The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship

Frank Lloyd Wright was renowned during his life not only as an architectural genius but also as a subject of controversy--from his radical design innovations to his turbulent private life, including a notorious mass murder that occurred at his Wisconsin estate, Taliesin, in 1914. But the estate also gave rise to one of the most fascinating and provocative experiments in American cultural history: the Taliesin Fellowship, an extraordinary architectural colony where Wright trained hundreds of devoted apprentices and where all of his late masterpieces--Fallingwater, Johnson Wax, the Guggenheim Museum--were born.

Drawing on hundreds of new and unpublished interviews and countless unseen documents from the Wright archives, The Fellowship is an unforgettable story of genius and ego, sex and violence, mysticism and utopianism. Epic in scope yet intimate in its detail, it is a stunning true account of how an idealistic community devolved into a kind of fiefdom where young apprentices were both inspired and manipulated, often at a staggering personal cost, by the architect and his imperious wife, Olgivanna Hinzenberg, along with her spiritual master, the legendary Greek-Armenian mystic Georgi Gurdjieff. A magisterial work of biography, it will forever change how we think about Frank Lloyd Wright and his world.

Author: Roger Friedland, Harold Zellman
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 10/01/2007
Pages: 720
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.69lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.20w x 1.29d
ISBN: 9780060988661

Review Citation(s):
New York Review of Books 11/20/2008 pg. 60

About the Author
Friedland, Roger: -

Roger Friedland is a cultural sociologist who studies love, sex, and God. Professor of Religious Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and New York University, he is also the coauthor of The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship (with Harold Zellman). He lives with his wife in Santa Barbara, California.

Zellman, Harold: -

Harold Zellman, a historian of modernist architecture and communitarian movements, is the principal of Harold Zellman and Associates, a Los Angeles architecture firm.