A Frank Look at Wright’s Fellowship

A new book exposes Frank Lloyd Wright’s cloistered Taliesin Fellowship as a less than ideal world for young architects.

No individual in American architecture has a more towering legacy than Frank Lloyd Wright. Perhaps equal in fame to Wright’s long career as an architect is his turbulent private life, a subject almost as well-documented as his buildings. Scandal and controversy were a constant throughout his life, beginning in 1909 when he abandoned his wife and family and sailed to Europe with the wife of one of his clients, Mrs. Edwin Cheney. Wright’s life with his third and final wife, Olgivanna, and their establishment of an architectural colony where he trained hundreds of devoted apprentices is now the focus of a new book ‘The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & The Taliesin Fellowship’ (Harper Collins), co-authored by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman. The Fellowship began at Taliesin, Wright’s estate in Spring Green, Wisconsin in 1932 and a second outpost, Taliesin West in Arizona, was established in 1937. As conceived by Wright and Olgivanna, the Fellowship was to be a self-contained, self-sustaining community of apprentices who would learn and practice the philosophy of organic architecture. Unconventional from the start, the Fellowship had cultish overtones, with residents forbidden from forming outside relationships and not allowed to leave without permission. The drawing card was the magnetic power and genius of Wright. All of Wright’s late masterpieces–Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax Administration Building and the Guggenheim Museum–were realized as part of the Taliesin Fellowship, yet the idealistic village Wright and Olgivanna hatched and reigned over was not exactly utopia. Their minions were overwhelmingly male, many homosexual, and they often paid a high personal price for their loyalty, a quality often cruelly manipulated by the famously outsized ego of their ‘master,’ and his controlling wife. The influence of the Greek-Armenian mystic Georgi Gurdjieff, who Olgivanna considered her spiritual master, is a thread throughout the book, with Gurdjieff’s teachings about transcendence and self-awareness coming to bear on the Fellowship at Taliesin. Marketed by Harper Collins as ‘an unforgettable story of genius and ego, sex and violence, mysticism and utopianism,’ the book is an unusual hybrid of page-turning storytelling–often unflinching in its sordid details–rooted in solid, groundbreaking scholarship. Ten years in the making, the epic-sized publication was co-authored by Roger Friedland, a professor of religious studies and sociology at UC Santa Barbara, and Harold Zellman, an architect and historian whose firm, Harold Zellman and Associates, is based in Venice. The two first collaborated in 1997 as Getty fellows working on a chapter for another book about Crestwood Hills. Their research on two former members of the Fellowship led to rare access to Wright’s archives in Scottsdale. ‘It became clear pretty quickly that this Fellowship was something beyond just a labor pool for Frank Lloyd Wright,’ Zellman says. ‘It was a very grand idea indeed, much more so than had ever been represented in previous histories.’ During a recent interview in his Pacific Palisades home, Zellman spoke at length about the book, a project he’s been consumed by for more than a decade. How did the Taliesin Fellowship first come about? Zellman: When Wright formed the Fellowship in 1932, he was out of work and it was three years into the Depression. In fact, he hadn’t had any serious amount of work since the 1920s. It wasn’t the Depression that caused all the problems. He was in deep trouble long before that in part because of his scandalous personal behavior. He was completely written off by architectural critics and historians at that point. There’s the famous line by Philip Johnson who, when asked about Wright, referred to him as the greatest architect of the 19th century. Behind that quip was a very serious and widespread belief that his career was over. The Fellowship certainly, in part, was inspired by a need to survive and to support Taliesin, which was an enormous and emotionally important part of Wright’s life. The bank was forever trying to repossess it. He desperately needed a financial base outside of his architectural practice, and that’s what the Fellowship was designed to be. It’s not that he didn’t have an interest in passing on his ideas about organic architecture, but there was a strong financial motivation, too. What kind of instruction did apprentices receive from Wright? Zellman: Wright was very hostile to formal education. His idea was that the way to learn architecture was by apprenticing and working on projects. The problem was he had no projects; that’s where the moxie comes in. He promoted this idea of the Fellowship, and many young people came without having any idea he had no work. What the apprentices did for a long time, for close to two years, was work on his estate, farming, cooking and serving meals. This worked into Wright’s theory of education: you can’t design a kitchen unless you’ve worked in one. Early on they got one really small house project and, with 30 apprentices, only a couple of them could be doing any kind of architecture work. There was a lot of frustration among apprentices, and many left. Some of them took to going at night into Wright’s vaults of drawings and independently studying them in order to learn something. Wright wasn’t about to start giving lectures and forming classes because that was the approach to education he very publicly reviled. In the book, you conclude that ‘the Fellowship did a better job of making architecture than of making architects.’ How so? Zellman: Many detected early on there was no opportunity for upward mobility. The highest rank you could expect to achieve was something called senior apprentice. Our conclusion after interviewing a lot of these people is that if you had any kind of strong sense of yourself and were looking for your own voice as an architect, there was no room for you there. There were several people, Fay Jones is a good example, who figured it out right away. He left within three months, and went on to an important career. However, many stayed long periods of time. Not everyone had huge ambitions. Many felt honored to be in Wright’s presence and to be serving this larger purpose. From their point of view, as they told us, they could be out in the world and doing mediocre, unimportant things or they could be devoting their life to what they considered to be this extraordinary architect. How did the Fellowship fit into Wright’s grander vision of restructuring American society? Zellman: Wright had an idea that pretty much developed around the same time as the Fellowship, a scheme for decentralizing America. He was very hostile toward the modern industrial city and, of course, it’s well-known how he was partial to the relationship of architecture and nature. He saw the city as alienating citizens from nature, among other things. He, like many others, was critical of the impact of industrialization—traffic, pollution–all those things we still really haven’t figured out how to deal with. Out of this critique of the industrial city, Wright came up with this alternative pattern of settlement called Broadacre City, essentially a network of relatively small villages connected by rail and highways. Ultimately, his dream was that cities would disappear. At the same time he was forming the Fellowship he wrote a book called ‘The Disappearing City,’ and he meant that quite literally. It was his hope that New York and Chicago and all these American cities would completely disappear and be replaced by a network of small, close to nature, village-like communities which, not coincidentally, were to be governed by architects. He saw the Fellowship as a seed people could replicate. This would be the method by which these Broadacre Cities would emerge. Did you set out to knock the mythical Wright slightly off his pedestal by unearthing more of his dark side? Zellman: We didn’t set out to do anything like that. The logic is almost the reverse. It isn’t so much what we did, but how other people treated him who have done research. The Wright bibliography is enormous. Architectural historians have tended to focus on, as they should, the architecture. There’s also been a number of pure biographies over the years, many fine ones, such as Brendan Gill’s ‘Many Masks,’ that started to move in the direction of demystifying Wright. Essentially, we just went where the information took us. One of the biggest advantages was that we weren’t writing a full-life biography, so it allowed us to dig a little deeper into this part of his life. We made a commitment to write the book and portray Wright as we understood him from our sources. If there were any marching orders we gave ourselves, it was not to use genius as a sort of rationalization for his behavior, as many of his followers tended to do. If he did horrible things to somebody, he did horrible things to somebody. In the end, people are pretty shocked by what they’ve read. It’s what we learned. Do you mind that some reviews have focused on the more sensational aspects of the book, in particular the chapter entitled ‘The Sex Clubs?’ Zellman: Aspects of sexuality that appear in the book are essential aspects of the Fellowship. It’s in no way gratuitous. This was an insular place, a world unto itself in which all satisfactions were to be found within. It’s evident in the structure and organization of the place, one that was predominately male, that there was a problem of sexuality. Olgivanna set about to solve or at least control it. Early on–and this is one of the most shocking aspects of the book to most people–she tried to encourage a certain amount of homosexuality at the Fellowship. She understood that if people didn’t find sexual release, they wouldn’t stay. It wasn’t that gay men joined disproportionately, but they stayed disproportionately, often rising to the ranks of the inner circle. Olgivanna also encouraged married women to spread themselves around in order to deal with the gender imbalance. You might say it was an experiment within an experiment. She had a problem and sought to solve it. But there was huge price paid. How did you manage to take years of scholarly research and cast it in the form of a compelling narrative? Zellman: That was the charge and that’s what we wanted to do. We didn’t want to write a book that was only of interest to scholars. It’s really an exercise in storytelling. We wanted to give a visceral sense of what it was like to be with Frank Lloyd Wright and in his world, to create an intimacy between people and the day-to-day life of the Fellowship. We also wanted to bring out of the shadows of history books these people who had devoted their lives to Wright, to give them a voice.