A tour through the sunny, theatrical collection of buildings at Taliesin West is a wonderful experience, highly recommended, but it may leave you with the uneasy sensation that something important is not being said.

That's absolutely true. There's a secret.

The secret is not that Taliesin West is less than a great architectural experience. It's not. Nobody said it was. Well worth seeing, it's a collection of great moments and odd decisions.

But Taliesin West is not one thing, like a house is one thing. It's a graduate school, architectural office (until recently anyway), non-profit foundation headquarters, popular tourist attraction, hipster shrine, gift shop, arts resource, retirement home, and a historic irreplacable set of buildings, all at once. It was constantly revised when Frank Lloyd Wright was alive and in Arizona, a sunny 3D sketchpad. On his seasonal return he would storm into Taliesin West and blurt out a long list of immediate changes while the perceptions were still fresh.

So, many of the standard Wrightian tactics and preoccupations are on full view here, desert-style, oriented to the sunlight. And as with so many others Scottsdale properties, houses have been advancing up to its doorstep. Like the Biltmore and the unfortunate Wigwam, the design relies on negative space, the ma of desert, which is no longer empty.

The secret is not that Mr. Wright could be obnoxious. Lately the verbal hero worship on the tour is eye-rolling rather than stomach-turning, but you still get a distorted, muffled, rewired architectural history that beats sanctimony like a gong. Mr. Wright foresaw this, Mr. Wright mandated this, isn't he so cute, all impulsive and headstrong and design-y. It's a shame to whitewash the tensions in Wright's personality with coats of saintly goo. And it's tiresome to choose either Wright as a supernaturally gifted design giant comparable to Beethoven, or Wright as a self-defeating, manipulative old Victorian windbag with poor writing skills and the standard human failings.

It's both. It's both! C'mon!

As Bruce Goff once wrote to him,

"…I feel I should tell you the real reason why I believe I should not accept your offer. I have known people who have worked with you in the Oak Park days and since, and they all seem to fall into two categories; one group thinks you have ruined their lives ... that you have stolen their ideas and that you are a devil. The other believes that you are a God who can do no wrong and that their lives are useless unless sacrificed for you. I don't want to think of you in either of these ways ... "

Right on, Bruce Goff. You go, Bruce Goff!

While you're on the tour, in his own bedroom, you might turn the corner - and there he'd be, magnificent, confrontational, cape and cane. One bad word - CLONK, you'd be on your knees and suddenly bound to a drafting table. He haunts the tours, listening closely, grumbling madly, and disappears in the woodwork, an invisible god on Earth, protected by the host Fellowship, the Foundation, the Conservancy and other interlocking licensing entities, stern and majestic and all-knowing in his watchful afterlife - I mean, even more so. Refer to this ghost as "Frank" and the whole campus seems to tense up around you. They're not really kidding. And if anything is holy in Scottsdale, it's a revenue source.

And speaking of revenue sources, the secret is not that Taliesin West and the interlocking entities and the rest of the Frank Lloyd Wright empire is in financial trouble. That's all in the newspapers.

It's a beautiful campus, still full of potential, and they try to remain optimistic. As of March 2005, the Foundation has a three-member leadership team that is no longer communicating with the remaining aging Fellowship members, who live on site. The architecture school, which has long had high turnover and questionable standards, is finally in danger of losing its accreditation. The studio was closed in 2003 because of insurance costs (reportedly due to lawsuits). Both Taliesins urgently need extensive physical multimillion dollar repairs. They lost two CEO's, a dean, a licensing director, much of its faculty and half its students in one twelve month period. There's a crazy-ambitious emergency plan to raise $100 million. As one of the few viable tourist attractions in Scottsdale, this has the city's attention. As the home of the Wright archives, the Ali Baba's treasurehouse of American architecture, this should have the attention of architects across the country.

No, the secret is more personal.

The Foundation and the Fellowship would not exist in any form if Wright hadn't gone to the opera with a friend one Sunday afternoon in 1924 Chicago and sat near to the dark-haired Montenegrin dancer Olga Ivanovna Milanov Hinzenberg. Wright noticed her, and provoked her into conversation by exclaiming to his friend, "They are all dead. The dead are dancing to the dead," which won a significant glance from the 26-year-old Olgivanna.

As one pretentious Arts-and-Crafts-era flirt to another, they were off to the races.

By the standards of 1924 Olgivanna qualified as a stone hottie. A dark-haired dancer, she was a prototypical velvet-clad Bohemian: artsy, attuned to celestial vibrations, sexually accomplished, itinerant, living in a commune with her mystical master in Paris, and completely willing to hook up with Mr. Wright, who stood close to retirement age and coming off a decade-long dry spell. What a shame their pillow talk has been lost to history. I bet they said "Philistine" to each other a lot.

Olgivanna was then and always a disciple of the Tartar mystic Georgi Gurdjieff. In Paris she'd been living as one of Gurdjieff's six closest acolytes in his "Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man". Any brief description of Gurdjieff's career or activities is likely to seem unfavorable, so I'd like to skip any controversy please, except to point out that access to Gurdjieff's circle carried the price of personal subordination, ecstatic dance, extreme diets, mind games, and sex.

Olgivanna came with a seven-year-old daughter with the (then) unusually musical name of Svetlana. There's a story that at her first night at Taliesin in Wisconsin, she danced while Dione Neutra played the cello, or something like that. Before the end of 1924, Olgivanna and Svetlana had taken up residence. She quickly bore Frank Lloyd Wright a new daughter, called Iovanna, and began helping Frank with certain heavy lifting, backstage, helping him with tasks like finally ending his marriage to the troublesome Miriam Noel, and selling shares of his future revenue to friendly supporters like Alexander Woolcott, of all people, to fund a (short-lived) corporation to relieve his chronic debt load. She married him in 1928 at La Jolla, and honeymooned in Phoenix, Arizona.

Olgivanna ended his dry spell. The whole idea of the Taliesin Fellowship appears to be primarily Olgivanna's idea, and it was a stroke of genius worthy of the craftiest MBA. It leveraged Frank's assets brilliantly. Using Wright's notoriety, they were going to open a school.

A school.

Wright would be in residence as master, as opposed to teacher. The students, no let's call them apprentices, because apprentices can't legally run away, had four hours of chores every day instead of classes. Farm chores. Household chores. Instead of grades they would compete for Wright's favor and approval and attention, and all the while these apprentices were to contribute their labor and designs and engineering skills to Wright's practice and household. In fact, they were building his houses and peeling his potatoes.

Olgivanna maintained her relationship with Gurdjieff. He came for an extended visit to Taliesin in 1935 and, she warmed herself with the entertaining friction between the two of them. Olgivanna planned to cross-pollinate Gurdjieff's high-intensity emotional-blackmail mind-control methods, if that's not going too far, to prevent these apprentices from waking up, looking around, and realizing they were (a) paying Frank for the privilege of doing his laundry and peeling his potatoes, and (b) paying for the privilege of doing design work credited to his brand identity, and (c) subject to being kicked out, like Tafel and Soleri, when they expressed individuality and competence, and (d) apprenticing under a master whose own non-transferable genius and lack of discipline made it unclear what it was they were supposed to learn.

Astonishingly, it worked. It only worked for thirty years. In 1932, the year Wright turned 65, Olgivanna successfully brought feudalism to Wisconsin.

Apprentices came and went. The first subordinate was the one who stayed the longest: the tall handsome loyal workhorse William Wesley Peters. An inner circle developed, orbiting around the force of Olgivanna's personality. This system produced Fallingwater, the Usonian houses, the Johnson Wax Building, the buildings at Taliesin West, the Guggenheim, the late houses like offhand sonatas and waltzes, all these beautiful flowers of the feudal system. He was quoted late in life that he was "shaking designs out of his sleeve."

Examples of the indignities that some of the students suffered - for instance, every year Wright would arrive in his big expensive Cherokee-red car and send out a party of tuition-paying architectural students into the murderous Phoenix heat to paint the rocks beneath a mine tailing visible from Taliesin West, because the stained rocks spoiled the purity of his view - are easy to come by, but fail to shock after a while. Ecstatic dance was replaced with mandatory black-tie dinners. Extreme diets were replaced by having to choke down Frank's absurd rhetoric. Apprentices were expected to gift Wright with boxes full of design ideas twice a year, at Christmas and on his birthday. Birthday boxes.

While Wright attended to the architecture, Olgivanna orchestrated the loyalties and private lives of their students, with iron will and an impressive array of emotional tactics. She went as far as arranging extramarital affairs. Frank Lloyd Wright had always been good at building his persona and brand, making himself into a kind of figure to be seen from a long distance, like "Disney" or "Hitchcock", legible at a glance and incorporating the effort of mere employees. Wright while still inhabiting his body was transformed into something more fierce and potent and everlasting than a God - he became a brand, and that's impressive enough. But it was Olgivanna who brought out his full ability to capitalize on the effort of others, and made Taliesin West into a wild-west labor camp.

In 1935 Olgivanna's daughter Svetlana and Wright's longtime apprentice, the tall handsome loyal workhorse Wes Peters, ran off and got married. Olgivanna disapproved but they were eventually welcomed back in the fold. Then in 1946 Svetlana and Olgivanna's grandson Daniel tragically died in a Wisconsin car crash, which threw Olgivanna into a deep depression. According to apprentices (quoted in "A Taliesin Legacy" by Tobias S. Guggenheimer), after Olgivanna's other daughter Iovanna returned from an extended 1949 European study experience with Gurdjieff,

Olgivanna wanted to control Taliesin… Her compulsion was expressed through control, which during Mr. Wright's lifetime ended at the doors of the drafting room. It appeared particularly effective over women, including highly accomplished ones. After he died, it extended to judgment in architecture and influenced strongly the character of Taliesin architects' work produced during the remaining years of her life….Gurdjieff exercises became central in Taliesin life and her influence waxed. While the last decade of his life was busy with professional work, Wright was not oblivious of her attempt to reshape the texture of Taliesin. In 1953, he finally reached his limit and blew up at her in their Taliesin West quarters one morning, "You are not going to turn this into a Gurdjieff Institute," he roared. Olgivanna paced behind him, "Fronk, Fronk, be reasonable."

This is more than dirty laundry; this means something important about the source and substance of Wright's reputation.

After Wright died in 1959, Olgivanna took control. As the keeper of the Brand she continued to consult her dead husband and her dead Gurdjieff via séance, and took their instructions. She not only went forward under Wright's banner, but consolidated her power by ousting John Howe, replacing him with the tall handsome and - more than anything else - loyal Wes Peters, requiring approval on every design that went out the door. Assistants weren't judged on the merit of their designs, just their degree of loyalty. So she became the architect. She demanded absolute loyalty, and she herself had dubious architectural judgment. You needn't take my word: go take a look at the Kaden Tower in Louisville Kentucky, a serious contender for the most unsightly building in America. With the aging Fellowship, the Lost Boys of Taliesin still gathered around her, and the strong handsome loyal workhorse Wes Peters still productive, Olgivanna continued to run things. She had a 40-year age advantage on her ex-husband.

This went on for decades. Here's the source of the hero worship. Here's the source of all puzzling disappointments associated with Taliesin Associates, the errant design, the elaborate mythology, the attempt to redefine Wright's individualist and constantly evolving work as a single cohesive 'organic' movement, the litigiousness, and the strange humorless calcification.

Sometime in the late 1960s Olgivanna became aware that Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, had defected from the Soviet Union and was in the United States. Allilueva had had quite a bit of press coverage, and had published a best-selling book.

Olgivanna came to the conclusion that this Svetlana Allileuva was the spiritual replacement for her own dead daughter Svetlana. And that Stalin's daughter should come to Taliesin and marry Wes Peters. Her reasoning was less than watertight, but it was understood as a spiritual / emotional decision and therefore no subject to criticism. They'd both been born in Georgia, or close enough. And Svetlana would bring her own considerable resources; she'd been rewarded had a little bit of money from her defection and book deal.

So Olgivanna began plying Stalin's defected daughter Svetlana Allilueva with hand-written invitations to Taliesin West. Despite Allilueva's puzzled reluctance, she flew to Phoenix in March 1970 and was transported by car to the campus. She developed a distaste for the desert landscape. Within three weeks she married the tall handsome loyal workhorse Wes Peters in a Svetlana-replacement program, and Stalin's daughter was calling Frank Lloyd Wright's widow "Mother".

This arrangement did not last long. The couple produced a daughter, Olga Peters Evans, and were divorced after 20 months of marriage. Allilueva retained the highest degree of respect for Wes Peters, except for his blind devotion to his group. But she hated Olgivanna. In her book "Distant Music" she draws this portrait:

This hierarchical system was appalling: the widow at the top, then the board of directors (a formality); then her own close inner circle, making all the real decisions; then working architects - the real working horses; at the bottom, students who paid high sums to be admitted, only to be sent the next day to work in the kitchen to peel potatoes….. Mrs. Wright's word was law. She had to be adored and worshipped and flattered as often as possible; flowers send by mail and presented by hand she enjoyed and encouraged. She gave advice to the architects, guided a drama circle, a dance group and a choir, counseling on private lives and relationships, expecting everyone to make personal confessions to her. She was a 'spiritual leader' and self-appointed minister, preaching on Sunday mornings on matters of God and man, when everyone was supposed to be in her large living room…..

Svetlana also reports, chillingly, that students at Taliesin were welcome to have sex, "all they could take."

"Some members of the fellowship derived their sense of being from their closeness to Olgivanna. Their souls virtually fed on hers. They were her mouthpieces and the operators who transmitted her directions. Their function gave them a sense of illusive power. Often, when they were capriciously dispossessed by a flick of the finger, they crumbled. The devastating effect of her benevolent force took its tool on the lives of those who could not develop a self separate from Olgivanna's. They stayed in the fold because the physical environment was the only remaining vestige of their fantasy… Mr. Wright's work… trapped those of his own disciples who stayed in the fold in a legacy too large for them to handle. Yet that legacy served as the only justification for their existence. Truth, which had resided at the core of Mr. Wright's life and work, was replaced with empty rhetoric, over-used phrases, imitative forms, and make-believe poses, all to help his students convince themselves and each other of an illusive relevancy."

- Reflections from the Shining Brow, Kamal Amin, 2004.

There's plenty more dirty laundry about Taliesin if you have a taste for it.

Before 2006, you had to work a little harder, pick up clues, and read between the lines. In 2006 it was all codified into a single book, The Fellowship, by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman, for your convenience.

All this long story of human weakness of one kind or another is nothing but stale gossip --

Except when it comes to the efforts of Wrightians to sanctify his name and place him above criticism. That's the same moment when the "appreciation" flips over into destruction. Make Wright into an infallible hero, and you can't see him for the absolute genius he was. That's the damn shame.

Why is this relevant? Because the FLW image defines the public perception about what an architect is and does. It matters to understand where this absurdly rich legacy came from and tease out what’s valuable, and what’s not, and to put the core lessons of Taliesin back into circulation, instead of making it an aesthetic argument that goes in a circle, "it's great because it's great". We have to understand the difference between his work, his students’ work, and the work merchandised under his brand. We have to be able to value his legacy on its merits.

That’s the only reason to drag Wright’s personal history into serious, clear-eyed evaluation: because he still matters.