Taliesin Fellowship Brochure

Ever wonder what the first call to join the Taliesin Fellowship may have been like? Luckily it has been well documented. What an exciting time it must have been for the young students to work alongside Wright.

In the autumn of 1932 the following text was sent out across the country, with explanation of the architectural education and applications.

THE TALIESIN FELLOWSHIP IS AN EXTENSION OF ARCHITECTURE AT TALIEIN TO THE ARCHITECTURE OF MUSIC, SCULPTURE, AND PAINTING. BY WAY OF AGRICULTURE MANUFACTURE AND BUILDING TO INCLUDE SEVENTY APPRENTICES AND SEVEN…

      Frank Lloyd Wright, together with a leader who will be in residence with the apprentices, four resident associates; a technical research man in structural engineering, a sculptor, a painter, and a musician together with a group of seventy qualified apprentices, carefully selected by the fellowship for qualifications of leadership. This group assisted in the workshops by three technical research men, trained engineers in industry, will constitute the membership of the Fellowship.

      Leaders in the creative thought of our own and many other countries have expressed the desire to come and share for a time in Fellowship activities when the provisions now being made for them are ready, residing there, temporarily, to execute commissions.

      Any rational attempt to integrate Art and Industry and correlate both with everyday life in America must proceed as essential architecture. Our Architecture can only grow by way of such social, industrial and economic processes as are our own.

Not only will the framework and background of our future as a civilization be erected as architecture in this organic sense, but the qualities most worth while in any study of life whether as philosophy, sculpture, painting or music are fundamentally, architecture.

      Architecture, therefore that is of life itself, or from the ground up, must be the first concern of any genuine culture. Work itself is indispensable to any comprehension of the principles which underlie life and the Arts alike. Art in any creative sense may be inculcated or cultured in work but can not be taught by book.

      An “alliance” between what we call Art and commercial industry can not be good enough because no mere “alliance”, however useful, can ever be creative. If organic forms appropriate to our life are to grow from within and are to be, in themselves, worthwhile expressions of machine age life, the original work will be done where the workers themselves not only have spontaneous recourse to practical, modern shop and general working conditions but, at the same time, have the benefit of the inspiration fellowship of genuinely creative artists in the work to be done.

      Whatever creative impulse has survived among us should somewhere, somehow have some fair chance at fresh life uncontaminated by human expressions already dead or dying. Inasmuch as the city is a dying formula, the Taliesin Fellowship lives works in the country. Constant contact with the nature of the ground and with nature-growth are the most valuable “texts” in this connection when the contacts are forms of experience directly related to creative work.

      The Fellowship established practicing what it preaches, is a simple expression of indigenous architecture. It is located on a state Highway in Southern Wisconsin near the Wisconsin River, a two-hundred acre farm about forty miles from Madison and four miles from the nearest village.

      In the life of the Fellowship, the harmonious integrity of the architectural circumstances is considered an important feature and although many of the buildings are already well along, every apprentice will have an active share in completing the establishment during the next several years.

      The work in architecture at Taliesin, near by, during the past thirty years has proved itself and has gone far enough in the current of contemporary ideas throughout the world so that good work to improve the design of their buildings and the utilitarian objects they produce can now be done in co-operation with our more advanced producers and manufacturers.

      As the Taliesin Fellowship our main purpose extend the apprenticeship from the seven or ten apprentices to which that work has been limited at Taliesin to include seventy-seven apprentices. Eventually all will work under the combined leadership of the inner-group as described, each apprentice actually at work, eventually, according to his or her own inclination, but with needed help, toward the machine-craft art of machine-age.

       A united effort to make such new forms as machine-work and modern-processes must have, if America is to have any natural life worth living, will be a constant practical aim of the whole work.

During the years past applications have come from all parts of the world from many young architects desiring to come to Taliesin to live and work.

      This new Fellowship will enable seventy-seven to be immersed in the many-sided activities of Architecture in all its phases.

These activities, gradually and spontaneously as possible, will be extended to include work in all of the arts as, also, the various modern machine-crafts.

      Working on various forms of practical enterprise in direct personal contact with the currents of modern thought and feeling, all demanding spiritual integrity in our new life, we believe many aspiring young artists will, here, find means to upbuild forces within themselves that will guarantee to us, as a people, a natural architecture.

        We are beginning this work hoping to grow gradually but spontaneously from within, upon a free and individual basis, keeping our own independence; everyday life made healthy and fruitful by direct experience with ideas as work and with work as idea: many-sided as that work may be.

The home life itself will be simple meals in common. Fixed hours for all work; recreation and sleep. Each worker will eventually have his or her own room for study and rest. Imaginative entertainment will be a feature of the home-life; plays, evening with the literature of music, by way of trio or Quartette, the cinema of our own and other countries and evening conferences to which musicians, literary men, artists, scientists will be invited and, sometimes, the public.

And the beautiful region is itself a never failing source of recreation.

Horseback riding will be encouraged, an adequate stable provided for a sufficient number of saddle horses.

The Fellowship work in all its branches will have as its motie the organic philosophy of an organic architecture for modern life as we are living that life at the present time, but some appropriate sense of the future seen as the present will give direction to every effort.

The study of architecture the first year, will be taken, informally, into special studies of building design and building construction, typography, ceramics, woodwork, and textiles. And this informal study will go hand in hand with characteristic model-making. Eventually it will go on with practical experiments in the machine-crafts as these experiments may be made by the apprentices in the workshop with modern-machinery and technical processes.

Apprenticeship will be the condition and should be the attitude of mind of the Fellowship workers. A fair division of all the labor in all the branches of the work will be the share of each individual although any individual’s predilection for some particular art-expression will be encouraged.

There will be o age-limit as to the apprenticeship so long as the quality of youth is characteristic. But the special qualifications of each applicant-(good background and good correlation of faculties foremost amoung them)-will finally be decided upon by the leader of the fellowship and Mr. Wright after a month’s trial in actual Fellowship work.

The Fellowship aims, first, to develop a well-correlated, creative human being with a wide horizon but capable of concentration upon the circumstances in which he lives.

A preliminary requirement of each member of the Fellowship will be to learn to draw well what he sees as the best means to develop the necessary correlation of the faculties.

The Laboratories and machine workshops as well as several of the buildings are not yet ready but eventually all will be planted as planned, next to the living quarters, as shown in the accompanying drawings. The draughting room, assembly room, studio for painting, studio for sculpture, demonstrating rooms and the small theater are already built.

The fist experimental units to be put to work are those of architectural construction and design, research in technical industrial engineering, the philosophy of architecture, typographical design, and the printing of the publication that will be the organ of the Fellowship; molding and casting adopted to modern systems of construction in glass, concrete and metal; woodworking by modern machinery. A collateral but informal study of the philosophy and practice of sculpture, painting, drama, and rhythm is essential for all apprentices. These first units are to be followed, as soon as possible, by the shopwork of actual glass-making, pottery, modern reproduction processes in many forms, as we may find the help to establish these units. Men of Industry in the United States will find it worth their while to co-operate with us in design research, each in their particular branch of manufacture.

After having had several years acquaintance with the actual performance of the apprentice, a personal testimonial will be given to each worker at the end of his or her apprenticeship, the length of the apprenticeship to be determined by the circumstances. During each working year a holiday of six weeks for each worker will be arranged, as the work may permit, and if the worker so desires.

Inasmuch as the Fellowship is not a “Foundation” but, to preserve direction, initiative and prompt action, is an individual, independent enterprise, the revenue for the first several years will come mainly form tuition fees and the sustaining work, four hours each day, of the apprentices. Added to this as the work grows may be compensation from industries for services rendered or to be rendered; the sale of completed art-objects; subscriptions to the various publications to be printed by the Fellowship and the contributions of “Fellowships”-(the equivalent of scholarships)-as gifts of equipment from “Friends of the Fellowship” The “Friends” to be a group organized among those who believe in our work and who are willing ad able to add scope to our usefulness as the Fellowship grows.

The success of our experiment must depend upon the quality of our membership and upon the spirit of co-operation felt and practiced by fellowship members. The apprentices, alone, can make their apprentice fruitful.

Each apprentice is required to pay the fixed fee for tuition according to terms stated on the application blank herewith. In addition the apprentices will be required to do his o her share of work, four hours each day, in the upkeep and care of the grounds and buildings on the farm, for the privilege of participation in experimental work in the studios and shops and in the production of art-objects and practical exemplars for industry and building or for exhibition and, perhaps, sale. An account will be kept of the money thus had from all sales, and at the end of each year a fair dividend will be paid to each member of the Fellowship which in the course of a few years may materially reduce the tuition fee to be paid by the apprentices.

The farm and the various gardens into which it is divided will be so managed as to employ the help of the apprenticeship under skilled guidance so that not only will the apprentices gain practical experience in farming but a substantial portion of the living of the apprentices will come from their own labor on the ground, thus enabling the tuition fee to remain as it is now fixed.


FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, TALIESIN, SPRING GREEN, WIS., JANUARY 1^ST, 1933

Pfieffer, B. B. (December 1982). Frank Lloyd Wright Letters to Apprentices. Fresno: University of California State Press

images from: http://www.edwinhimself.com/blog/2011/03/04/scans-of-the-1933-taliesin-fellowship-brochure-frank-lloyd-wright-emphemera/