Frank Lloyd Wright

"The man is still an iconoclast!" Whispered indignation. Perhaps. But, I wish they would dub me "radical," and let me go home. A good word "radical"? How know life unless through knowledge of the "root"?

And it was unthinkable that any house should be put on that beloved hill. I knew well by now that no house should ever be on any hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it, so hill and house could live together each the happier for the other. That was the way everything found round about it was naturally managed, except when man did something. When he added his mite he became imitative and ugly. Why? Was there no natural house? I had proved, I felt, that there was, and now I, too, wanted a natural house to lie in myself. I scanned the hills of the region where the rock came cropping out in strata to suggest buildings. How quiet and strong the rock-ledge masses looked with the dark red cedars and white birches, there, above the green slopes.

Yes, there must be a natural house, not natural as caves and log cabins were natural but native in spirit and making, with all that architecture had meant whenever it was alive in times past. Nothing at all that I had ever seen would do.

But there was a house that hill might marry and live happily with ever after. I fully intended to find it.

Architecture, after all, I have learned, or before all, I should say, is no less a weaving and a fabric than the trees. And as anyone might see, a beech tree is a beech tree. It isn't trying to be an oak.

Another fall, another winter, another spring, another summer, and late in 1915, Taliesin the II stood in the place of the first. A more reposeful and fine one. Not a "chastened" Taliesin. No, rather up in arms declining the popular Mosaic-Isaian idea of "punishment" as unworthy of the sacrifice demanded and taken there.

Its "elevation" for me now is the modeling of the hills, the weaving and the fabric that clings to them, the look of it all in tender green or covered with snow or in full glow of summer that bursts into the glorious blaze of autumn. I still feel myself as much a part of it as the trees and birds and bees, and red barns, or as the animals are, for that matter.

Not so many dreams of the future? Moments of anguish? Oh yes--but not of regret. I am enjoying more, day by day, the eternity that is now, realizing, at last, that it is now and that it only divides yesterday from tomorrow.

Taliesin! When I am away from it, like some rubber band, stretched out but ready to snap back immediately, the pull is relaxed or released. I get back to it, happy to be home again.