taliesin

Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wisconsin, was Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio, which he began in 1911 after returning from work and study abroad. He had built a home in the Oak Park suburb of Chicago--while working with Louis Sullivan--for himself and his wife, Catherine Lee Tobin, and their 6 children, but left his family for Europe, and when he returned, it was to the valley where he spent his childhood summers on his Uncle James's farm, to build Taliesin.

He lived at Taliesin with a woman he'd met and fallen in love with at Oak Park, Mamah Cheney, but a servant, unhappy with the arrangements at the home, started a fire which destroyed part of the home and killed Mamah Cheney, her two children, and four other people, in 1914. Wright however chose to rebuild Taliesin.

In 1924, Wright married for the second time, to sculptress, Miriam Noel.

In 1924, Wright met Olga Lazovich Hinzenberg... whom, of course, he later married, in 1928, the year after divorcing Noel. In 1925, another fire, this one caused by electrical wiring, burned Taliesin. And again, Wright rebuilt. Taliesin III, with wife number three. 1927 was also the year Wright built a small desert camp called Ocatillo, as a low cost living and studio arrangement, during the design and construction of the Arizona Biltmore Hotel. Ocatillo eventually grew and came to be know as Taliesin West.