Around the Wright World

Home for the Holidays: Spring Celebration at Taliesin West

Each year, the Wrights would host a grand celebration and a fond farewell to the Sonoran Desert on the Easter holiday before returning to Taliesin in Wisconsin for the summer. Join us on Saturday, April 8^th, and celebrate the season of Spring. Activities include Easter egg and botanical crafts, outdoor games, live music, and food & beverage available for purchase. Spring into action and get your tickets today!

Wright Plus 2023

Join the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust for the spectacular Wright Plus Architectural Housewalk on Saturday, May 20, 2023. Tour the interiors of eight private residences designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and his contemporaries. For one day only, homeowners invite guests into their private living spaces, which retain the original exterior features with interiors designed to suit their individual tastes. Guides will be on hand to enhance the tours with details about the history and the beautiful architectural elements that give each home its unique character.

TALIESIN YOUTH CAMP: DESIGN A SPACE THAT’S WRIGHT FOR YOU (online)

In this virtual, weeklong summer camp, we will explore how Wright approached the design process in creating his own Taliesin estate. In live two-hour morning sessions, we will look deeply into the architectural details of Wright’s home and studio, using Taliesin as a text for organic principles of design. Students will incorporate what they have learned in our group sessions into a designed space that is (W)right for them. We will guide them through scaled floor plan drawing and model-building techniques, allowing them to design, draw and build their designs during the hands-on, off-screen afternoon sessions at home. To make sure all students have the necessary materials on hand for the camp week, a prepared kit will be mailed to families.

TALIESIN YOUTH CAMP: CREATIVE WRITING

Develop Wild Characters And Write Them Into Your Story
The original Taliesin was an ancient bard in Wales. Then Taliesin became a house? In Wisconsin? In a place so beautiful of course tales are told here! And so, inside Taliesin, the house, we will make wild stories filled with wild characters that will echo from the walls and bowels and across the valley.

We’ll spend time developing our casts of characters, figuring out their curses, their callings, their dark desires, and their destinies. Then we will send these characters on quests for simple objects (maybe tacos?) and then on epic quests across dangerous landscapes where their truest selves will be revealed.

Writing fiction is play. Writing fiction is a game. At the same time, writing fiction helps us find deep truths about the world around us. Let’s use the creative spirit of Taliesin to have a blast and build beautiful worlds.

We will spend a session or two writing biographies of characters and examining their psychological needs. Then we spend the next two or three sessions planning out and writing a story with those characters in action.

TALIESIN YOUTH CAMP: DESIGN A SPACE THAT’S WRIGHT FOR YOU (in person)

Wright designed Taliesin as a space that’s (W)right for him and envisioned it as a school, a home, and a farm. What will your dream space look like? This architecture camp will introduce you to the principles of organic architecture and the work and life of Frank Lloyd Wright. We will study and explore Taliesin first-hand, and research Wright’s Taliesin design, as inspiration for your own design. Each of you will draw a floor plan to scale and build a 3D model of your space. At the end of the camp, you will have the opportunity to present each individual project to parents and family members.

TALIESIN YOUTH CAMP: MINECRAFT DONE WRIGHT!

The hub for this architecture workshop will be the original drafting studio at Taliesin’s Hillside Home School building, where Wright and his apprentices built and created the Broadacre City model themselves. The schedule will blend time spent building in Minecraft with outdoor hikes on the Taliesin property for inspiration and class discussion about sustainable living.
Our small class sizes allow us to accompany the students through their individual design processes, building on their individual skills and challenging them to explore beyond. Students will study Wright’s blueprints and photographs of famous houses and projects to translate into Minecraft.
Classes will be led by a Microsoft Minecraft Global Mentor who has taught middle school classes using Minecraft: Education Edition since 2015.
Each student will need to bring a laptop computer to camp, and the Minecraft Education software will need to be downloaded in advance of camp. Detailed instructions will be sent a week in advance of camp.