Frank Lloyd Wright has been canonized as America's greatest architect - the man who gave us the Guggenheim Museum, and dozens of other 19th and 20th century American architectural landmarks. The scandals of his early life - including his multiple marriages and the bizarre axe murder of his third wife and family by an outraged servant in 1914 - have long since become the stuff of legend. Yet by far the most bizarre, prolonged, and fascinating period of Wright's prodigious career - from 1932 through the end of his life in 1959 - involved his founding and stewardship of the Taliesin Fellowship in Spring Green, Wisconsin a kind of academy-cum-architectural-firm-cum-communal living foundation he created together with his third wife, Olgivanna. A devotee and former lover of the legendary mystic Georgi Gurdjieff, Olgivanna Wright saw Taliesin as a potential American outpost for Gurdjieff in the United States; Wright saw it as a kind of miniature society in which he could play feudal lord - dressing his young and willing apprentices in matching uniforms, demanding that they perform endless physical labour, even intruding into their personal lives in unexpected and sometimes alarming ways. Wracked by dissent, almost constantly bankrupt, the facility nevertheless became the seedbed of some of Wright's most impressive projects - from the innovative Johnson Wax building to the unforgettable Fallingwater. After his death, Wright's widow and remaining apprentices quietly conspired to preserve secrecy about the dark side of Taliesin. Now, in "The Fellowship", sociologist Roger Friedland and architect Harold Zellman have persuaded dozens of former apprentices - and Wright's remaining daughter, long out of the public spotlight - to reveal the truth. The result is a twisted and haunting tale of genius and ego, mysticism and chariatanism, violence, deep sexual dysfunction, and more - a magisterial work of biography, one that will forever change how we think about Frank Lloyd Wright.
The Fellowship
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle.
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Few architects have gained the level of professional achievement and popular notoriety of Frank Lloyd Wright, who's as famed for his bullheadedness, abuse of underlings, condescension to his clients and his numerous wives as he is for his indisputable masterpieces of American architecture. In their biography, Friedland and Zellman skim over the typical historiography and gleefully delve into Wright's secrets and scandals, focusing on the cultish atmosphere, the mystical teachings and especially, the sexual indiscretions at Taliesin, his studio-commune where he commanded a near-messianic following. There are no major revelations, but the narrative is riveting, endowing its historical characters with all the drama of contemporary tabloid celebrities. However, heavy reliance on the dusty and probably skewed memories of interviewees produces some anecdotes that sound more like exaggerated cocktail gossip than historic fact. Occasionally, the authors use awkward psychoanalysis to account for Wright's architectural practices, such as interpreting his prairie houses' lack of basements or attics as an attempt to erase the painful memories he suffered in those spaces as a child. While the book may appeal to those more curious about the man than his achievements, readers may find the focus on all the indiscretions at Taliesin underwhelming. (Sept. 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Whatever visionary brilliance Frank Lloyd Wright possessed as an architect did not extend to his talent for structural engineering, nor, as this often-searing account shows, did he succeed at engineering human lives and souls. Wright was famously individualistic, stubborn, and egotistical. But that's only the beginning of the epic soap opera that roiled around him as Wright extended his franchise to two cultlike, communal encampments, in Wisconsin and Arizona, known as Taliesin (Welsh for "shining brow"). Aspiring architects, designers, and cultural misfits flocked to Wright, apprenticing more often as manual laborers than as draftsmen or creators. Wright's imperious style was matched by that of his third wife, Olgivanna, a disciple of George Gurdjieff, the Russian mystic whose sense of the spiritual content of cosmic forces echoed Wright's belief in the transformative power of nature. Friedland and Zellman's long but absorbing book paints an uneasy history of Taliesin, involving problematic sexual relationships, tax collectors, prima donnas, draft resisters, dancing angels, long-suffering clients, parental malpractice, and, not least, in its role as training ground, an astounding record of failure. Steve Paul
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Authors
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
57 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What Was That About The Dark Side Of Genius ... ?,
By
This review is from: The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship (Hardcover)
For years I have been devoted to Frank Lloyd Wright, seeking out his buildings and reading all I could get my hands on about his life and work. His one-of-a-kind genus created a body of work which has lost none of its power. For me that power holds a nostalgia, too, for an era we will never see again, a time when cheap labor and an architect's take-no-prisoners charisma could get astonishing structures erected. Those elegant Usonian homes from the 1940s do make me pine for an era of cheaper materials and fewer code restrictions. One can read the histories of his structures and grow dewey-eyed: To think there was a time when one could build a house for $5,000, and have that house be an exquisite cedar and brick jewel box, sited magnifiecntly on a bluff with a glorious view of the valley below -- in very short order proclaimed a masterpiece -- !
But so much of the canonical Wright literature is hagiography. This book is anything but. Its first pages, for instance, rip away the veil of obscurity regarding Iovanna, Wright's & Olgivanna's child, who was still living when then the authors began the project. Until I read these passages, it had not occured to me that the woman was mysteriously absent from what I read about Wright and the Fellowship. The authors tracked her down to a mental institution. There is clearly a tragedy surrounding her, one that the keeper's of Wright's legacy have ... hidden? avoided? dismissed? She seems lucid enough when the authors talk to her. It is sad of course to have one's heroes diminshed. Wright does not come off well in this book. His and Olgivanna's antagonistic relationship is fully exposed. And she in particular seems an absolute horror. Perhaps I am unrealistically devoted to the ideal of independence of the human creative spirit, but I found the evidence of her meddling in the lives of the people around her to be appalling stuff. Wright's pettiness also had me confounded. Frequently his behavior was downright childish. Towards the end of the book a good case is made for a strong history of manic-depression on both Wright's and his Olginanna's part, and certainly so in the case of their only child. This book is filled with background on Gurdjieff In previous books his influence on the Fellowship has been alluded to but never has it been discussed in such detail. I found much of the detail to make for tedious reading however; I decided immediately Gurdjieff to be the very epitome of the Cult Of Gobbledygook (as such, a perfect foil for Wright himself -- did you ever try to read HIS writing??). I must confess that as much as I love Wright's architecture and will continue to seek it out as well as the buildings designed by his apprentices, it is a bit of a relief to read it is not ALL regarded as masterwork. There are 2 books available covering the work of Wright's apprentices (Tobias Guggenheimer's "A Taliesin Legacy" and the official Taliesin Assosciate Architect's coffee-table style "A Living Architecture") and in each are examples of dubious architectural achievement. Of course architecture is a 3-dimensional experience and should not be judged by photographs alone. Wright, like any architect, had his share of the not-quite-beautiful. Wright built over 400 structures in his 72 year career, so seeming aesthetic missteps were inevitable. Maybe not everyone would agree what's on that list... but, is it just me or is Pfeiffer Chapel at Florida Southern College ugly? Five years ago I made my first trip to Taliesin West, something I had been looking forward to for years. Indeed it was, and will continue to be, stunning. The aura of one person encompassing so many others, and in such an extensive built environment springing from that one mind, with little precedent, is humbling. But even then I got a spooky feeling from that Taliesin Fellowship, listening to grown apprentices or the children thereof give out tour-guide reminiscences, worshipful and rather too rehearsed. I knew then that being a Taliesin apprentice couldn't have been all that great ... and this book confirms my apprehensions vividly.
33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Essential Book,
By
This review is from: The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship (Hardcover)
This is one of the most engaging non-fiction books I've read in the last few years. The reviewer who said that it combines the joys of People magazine and scholarship definitely has a point. The story of Wright's fellowship is wonderfully peculiar, amazing, and sad. I came to the book with some knowledge of Wright (I've been to both Taliesins and have visited a number of his other buildings) and a strong interest in 20th century American cultural history. But Wright's always been a puzzle. He was a great genius, but his roofs leaked. His architecture (to me, anyway) is infinitely more appealing than that of the International Style, but somehow became an also-ran. No strong proteges ever emerged to carry the torch.
This book certainly provides many clues to the puzzles of Wright. For one thing, it places him in the context of his culture. For example, I had no idea of the strong influence the occultist Georgi Gurdjieff had on Wright and especially his wife Olgivanna. And while I'd always heard that Taliesen was something of a "cult of personality," well, it was more than that -- it was pretty much a cult in the literal sense. Wright and his family occupied an almost godly position, and the "apprentices" slaved away uncompensated and bent to the Wright's every whim or were asked to leave. One negative review complained that contradictory descriptons of Wright's behavior indicate that that the book is full of falsehoods. I take the opposite tack. I think the book draws a very believable portrait of a contradictory man. Wright is shown as a homophobe who nonetheless tolerated and treasured numerous homosexuals in his inner circle and an anti-Semite with many Jewish followers. Both are quite believable, partly because Wright had no interest in (and was not capable of) being consistent and because both prejudices were absolutely normal in early and mid-century America. I also have little trouble understanding that the great champion of a Democratic architecture could be at times both a fascist and communist sympathizer. He was a great elitist, and the sort of thinker who elevates Mankind in the abstract but has little sympathy for ordinary humans. It's fun and illuminating to see Wright and Olgivanna take the measure of other 20th century luminaries -- Olgivanna dismissed "Atlas Shrugged" as "slush." And it's also fun to see how Wright, a stunningly imperious soul, could be intimidated by other even more imperious types -- especially if they were connected to money. In truth, Wright emerges from this book as something of a monster, or as Gurdjieff put it, "an idiot." But anyone who knows anything about Wright's life already suspected that. What redeems him is the fact that he really was a genius, just as he always insisted.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the whole story,
By Bill Patrick "architect" (woodside, ca) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship (Hardcover)
Like many former apprentices I learned much more about Olgivanna
than I knew from my own contact during the time I was apprenticed at Taliesin. It never occurred to me that she was indeed cruel--I just thought she was FLLW's means to keep himself free of the logistics of housekeeping. He never expressed much liking for the mystic Gurjieff, and Olgivanna set up the school following Wright's death which spelled the demise of Wright's ideas in favor of the mystic. I am sorry that the existing remnants of the Fellowship at Taliesin seem to have prevailed in denying this exposition. The idolization of Olgivanna persists! The book reveals it all and is a great read! Bill Patrick
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
