Why he matters
Frank Lloyd Wright’s name is on Taliesin West, but for thirty-two years after Wright died the man at the head of the drafting room was William Wesley Peters. An engineer by instinct, he was the first apprentice to join the Taliesin Fellowship, married into the family, and did the structural thinking behind some of Wright’s most daring buildings.
When Wright died in 1959, the practice did not close. It became Taliesin Associated Architects, run by the apprentices from the Scottsdale mesa, and Peters led it until his own death in 1991. The Wright buildings finished after 1959, and much of what the firm designed across the Valley, came out of a studio he ran.
Where to find his mark today
Taliesin West. He was part of the household that built it by hand from 1938, and its drafting studio was his office for the rest of his life. Guided tours pass through it.
McCormick Ranch. The Mountain View East homes, one of the rare subdivisions designed by the Taliesin firm, went up here in 1978 while he led it.
The man in the drafting room
Peters’ story runs in parallel with Frank Lloyd Wright’s and Olgivanna Lloyd Wright’s. He married Olgivanna’s daughter, raised his surviving son among the Fellowship after her death, and served beside Olgivanna in running the institution after 1959. The later apprentices who built Scottsdale careers, like Vern Swaback, came up through the firm he led.
His private life touched the Cold War once. In 1970 Olgivanna invited Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, to Taliesin West. She married Peters in Phoenix on April 8, and the marriage, crowded by the Fellowship and by Olgivanna, was over within three years. Their daughter Olga was born in 1971.
The full story
William Wesley Peters was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1912 and grew up in Evansville. He studied at Evansville College and at MIT, and in 1932 he became the first paying apprentice in the new Taliesin Fellowship in Wisconsin. He fell for Wright’s stepdaughter Svetlana, left for a stretch to practice on his own in Evansville, married her in 1935 and came back to Taliesin the next year.
The Wrights were already wintering in the desert, and in the 1930s the whole Fellowship followed. After Wright bought the mesa in December 1937, the apprentices began building Taliesin West in 1938, quarrying rock and pouring desert masonry themselves. Peters’ role in the wider practice was engineering. He was structural engineer and project architect on Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax building, and later directed the structural design of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
The 1940s brought the worst of it. In 1946 Svetlana, pregnant with their third child, and their two-year-old son Daniel were killed in a car accident in Wisconsin. Their older son, Brandoch, was raised largely within the Fellowship.
Wright died in April 1959, and the apprentices reorganized as Taliesin Associated Architects, headquartered at Taliesin West, with Peters as chairman. Over the next three decades the firm completed Wright designs, extended the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix with new wings in the 1970s, and took Scottsdale work of its own, including an insurance building in 1972, the Mountain View East homes in McCormick Ranch in 1978 and an office for the Arizona Conference of Seventh-day Adventists in 1983. A 1986 showcase house at Taliesin Gates is credited principally to Peters himself.
In 1970 he married Svetlana Alliluyeva weeks after she came to the mesa at Olgivanna’s invitation; they separated within three years. In 1985, the year Olgivanna died, Peters became chairman of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. He died in July 1991, still at the head of the firm. It was dissolved in 2003, and the school’s library carries his name. His decades at the drafting table belong to the boomtown era that grew up to meet the mesa.