| In the past several years the life and work of
Frank Lloyd Wright has become widely discussed in popular
culture. Wright’s third wife, Olgivanna, was an early and lifelong
devotee of Gurdjieff ’s Fourth Way mysticism and introduced
Wright to Gurdjieff and his teachings. For over 30 years, from
their first meeting in the 1920s until Wright’s death in 1959,
Olgivanna was FLW’s life partner and co-director of the Taliesin
Fellowship in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Although well known
as the originator of Prairie Style architecture, Wright’s best
known and most “organic” buildings were designed after he met
Olgivanna and established the commune-like Taliesin Fellowship
in theearly 1930s.
How much of Wright’s post-Prairie Style architecture was
influenced by Gurdjieff ’s spiritual understandings of the
material world through Olgivanna? This presentation is
intended to be more speculative than scholarly in addressing
this question. Through visual images of Wright’s buildings and
my own experience as an architectural historian, I will present a
hypothesis that Wright’s best work was heavily influenced by an
understanding of sacred architecture learned, in part, from his
wife Olgivanna, herself a Fourth Way mystic.
(NB: Much of the material in this presentation is informed by
the book The Fellowship – The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd
Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship by Roger Friedland and
Harold Zellman, HarperCollins, 2006.)
Eric Wheeler is a Certified Teacher of the Enneagram in the
Narrative Tradition (1999). He offers seminars and private
consultations in the Enneagram for churches, schools, businesses
and individuals in the Upper Midwest. He is an adjunct faculty
member of Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Eric
also works as a consultant in historic preservation and
heritage tourism. |