• Email   • Print  The Dreams of Frank Lloyd Wright   The news
in early June came on what would have been Frank Lloyd Wright’s
138th birthday. The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in
Scottsdale, Arizona, which is part of the Frank Lloyd Wright
Foundation, had been issued a warning by the Higher Learning
Commission—its accreditation endangered, its student body now
down to ten pupils, its finances in shambles. But this was less
surprising than the fact that the school still exists at all.
Wright founded what he called the Taliesin Fellowship in 1932,
when his own financial prospects were dismal, as they had been
throughout much of the 1920s. Having seen the great Chicago
architect Louis Sullivan, his former boss, die in poverty not
many years earlier, Wright was forestalling his own prospective
oblivion. Considered a virtual has-been (“as an architect he has
little to contribute,” concluded John Cushman Fistere in Vanity
Fair in 1931, and Fistere was not the first to say so), Wright
created the fello