It is not the best known construction of Frank Lloyd Wright (Wisconsin, USA, 1867-1959), but perhaps it is the one that says the most about the evolution of his work. The architect started in 1897 Taliesin, the farm where he would build his own house, his studio and his school of architecture, and continued to make changes and modifications until the same year of his death, in 1959. Built in the mountains of Wisconsin, the architect gave it the name of a Welsh poet in honor of his maternal family, who came from there, but for a time the house, which has 524 windows but no gutters because Wright liked icicles to form in winter, was a cause for scandal and became known in the press as "the farm of love" and "the castle of love." Later, its legend became much blacker, when it became the scene of the so-called "Taliesin massacre". But to get there, you must first begin to unravel the entire hectic love life of the architect, who was married four times and had seven children.
Wright married young, at only 22 years old, to his first wife, Catherine Lee Tobin, Kitty , who was 18. It was 1889 and the architect's controlling mother, Anna Lloyd Jones, who used to say that she had already decided on the future career of her son before he was born, opposed that wedding. She moved, along with her two unmarried daughters, to the house next to that of the couple, who began to father children without pause. They had six in 13 years: Frank Jr., John, Catherine, David, Frances, and Robert.
Even though she already had her hands full with her six young children, Kitty established a nursery for the neighbors' children in her backyard and introduced new educational methods. They used to play with colored papers and wooden cubes and make Japanese-style crafts. Kitty was part of a women's association, the Nineteenth Century Women's Club, and gave talks on education and the rights of the child. Lloyd Wright's career was beginning to take off and the marriage often hosted dinners and parties.
The family was fractured in 1909, when the romance that the architect had had for years with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, who had commissioned him a house with her husband, the Cheney House, came to light. Restless and steeped in the ideas of the suffrage movement, Mamah abandoned her husband and two children and moved to Colorado with a friend. It was just a cover. Four months later, Wright also left Kitty, and the two lovers met in New York and took a ship to Europe.
The newspapers followed the scandal with fascination and watched as the adulterous couple went from Berlin to Florence. Marked by controversy, Wright lost some of his most powerful commissions, such as the Henry Ford family home. In fact, in 1910 he attempted a failed reconciliation with Kitty, who refused to grant him a divorce on the grounds of her Catholic faith, and finally settled his domestic affairs with architectural practicality. He installed his first wife and all the children in what had been his studio, in Chicago's Oak Park neighborhood, and converted the family home into a rental, to generate income for them.
He moved Mamah to Wisconsin and began building Taliesin, which began to rise up with an aura of scandal around it for being the love nest of an adulterous couple. The school inspector in the area told a journalist who went to report on the couple that the fact that they were there was a danger to the children of the community. “It is a shame that boys and girls grow up thinking that a man and a woman can live together outside the bonds of marriage,” he declared.
Far from hiding, the couple grew up with the opposition. She, who spoke several languages, began translating from Swedish and disseminating the work of the Nordic feminist Ellen Kay in the United States. The novelist Nancy Horan , who dedicated the book Loving Frank to her , sees her as one of many upper-class women of her time who felt they needed "more," that they had "undeveloped potential," and found in that illicit romance a way to express their wishes.
For his part, Wright also used it to underline his main theory, which dictated his own superiority over ordinary mortals. "Two women are necessary for the man of artistic mind, one to be the mother of her children and another to be her mental companion, her inspiration and her soul mate," she told a journalist. To another he pointed out that “laws and regulations are made for the mediocre. The ordinary man cannot live without rules to guide his conduct. It is infinitely more difficult to live without rules but that is what the honest, sincere and thoughtful man needs to do ”.
Taliesin's romance ended brutally 106 years ago today. Wright was in Chigago working on the design of the Midway Gardens, while Mamah and her two children, who had come to live with the couple, Martha, 8, and John, 12, had stayed at the house. Since he was always on site, there was also a full team of construction workers. One of them, a 19-year-old draftsman, suddenly noticed while eating with his colleagues how dirty liquid began to flood the dining room floor. "It looked like dishwater," he later told newspapers. It was gasoline.
What had happened is that Julian Carlton , one of the house servants, had axed Borthwick and his two sons to death and set the house on fire. Along with the three of them, three of the workers and a 13-year-old boy died in the fire in the Taliesin massacre. The murderer was also found dead in the attic: he had swallowed a dose of hydrochloric acid. He did not leave anything written, so it can only be assumed why he did so. His wife, who worked as a cook in the house, declared that he had become paranoid and had been sleeping with the ax by the bed for weeks. Some Wright biographers have spoken that the gang may have launched racist insults against the servant, who was black and born in Barbados and it is also believed that Borthwick had fired the two Carltons that same week.
The fascination of the press with that adulterous romance did not end the fire of Taliesin, on the contrary. Some residents of the area attributed the tragedy to an Avenging Angel. Wright worked to quickly rebuild both the house, which had been practically destroyed, and his love life. Later that year, he received a letter of condolences from an admirer named Maud Miriam Noel , a high-society spiritualist and morphine addict. In The Women , the book that TC Boyle dedicated to Wright's four couples, Noel is the one that takes the most prominence, perhaps because she lives up to the character of the architect, with a similar measure of narcissism.
The couple lived together from 1915 to 1922, when Kitty granted Wright a divorce and in 1923, the mandatory year of waiting expired, they married. In his Autobiography the architect says: “Marriage was the ruin for both of us. Instead of getting better with the wedding, as I had hoped, our relationship became much worse. " Their divorce was sour and tumultuous and Miriam was formally charged with burglary when she tried to sneak into Taliesin - always the house - where Wright already lived with what would be his third wife and fourth partner, Olgivanna Lazarovic , a Montenegrin dancer that she was also married to an architect, the Russian Vlademar Hinzenberg.
The two met at one of her performances in Chicago. They were 31 years old. Again, Wright had to wait for Miriam to grant him a divorce before he could marry Olgivanna, with whom he remained until she died in 1959 at the age of 91. In 1926 they had their only daughter, Iovanna who, like her mother, studied dance and movement in Paris with the mystic GI Gurdjieff. Olgivanna wrote music and several philosophy books while Wright established himself as a master of architecture, signed some of his most important works, such as the Guggenheim in New York, and founded another Taliesin, this time in the state of Arizona, where his foundation still remains. .
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