Dear Members of the Board,
With the announcement of the departure of Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s President Stuart Graff, the Foundation faces a new era. As someone who had the privilege and pleasure of living at Taliesin (in Spring Green, Wisconsin) and Taliesin West (in Scottsdale, Arizona) for five years as I led what was first the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture and then the School of Architecture at Taliesin, I would like to provide a few suggestions for the Board to consider as it looks toward its future.
First, my interpretation (as well as that of many others) of Wright’s will is that the Foundation was set up explicitly to enable the peculiar combination of training program and practice for which Wright and his apprentices built most of the facilities at Taliesin and all of Taliesin West. Over time, that entity split into an architecture practice and an accredited school of architecture. The former petered out and closed, while the latter kept going but largely lost the Foundation’s interest and support. In 2020, after I resigned as its head, “the Foundation and the School were able to resolve their differences and reach an agreement in their mutual best interests and wish each other success in their respective future endeavors,” according to the agreement. The School had to leave its home at Taliesin West. The Foundation then refused to let it use the Wright or Taliesin name or any logos or symbols. Today Taliesin and Taliesin West are empty shells whose primary purposes are to be house museums. Admirably, the School continues to operate a few miles from Taliesin West.
Wright and his widow, Ogilvanna Wright, abhorred the idea of such preserved tourist sites—a repulsion I personally share. They saw the Fellowship, as the combination school and practice was called, as a living entity that was the heart and soul of the physical sites between which it migrated twice a year. The Foundation was the legal entity meant to ensure that active legacy.
My advice to the Foundation Board would be to immediately bring back the School, give it back the ability to use the Wright brands and names, and help it grow and thrive. There is a practical side to this suggestion. Even when the School was at a minimal size, it provided several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of support to the Foundation’s extensive and highly paid staff and operations. It also made Taliesin and Taliesin West into living communities that were highly attractive to the sites’ tens of thousands of annual visitors. In its absence, the places are, again in my opinion, empty and barren.
I believe that Wright’s vision could be honored and continued by thinking of the School as what any good and experimental graduate program in architecture should be: a place that is not only a site for high-level education, but also a research laboratory for the future of our designed environment. That is certainly how Wright treated it when he produced projects such as his “Usonian” vision of sprawl there. Integral to the School have been extensive lecture programs that have brought some of the best practitioners and theoreticians there, which is easy to do because of the sites’ attraction. The monthly social events that brought community members onto the property for meals cooked and served by students and faculty added to the function. These forms of research, development, and outreach could and should be formalized and strengthened.
As the School is small, the Foundation should look to partner with other educational institutions. While local universities such as the University of Wisconsin and Arizona State have not been very helpful in the past, there are many other institutions with which it could partner. The Foundation could also look beyond the current definition of architecture that has been stripped of many of areas Wright pursued, such as landscape, graphic, and furniture design, as well as agriculture, theater, and film, to extend the School’s activities in new ways. In Wisconsin in particular, the relationship with the strong organic farming tradition and culinary experiments of the Driftless Region in which Taliesin is located suggest a strong potential for integration of the facility’s eight hundred-odd acre site and its programs.
In order to do this, the Foundation should relax its overly restrictive policy on the use of Wright’s name and logos by the School. This would be more fitting for the history of Wright’s vision instead of endorsing the manufacture vent grilles or faucets with neo-Wrightian details or sneakers inspired by Wright’s Broadacre City.
The Foundation also needs to abandon its efforts to set the sites in amber. The currently goal of returning the properties to the state in which they were on the day when Wright died in 1959 are based on outmoded ideas of historic preservation and ignore the ways in which both Taliesin and Taliesin West continued to evolve and change–and should continue to do so—both during and after Wright’s life.
Finally, the Foundation should act as a responsible, open member of the larger communities of which it is part. These include not only the Frank Lloyd Wright ecosystem, with components as the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust in Chicago, the various other historic properties, and the archives the Foundation sold to Columbia University and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but also the larger world of architecture, the more nebulous terrain of intentional communities, and the local communities in Spring Green and Phoenix. The Foundation should be a participant, sometime convener, and thought leader.
Taliesin and Taliesin West are amazing sites. Frank Lloyd Wright’s legacy in buildings and thought is extensive and productive of new ways of understanding how we might make a more sustainable and beautiful environment. As trustees of these sites and legacies, the Foundation should focus not on policing and exploiting memory, but on fostering what Frank Lloyd Wright and his many collaborators made possible.
Aaron Betsky is a visiting professor at the Michael Graves School of Public Architecture and a critic living in Philadelphia. He served as the dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture and then the School of Architecture at Taliesin from 2015 to 2020.
