Images in this collection are from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives housed in the Department of Drawings & Archives at Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. Robert Carroll May, who studied as an apprentice in the Taliesin Fellowship from 1939 to 1942, took the majority of these photographs of Taliesin West in 1940.
Frank Lloyd Wright purchased the land for Taliesin West in 1937, and some minor site work and temporary construction was done by Wright and the Fellowship before their return to Wisconsin for the summer. Work continued on the walls and terraces of the buildings during the summer of 1938 by local laborers, with occasional supervision by a Taliesin apprentice. Questions regarding construction issues, and progress on the site was communicated to Wright by telegram to Taliesin in Wisconsin. Work on many other projects, and pneumonia, kept Wright in Wisconsin during all of 1939. These photographs show the completed Taliesin West in its earliest form. Wright would reshape the buildings repeatedly until his death in 1959.
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