a wood bed and an Arts and Crafts chest of drawers, missed fields of drying corn and rye from diamond-paneled lead windows.
