A Modern Architect in Connecticut:
1948-1962
“I was well primed for excitement when I discovered the work of Frank Lloyd Wright in my freshman year in architectural college. I caught fire. It seemed that this was what I had been unconsciously seeking. His lofty ideals of beauty and honesty, his sense of the interrelatedness of architecture with every other part of life, his concept of developing a building as an analogy to natural growth, his love of the land, and their embodiment in his extraordinary buildings became the focus of my aspirations and have remained a vital element ever since.
The years at Taliesin immersed me in a totally creative environment where everyone contributed in many ways. Building went on all the time; so did music, theater, cooking, and gardening. It was an exhilarating time and the Taliesin ideal of a balanced life lived in a beautiful environment is with me still.
As is often the case in life, the legacy had its downside: In their effort to impart to their children an enduring high mindedness, my parents left us ill equipped to cope with the far lower level of human aspiration we would later encounter. Likewise, at Taliesin, despite Mrs. Wright’s proclaimed opinion that Taliesin young men and women were trained to go out into the world fitted for everything, for me, and I suspect for some others, the experience was not helpful later in dealing with the realities of the marketplace or the failures of common culture. Taliesin was a utopian society with no counterpart in the outside world. It was up to the world to come to “us.” It was not our role to seek them out. This was OK for Mr. Wright personally; he had earned this prerogative. For budding young architects this attitude could prove self-defeating.
In fairness, however, it should be said that Wright normally placed apprentices on rotating duty as construction supervisors in the field and this, when carried out, provided some of that needed experience in coping with the commercial jungle. In my case, World War II intervened before my time.”
Robert Carroll May quoted from A Taliesin Legacy: The Architecture of the Apprentices of Frank Lloyd Wright by Tobias Guggenheimer.
The years at Taliesin immersed me in a totally creative environment where everyone contributed in many ways. Building went on all the time; so did music, theater, cooking, and gardening. It was an exhilarating time and the Taliesin ideal of a balanced life lived in a beautiful environment is with me still.
As is often the case in life, the legacy had its downside: In their effort to impart to their children an enduring high mindedness, my parents left us ill equipped to cope with the far lower level of human aspiration we would later encounter. Likewise, at Taliesin, despite Mrs. Wright’s proclaimed opinion that Taliesin young men and women were trained to go out into the world fitted for everything, for me, and I suspect for some others, the experience was not helpful later in dealing with the realities of the marketplace or the failures of common culture. Taliesin was a utopian society with no counterpart in the outside world. It was up to the world to come to “us.” It was not our role to seek them out. This was OK for Mr. Wright personally; he had earned this prerogative. For budding young architects this attitude could prove self-defeating.
In fairness, however, it should be said that Wright normally placed apprentices on rotating duty as construction supervisors in the field and this, when carried out, provided some of that needed experience in coping with the commercial jungle. In my case, World War II intervened before my time.”
Robert Carroll May quoted from A Taliesin Legacy: The Architecture of the Apprentices of Frank Lloyd Wright by Tobias Guggenheimer.