SPRING GREEN, Wi — Outside of private tours, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin estate in Spring Green isn’t often accessible to the public. The estate opened its gates for their annual free tours on Sunday, opening a world of nature and architecture.
Wright’s Welsh ancestors originally settled on the land that is present day Taliesin, which translates to Radiant brow in Welsh. He spent his childhood on the estate, often hiding on top of a hill to avoid farming. When he inherited 800 acres of the land in 1911, built his home on the brow of that hill, molding the home into the hillside, practicing his theory of organic architecture.
“He framed the surrounding landscape with tons of windows to join outside and in so his design would integrate with nature, and he repeatedly played with traditional understandings of space, constantly breaking the box, to replicate nature’s organic forms,” said Elizabeth Maske, Communications Coordinator for the Taliesin Preservation.
He used sand from the Wisconsin River and wood from surrounding oaks to construct the property making it one with the land his ancestors settled on. Today, the land is operated by the Taliesin Preservation, who saved it from near ruins in the 1990s, and continue Wright’s legacy with an architecture fellowship.
Maske added, “Taliesin sits on the brow of a beloved boyhood hill where Wright often took refuge from the drudgery of farm work, he placed it on the brow of the hill to preserve the hill, in line with his theory for organic architecture”.
To this day, a 92-year-old woman who worked for Wright for a decade still lives on the land that was named one of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites in 2019.
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