What it means
In Scottsdale, Taliesin is a place, a people and a boulevard. The place is Taliesin West, the winter home, studio and school that Frank Lloyd Wright began building in January 1938 on a mesa of creosote and granite below the McDowells, out of rock his apprentices gathered on site and canvas stretched over redwood. Locals drop the “West.” Nobody here needs to distinguish it from the Wisconsin original, which is 1,700 miles away and, in local usage, barely exists.
The people were the Fellowship, the Taliesin Fellowship, the apprentices who lived in tents while they built the compound and were the town’s resident eccentrics for fifty years. “The Fellowship” was shorthand for the whole household, Wright included, and later for the architects who stayed on after he died in April 1959. The boulevard is Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, the road to the gate.
The full story of the building, the tours and the free overlook is in the Taliesin West guide; the institution that owns it is in the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation guide. This page is about the word.
Where you’ll meet it
On the brown highway signs off the Loop 101, on the Spire at Scottsdale Road and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, in the names of the Taliesin Gates subdivision next door, and in conversation whenever a visitor asks what there is to see here besides golf. Also, mispronounced, at every hotel desk in town.
Where the word came from
Taliesin was a sixth-century Welsh bard, and the name means “shining brow” or “radiant brow.” Wright met it through the poet Richard Hovey and liked it for two reasons. His mother’s family, the Lloyd Joneses, were Welsh and gave Welsh names to their Wisconsin farms. And his new house, begun in 1911 on family land above the Wisconsin River at Spring Green, sat on the brow of a hill rather than its crown; a house, he said, should be of the hill, not on it. The name applied first to the house and then to the whole 600-acre estate. The Foundation that owns it spells out the pronunciation on its own site: Tally-ESS-in.
The Wisconsin Taliesin burned twice, on August 15, 1914, when an employee set fire to the living quarters and killed seven people, and on April 20, 1925; historians count three Taliesins on the same foundations.
The Fellowship came next. In 1932, broke and out of fashion, Frank and Olgivanna Lloyd Wright founded the Taliesin Fellowship, an apprenticeship in which young people paid tuition to live with the Wrights and learn by doing: drafting, building, farming, cooking, music. The Foundation counts more than 1,000 apprentices over its history. Wright said the word meant “fellowship in the finest sense.”
In December 1937 Wright, seventy and ordered south by his doctors, bought cheap desert northeast of Scottsdale and telegraphed the Fellowship in Wisconsin about the new site. They came west that winter, pitched tents and started building in January 1938. The place needed a name and got the obvious one: Taliesin West, the winter brow to the Wisconsin summer one. From then on the Fellowship migrated with the seasons, and the Scottsdale half of its life gave the town the word.
What it is not
Taliesin is not the Arizona Biltmore, which Wright consulted on in 1928 and did not design, and it is not Cosanti or Arcosanti, which belong to his apprentice Paolo Soleri. Taliesin West is also not a museum of Wright’s furniture shipped in from elsewhere: nearly everything in it was designed by him and made on site by the apprentices.
The fine print
The word’s ownership has been contested in the one way that matters: who may use it. Wright deeded his name, drawings and homes to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in 1940, and after his death Olgivanna ran both the Foundation and the Fellowship until a month before she died on March 1, 1985, with William Wesley Peters running the architects’ practice, Taliesin Associated Architects, out of the drafting room. The Fellowship’s apprenticeship became an accredited degree program, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, and when accreditors required the school to be independent of its parent, it split off in 2017 as the School of Architecture at Taliesin. The marriage lasted three years. The Foundation ended the lease on July 31, 2020, the school surrendered the Taliesin name and moved to Cosanti and Arcosanti as The School of Architecture, and the “Fellowship” survives on the mesa only as a handful of Legacy Fellows in residence.
So the word now has two meanings that pull apart. Taliesin the building is as settled as a name gets: National Historic Landmark in 1982, UNESCO World Heritage in 2019 as one of eight Wright works inscribed together. Taliesin the community has left the building. Anyone who says the school was “closed” is wrong; it moved, and it teaches at the apprentice’s compound instead of the master’s. The Wright and the desert note puts both places on one day’s loop.