Announcing the Taliesin Institute

The Taliesin Institute is a new initiative of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, focused on providing education, outreach, and information to architecture and design students, new and established design professionals, and the broader public interested in learning about the history and future of organic architecture principles. Those principles—which formed the core of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work—are more relevant today than ever before, and are not just represented in Wright’s own buildings and designs: they are far-reaching, and unrelated to any particular style of construction, geography, or material. More importantly, those principles are evolving to respond to changing needs of our world—climate change and sustainability, cultural and economic development, and new modes of living all cause us to rethink how Wright’s principles can help us to design, build, and live better now and in the future.

Over the next several months, leadership of the Taliesin Institute will be fleshing out the strategic plan for our work, and then announcing specific programs as they are ready to come online. We expect to start with small, focused programs that can be fine-tuned and scaled up as the opportunities allow. These explorations include organizing a consortium of architecture schools and practitioners to study at the two Taliesin campuses, Taliesin in Spring Green Wisc. and Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Ariz., with a particular focus on hands-on work aligned with Wright’s insistence on learning by doing. We will also be creating public classes, symposia, and workshops that reflect the evolving nature of Wright’s principles of organic design and their relevance to the way we live now, and in the future.

To lead these programs, the Foundation has engaged Jennifer Gray, Ph.D., a noted Wright scholar who recently was the Curator of Drawings and Archives at Columbia University’s Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. Dr. Gray was responsible for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, containing more than one million elements including Wright’s drawings, writings, and photography. Dr. Gray is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia and has taught at Cornell University and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Dr. Gray was also the co-curator of the MoMA exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking the Archive. In addition to her expertise on Wright’s work, Dr. Gray’s research explores how designers, notably Dwight Perkins and Jens Jensen, used architecture, cities, and landscapes to advance social and spatial justice at the turn of the 20th Century. She also is interested in contemporary social practice, curatorial practice, the history of architecture exhibitions and questions of critical heritage.

If you are interested in becoming involved with the work of the Taliesin Institute, or to find out more about our programs as they develop, please complete the “Contact Us” form at the bottom of the page and note your interest in this work so we may contact you.