Frank Lloyd Wright

After leaving Chicago in 1909, the number of commissions he received declined. The Depression robbed him of his remaining work, and between the years 1928 and 1936 Frank Lloyd Wright built just two buildings for clients. As he had few buildings through which to express his philosophy of architecture, Wright devoted much of his time to writing, giving lectures, and preparing museum exhibits of his projects. In debt and without commissions, Wright and his wife, Olgivanna, founded the Taliesin Fellowship in 1932, opening their home and studio to apprentices, who would divide their time between farming Taliesin's fields, restoring the dilapidated buildings, and learning architecture by working under Wright's eye in the drafting room.

Wright mailed a circular to friends and newspapers, and in August 1932, nineteen-year-old John H. (Jack) Howe arrived as one of the first apprentices. While still in high school in Evanston, Illinois, Howe had visited Wright in his Chicago office. Howe spent over three decades as Wright's chief draftsman. In the autumn of that year the early apprentices repaired and enlarged buildings for the expected additional recruits. By Christmas the Taliesin Fellowship numbered twenty-three, among them Robert Mosher, William Wesley (Wes) Peters, and Edgar Tafel.

Wright and his apprentices farmed the fields below Taliesin and achieved a degree of self-sufficiency. Contemplating the urban unemployment of the Depression, Wright had recently proposed a social reordering of the nation which would bring dignity to the American worker. The program involved allotting one acre of land to each adult and child in the United States, hence its name, Broadacre City. Far more than simply a proposal for the redistribution of land, it outlined major changes in urban design, political institutions, economics, transportation, and buildings.

In 1886, the same year that nineteen-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright left the University of Wisconsin to begin his career in Chicago, another Wisconsin resident, fifty-three-year-old Samuel Curtis Johnson, embarked on a new career. Earlier, Johnson had closed an unsuccessful stationery store in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and moved to nearby Racine to sell parquet flooring for the Racine Hardware Manufacturing Company.

The beginning of the twentieth century also witnessed a change in architectural taste. In Chicago, thirty-three-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright and several other architects from the Midwest came to be known collectively as the Prairie School. This group favored an architecture that stressed horizontality in houses - the line of the prairie - and evolved a style in which rooms opened onto each other and extended the spatial enclosure into the site. Emphasizing space as the reality of a building, Wright and his contemporaries urged an end to the cluttered rooms and agitated surfaces of Victorian architecture. Nationwide shifts in taste, encouraged in part by Wright and the Prairie School, caused the market for the Johnson company's intricate flooring to fall sharply, until in 1917 Johnson and his son discontinued the sale of parquetry entirely.

Interviewed years later, Needham, Louis & Brorby art director E. Willis Jones recalled William Connolly showing him the drawings of Matson's proposed office building for the Johnson company. Connolly asked him to recommend a sculptor for a frieze at the top of the building, but Jones urged him to reject the entire building design and hire Frank Lloyd Wright to make a fresh start. Connolly was unfamiliar with Wright, so Jones showed him copies of the Wasmuth and Wendigen publications of his work, noting that Connolly was entranced. Jones called in his firm's vice president, Melvin Brorby, and architect Howard Raftery, and the three men convinced Connolly to pursue Wright.