A Way of Life: An Apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright

A Way of Life is an extraordinary record of the eighteen months that Lois Gottlieb spent with Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship in the late 1940s. Wright started the Fellowship in 1932 during the depression era when he had little or no work and thought it a worthwhile idea to train young architects. The apprentices came from all sorts of backgrounds and many different countries. Some of them joined the Fellowship because they had seen Wright's work, others because they had read his autobiography. All of them wanted to be involved with his new architecture and to emulate his approach, which was to make all aspects of living more beautiful and compatible with the environment. Taliesin was Wright's home and farm and Taliesin West in Arizona was his escape from the severe Wisconsin winters. Taliesin was operated as a self-contained working community where the apprentices became self-sufficient while continuing their architectural education. The Fellowship emphasised not only design and construction but also philosophy, arts, crafts, farming and gardening. This publication offers unique photographs as well as personal recollections of a time spent working on what has been described as Frank Lloyd Wright's autobiography in wood and stone.