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Maybe it could be in New York City at the Whitney Museum of American Art? Maybe at the Museum of Modern Art? Wherever. Somebody should mount an exhibition on Taliesin East.
I've stolen this idea from Neil Levine, the noted architectural historian and Frank Lloyd Wright scholar at Harvard. Such an exhibition would not present Taliesin as a finished work of art, because it never was any such thing. That would be the whole point: to understand Taliesin (and by extension, all architecture) as a process. Taliesin East is not so much a built object as an architectural garden that Wright seeded and weeded for almost half a century.
A work of architecture is always a narrative, unfolding over time. It is a story that never ends, with future chapters still to be written. Even if the building remains the same physically--which rarely happens--it changes anyway because of alterations in the climate of appreciation by which it is known. It was T.S. Eliot who wrote that whenever we make something new, we alter the past. Taliesin is the ideal case study.
Rising from the ashes
Taliesin East is, of course, the house that Wright built for himself near Spring Green, Wisconsin, in the farmland where he spent much of his boyhood. In my opinion, it is his greatest work. (Levine, by the way, shares that opinion.) Twice Taliesin burned and was rebuilt. Each rebuilding incorporated fragments--sometimes charred--of an earlier house. The house also changed whenever Wright's life changed: He altered it to fit, like clothes.
"It's exciting to think about reconstructing the history of Taliesin," says Levine. "It's like these great old sites that had many layers, like Troy. And the documentation is there." He'd like to see the house presented in an exhibition in six parts: 1911, 1914, 1924, 1937, 1949, and 1959. He thinks we'd learn a lot not only about Wright, but about the nature of creativity.
There's another reason for an exhibition on Taliesin. The place is falling apart. It needs our love and our money.
As Wright often said, he built Taliesin not on the hill but of it. That's part of the problem. The house functions as an unintended retaining wall. The soil is only about 6 feet...