master storyteller and fllw expert

I had been studying the life and work of Frank Lloyd Wright for more than twenty five years before I finally booked a trip to Wisconsin to visit Wright's own house.  In that span, I'd read hundreds of books, visited more than a dozen public Wright sites, and shared my storytelling sessions with thousands of interested guests.  But I hadn't yet made "the pilgrimage" to see where the work was created and how the master architect himself lived.

It's important to understand that while Wright wanted, sometimes desperately, to create large public designs, he was primarily an architect of houses.  His work shaped the way his clients lived their lives and, by way of his own notoriety and through the Taliesin Fellowship, influenced the way other architects designed homes across the country and for years to come.  Seeing how he himself lived seemed vitally important to understanding how he crafted the designs that changed so much of how we live in this country.

Getting to Wright's Wisconsin home is not easy.  The closest airport is Madison, but even for a larger city, the flights are seldom direct and - at least at the time - only a few airlines serviced the state's capital.  Once in my rental car, I immediately sought out the Unitarian Meeting House.  It was the closest Wright I could tour before driving the hourlong rural path through the tall hills and lush valleys to Taliesin just outside of tiny Spring Green, Wisconsin.  The Meeting House was magnificent, living up to all the photos and stories about it's amazing construction by the members of the church, but it was really only a preview of what I'd waited too long to experience.

I arrived in Spring Green later in the day than I had originally planned.  I'll confess, I'd taken two stops in Madison to see each of the two houses that Herbert & Catherine Jacobs had commissioned Wright to design for them.  The Jacobs I, as it's called, is on a residential street, which explains why Wright chose to put very few windows at the front and turn the house toward the back yard.  The other house, obviously called Jacobs II, was more rural and almost impossible to see with the landscaping.  The current owners have had to erect a small sign reminding visitors that they are at a private residence and that trespassing on their property is illegal.  Fortunately, I was able to visit the house again years later as part of a "Wright in Wisconsin" tour, for which the owners graciously opened their home and gardens.

Spring Green is a quaint little town; the "welcome" sign on the highway boasts some 800 residents.  Laid out in an easy grid, the tiny downtown boasts three designs by Taliesin Associated Architects, including a bank, the bank's former drive-thru that is now an unusual residence, and a lovely church.  There are also cute shops, simple local restaurants, and wide streets that just beg residents to walk and bike to the nearby community grocery store or the baseball fields.  

Sadly, most of the restaurants were closed by the time I arrived, so I enjoyed a quick drive through the area then hightailed it to the local Culver's, a Wisconsin-based fast food chain famous for butter burgers and frozen custard!  I hauled my respectable meal - if a burger, fried cheese curds, and a "concrete mixer" made with frozen custard and Heath bar pieces can be considered respectable - over to the Usonian Inn, a local motel with a distinctly organic flair.  Comprising about a dozen rooms, the roadside motel was designed in 1948 by J.C. Caraway, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright.  The inspiration from Wright's Usonian building style was a great way to begin my immersion into Wright's own world of architecture.

Being a native Floridian, I wasn't ready for the crisp morning - even in the summer - and the amount of fog that would greet me as I made my way out the door of my comfortable room.  Too excited to sleep in, I was definitely up and out before most other visitors to the sleepy area, which meant my trip over to Taliesin was on clear roads; I felt like the only person heading to Taliesin that day!  As I neared the bridge over the Wisconsin river, I got chills.  Not just from remembering the story of Wright's stepdaughter, Svetlana, dying in a flood that pushed her car off of a bridge and into a local river, but also because I could see the roof of the Riverview Terrace Cafe and Visitor's Center perched over the shoreline.

Most guests would make a beeline for that location, but I had three stops I had to make to pay homage to the legendary architect.  First, I pulled over just after the visitor's center to peer up the hill to the main house, Taliesin.  With the early morning light behind me and the fog blanketing the valley, the sparkling house seemed to float over the hills rather than be connected to them.  Wright's playfulness was on full display as the house is partially hidden behind trees and other landscaping, the roofline and the jutting birdwalk piercing most noticeably through the foliage.  I stood on the side of that road for far too long, annoying the few drivers who had to be careful not to get too close to my rental car, which I'd just barely gotten off the roadway.

My need to see Taliesin in person wasn't quenched, but I'd had a big enough sip to tide me over until my up close tour later that day.  I drove down the country road further to the entrance of the Hillside Home School.  This was, for springs and summers, the home of the Taliesin Fellowship for so many years.  Standing next to my car, which this time I'd been able to pull into a driveway, I marveled at the way the building reminded me of other Wright projects but how much it fit the landscape of this "driftless area" of Central Wisconsin.  

My last stop was at Wright's first building, the small family chapel that the Lloyd Jones clan had commissioned from Joseph Silsbee and for which a teenage Wright was credited as devising the interiors.  It was next to this small chapel where Wright was interred just a few months short of his 92nd birthday, when a complication from surgery for a bowel obstruction took his life in 1959.  Wright's resting place, surrounded by numerous graves of his closest associates, is of course the showiest of them, with a leaded glass ornament and a large natural rock upended at the head of his grave to mark the place where a great architect was buried.  Standing in that small family gravesite, surrounded by the man's friends and family (including the mistress, Mamah, who was murdered by a crazed servant and laid to rest at the base of a large tree just 20 feet from Wright's eventual grave), I felt a connection to the man I had somehow not felt before.  

By coming to his home, and also his grave, I'd also brought my own relationship with his work and life "home".  At that moment, and at several others as I toured the amazing home on the hill, something 'clicked' inside me.  I can't describe it any other way, but I know that during that visit, my fascination turned to a stronger respect, and, in some strange way, a love.  Love not just for what he accomplished - because there is enough to let you overlook his personal life - but also a love for who he was.  A love for the people and world that shaped him and a love for the home he created for himself and the people that he himself loved.  

Finally, the man who I loved to tell funny stories about and whose work I admired in a geometric and abstract way became suddenly and fully real for me.  Sitting in his living room and listening to an interpreter describe Wright playing piano not five feet from my seat while I looked out at the expansive Wisconsin landscape beyond, I understood the man and his love of nature in a way I hadn't before.  That moment changed everything for me.  And the limited spotty cellphone coverage and getting stuck behind tractors on that two-lane hourlong trip out to Spring Green are small prices to pay to feel that way again and again.