Inside Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship

"It won't take long for readers of 'The Fellowship,' an ambitious new study of Frank Lloyd Wright by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman, to realize that the book is no ordinary exercise in architectural history."

"['The Fellowship'] is an unusually detailed account of the architect's unorthodox design process, in particular the role played by the apprentices, many of them gay men, who surrounded Wright at his Taliesin Fellowship in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Arizona. Nine years in the making, the book provides a sustained look at the Fellowship during the period when Wright produced the masterpieces of his late career: Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax building and the Guggenheim Museum.."

"..it is an almost bizarre hybrid, a serious piece of scholarship wrapped in melodrama, spiritualism and sexual innuendo...the book describes in great detail not only how the designs for Fallingwater and the Guggenheim came together but also Wright's anti-Semitism, his isolationist politics and the drugs abused by his troubled daughter...Taliesin and Taliesin West as painted by the authors are hothouses of competition, jealousy and longing..."

"Founded in 1932, during a period when Wright, in his mid-60s, was floundering professionally and personally, the Taliesin Fellowship...offered a way to raise funds and keep his architecture studio fully staffed even when he had no clients. In fact, as Zellman and Friedland make clear, Taliesin deserves to rank among Wright's most brilliant creations as an ingenious ploy to keep his practice afloat and his expensive lifestyle from flagging."

"The architect, after all, had what can only be called a flamboyant personal style, sweeping through rooms in flowing capes; but he also projected an aggressive, if effortful, masculinity, digging shirtless in the fields with the apprentices...It is hardly a stretch for a scholar to look for connections between that seeming ambivalence and Wright's career-long effort to strike the perfect balance between Sullivan's flowery, elaborately ornamented buildings and a more muscular, self-reliant style."