Taliesin

Frank built his house anyway, and it was gorgeous.

He named it Taliesin.

It was a kind of refuge at the time.

I was getting a worm's-eye view of society and needed to get into the country, and my mother had prepared this site for me and asked me to come and take it, and I did.

And Talyerson is built like a brow on the edge of the hill, not on top of the hill, because I believe you should never build on top of anything directly.

If you build on top of the hill, you lose the hill.

Frank and Mamaw lived comfortably in Taliesin, as he was with his first house, the one he had built for his family with Catherine.

Frank was always futzing with the new one, too.

Well, he did after they came back from Japan.

They were with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin, and then they went to Japan and had a house in Japan.

And then I think in 1938, they realized the war was coming and came back.

They couldn't come back directly from Japan, so they came back by way of Europe.

And the couple, the Hagans, met him.

They went to his Taliesin home several times.

They met him to go over the plans because he never went there except for that one time.

So it's really an incredibly fascinating house.

I think initially we were in different, different classes and different sides of the studio.

There's like a East or North and South or East and West.

I can't remember.

And we were in opposite sides and in opposite classes.

Yeah, and I remember Blue Sky Architects.

I set out to go and apply for a job at their studio, which is in their house in West Vancouver.

I remember taking the bus from Eastbound downtown, changing buses, changing buses, walking, and I got to the cul-de-sac and I just turned around.

I couldn't imagine trying to do that every day.

So it's really, really a nice place.

And for some of your guests who are into architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright made his house here, Taliesin.

So about two miles down the road is his, well, I call it a gigantic campus, Taliesin.

So he has his house there.

It's very famous, the world famous architect who built, you know, places all over, uh, the UK.

Uh, so it's not the greatest, but it's very, very strange.

And again, it comes back to, I always think where I live as kind of magical, and it always has this magical feeling to it.

And there, Taliesin, where Frank Lloyd Wright lives, is haunted by his family and by Frank Lloyd Wright.

When they, uh, first begin corresponding in earnest, it's in response to an invitation that Wright has extended to O'Keeffe.

He is starting, uh, what, what he's calling his Taliesin Fellowship at his, his studio school in Wisconsin, and he invites O'Keeffe to relocate to, uh, to Taliesin in Wisconsin, where he and his students will design and build a studio for her to work.

And she'll be involved with the, uh, the artistic and architectural communities around Taliesin.

But the, uh, the letter that I quote from in the catalog essay comes from a visit that O'Keeffe made to Taliesin in 1942 as part of the, as part of the, the long conversation, discussion they had about his invitation for her to join him.

And on that visit, Wright gifted to O'Keeffe an annotated and underlined copy of his, his 1939 book, An Organic Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy.

And O'Keeffe is thinking about her visit in Taliesin while she, uh, rides the train back from, from Wisconsin to New York.

And she reads the lectures that are compiled in that book and says to Wright that as she's reading through, she stops often to think about it, always relating what you give me, what Wright gives in his, in his lectures, to what I want to do, to what O'Keeffe wants to accomplish in her paintings.

And that was a moment in the archives when a light bulb really lit up, where O'Keeffe is articulating this point of intellectual continuity between Wright's theories of architecture in the, the 1930s and '40s and O'Keeffe's paintings of the same moment.

And then we went to Frank Lloyd Wright's place.

Taliesin? Yes.

And we got the official tour.

But then he told us where all the murders happened.

is.

I'm pretty sure it's Springfield.

And I think that's where Taliesin is as well,

right? Yes.