Found: Taliesin, Spring Green, WI

Found: Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin. Wisconsin office of Taliesin Associated Architects, and campus of the
 Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, established in 1932 by Mr. and Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright.
Copyright Taliesin® The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.
Photograph by (Taliesin apprentice) John Amarantides. Circa 1970s

Found: WINGSPREAD, Racine, Wisconsin. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Pub. by Joboul Publishing Co., Inc., Evanston, Illinois.
Made by Dexter Press, West Nyack, New York. Circa 1970s.

Sometimes hidden in the trees, buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright haunt the landscape of Wisconsin. Taliesin holds forth in Spring Green offering guided tours while the Annuciation Greek Orthodox Church hovers in Milwaukee offering a futuristic spiritual retreat. Racine is graced with the Johnson Wax headquarters and Wingspread both commissioned by Herbert Fisk Johnson, Jr. about 1938-39. Family continues to run the company, but Johnson's house, Wingspread, was donated to the The Johnson Foundation twenty years later in 1959 for use as an international conference center emphasizing causes related to water, health, and community.

Found: The House on the Rock, Spring Green, WI

Found: "The House on the Rock at Spring Green, Wisconsin on Highway 23, North of Dodgeville, Wisconsin" copyright The L.L. Cook. Co., Milwaukee, Wisconsin from Ektachrome Transparency, circa 1965

Less than seven miles from Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin in Spring Green hovers a spectaclar manifestation of hording, imaginative architectural design backed with an astute ability to appeal to public curiosity. Wisconsin Dells is not far away nor is Cave of the Mounds. Tourist pamphlets didn't prepare us for the sensory overload that is The House on the Rock. More proof positive what isolation, time, and money can produce in Wisconsin. Built on "Deer Shelter Rock" by Alex Jordan, Jr. in the 1940s, this maze of rooms and objects wasn't originally intended as the sort of tourist attraction it has beomce with inn, spa, golf course and tour packages. Plunk down the $28.50 and try to power through it. After an intense darkly mysterious 3 hours of gawking, strolling, striding, and absorbing, we were expelled back into the bright light of Wisconsin on a summer afternoon.  Inside, the eerie pneumatic 35 piece orchestra of stringed and percussion instruments (from sitars to cellos) was topped by the surreal installation of an immense and swirling carousel with topless winged women peppered throughout. Back then, disposable cameras and rolls of 35 mm film were vended near the carousel to satisfy the overwhelming urge to document the intensity photographically. At the core of the house is a carpeted dank lounge/pit where Jordan is said to have sipped Tom Collins and read books. A stream of nosy tourists pushed him to start charging to look around the place. He applied the income to acquiring and expanding his home and collection over time. The house sprawls to display collections of eccentric and associative objects from dolls to steam locomotives to pipe organs. "Despite the globe-trotting aura of the collection, Jordan hated to travel and never left the country. He died in 1989, at age 75," wrote Roadsideamerica. Alex's world makes a great exotic location to stage your next wedding or a Halloween party...

Author Neil Gaiman, who  lives near Menomine, Wisconsin, appeared at the 
The Gathering of American Gods Costume Party  at HoTR, 10.29.2012.. Video by EvilWylie.

NOTE: Thanks to Professor Ed Kern, our Lawrence University colleague, for the tip on Neil Gaiman's references to the House on the Rock in American Gods.

Frank Lloyd Wright Trip, Spring Green, WI

Taliesin Tour, Spring Green, Wisconsin, May 12, 2012

Taliesin Texting Girl, Spring Green, Wisconsin, May 12, 2012

 Wisconsin native artist/architect Frank Lloyd Wright kept his roots deeply planted in his home state throughout his life. Wisconsin held meaning and memories. "I wished to be part of my beloved southern Wisconsin," he wrote in An Autobiography published in 1932. Mired in controversy, he built his home/studio/farm at age 44, Taliesin in Spring Green, as a refuge after practicing architecture in Chicago and traveling for a couple decades. He waxes poetic describing his connection to place:

 "As a boy I had learned to know the ground-plan of the region in every line and feature. For me now its elevation is the modeling of the hills, the weaving and the fabric that clings to them, the look of it all in tender green or covered with snow or in full glow of summer that bursts into the glorious blaze of autumn. I still feel myself as much a part of it as the trees and birds and bees are, and the red barns. Or as the animals are, for that matter." (167)

Far from tranquil, the completed Taliesin attracted melodrama from murder to fire (see Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders by William Drennan, 2007). "Three times built, twice destroyed, yet a place of great repose" (368) wrote Wright.  Undaunted, he did not flee as so many other Wisconsin-born artists had from Liberace to to Georgia O'Keeffe. He remained passionate: "The landscsape itself changes outside the windows as the sea changes, only these valley changes are more immutable than the sea, I think." (370)

Wisconsin embraced Wright with important buildings still preserved including Taliesin in Spring Green, Racine (S.C. Johnson Wax), Wauwatosa (Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church), and residences such as the Bernard Schwartz House in Two Rivers. His legacy lingers on as never built buildings--Monona Terrace--are built and architectural homages appear.

Still the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright may not hold the allure for today's young artist's living in a world of texts and posts though sitting on the ridge of eternity.