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In his first year at the house, Kelly Oliver’s room was situated beneath the living room where he could hear the footsteps of those above and the occasional strains of Wright’s piano. Oliver described Wright’s musings as casual and contemplative: “He sort of doodled… He didn’t play anything completely through.” Wright used the piano as a mental workspace allowing him to explore and refine ideas internally: “Wright designed everything in his head,” Oliver explains. “He was never trying to figure things out on paper.”
When he did put pencil to paper, Wright tended to sketch ideas quickly and on a grid system—often using a heavy #2 pencil, rather than a fine one in his later years. As Oliver described, “When he did sit down at drawing, he drew what he had been planning to draw. And sometimes it’s very rough. But the whole scheme he would sketch out himself.” The head draftsman, well aware of Wright’s propensity to revisit and revise, often managed two sets of final drawings: one for ongoing work and one for final touches. This ensured that the final plans met Wright’s exacting standards while preserving the integrity of the work already completed.
Wright’s leadership was defined by his informal yet impactful communication style. During Sunday morning breakfast gatherings, he would initiate discussions with open-ended questions and “then give a talk on a subject he probably had in mind all along,” Kelly mused. A notable development was the introduction of a recorder to document these Sunday talks, allowing Wright’s insights to be preserved for future reflection.
Mrs. Wright
Oliver described Olgivanna Wright, as “a little hard to get to know at first” but later came to understand that “she was the one that made the Fellowship function. From determining living quarters to approving the week’s menu, to arranging vacations and weekly work assignments, to making sure Mr. Wright ate a healthy diet, she helped Mr. Wright live a worry-free existence.”
Her support was evident in a memorable incident where she, knowing Mr. Wright felt disinterested in a speech he was about to make, deliberately shared a provocative opinion to rally his confidence. “This got Mr. Wright fired up and he gave a great talk’” Oliver recalled, having witnessed the episode from the driver’s seat.
Despite their occasional disagreements, Mrs. Wright’s insights helped smooth out personal and professional challenges, making them a well-functioning team: “Mr. Wright depended upon her quite a bit on analyzing people, deciding what to say. I don’t think anyone’s ever written about that or dared to write about how they worked together. And I’m not sure that many of us really know exactly how it all worked out. But it did work. And they both had their own interests,” Oliver explained.
The Movements
The influence of George Gurdjieff and the Movements—sacred dances introduced by Mrs. Wright—was quite visible at Taliesin. These dances, aimed at spiritual awakening, were integrated into the apprentices’ routine, oftentimes much to Wright’s chagrin. “He hated to have the guys spend time doing that when they should be working,” Oliver said, highlighting the tension between artistic and practical demands.
This tension reached a peak during the simultaneous preparation of an exhibition of Wright’s work at the site of the future Guggenheim Museum in New York and a significant dance performance at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. “The minute we finished the exhibit in New York, a number of us immediately went to the Goodman Theatre and started working on the performance there. I was working on the lighting, and some were dancers,” Oliver recalled. The overlapping commitments created a frenetic environment but resulted in successful outcomes for the exhibit and the performance.
Despite his own lack of interest in the Movements, Oliver acknowledged the deep commitment of others, including his wife, to the dance practices that actively continued as he moved on to other projects.
Rebuilding, Resilience, Gender Roles and Community Life
A pivotal moment in Oliver’s time at Taliesin occurred when a brush fire destroyed the Hillside Theater, the very building he had worked on his very first day. Oliver recalled the scene: “Mr. Wright had been burning some weeds and grass… and the fire got into the theater.” This calamity, which started outside the stage door, spurred Wright to design a new, fireproof structure. Wright was reportedly, “in the drafting room designing the new theater while the old one was burning,” Oliver recounted, although he admits that this story might have been embellished. “ I was assisting in cleaning up the burned remains of the prior theater structure the next morning when Mr. Wright arrived and asked me to take charge of the reconstruction,” Kelly notes.
During this time, Oliver had married, and he and his wife, having lost their room which was above the Dining Room, were assigned an apartment at Midway Barn. Other apprentices and their families also resided nearby. Oliver, who perhaps wanted to personalize his home, only enclosed the patio of his apartment, as he was preoccupied with the stressful task of rebuilding the theater before winter. “We were trying to get the theater completed… We had a night shift, and that was hard to do,” he recalls. The urgency to close the theater before moving to Arizona for the winter meant they had to work quickly. “We had to get it closed in,” Oliver explained, noting that while they managed to close in the Living Room and start on the Theater the first year, it wasn’t until the second year that they could fully close the theater in.
When asked about what life was like for his wife, Oliver explained how Taliesin was distinguished by its progressive approach to gender roles and inclusive community life. Women were actively involved in all aspects of the Fellowship’s work, from drafting and construction to cooking, serving, and participating in the arts. Oliver highlighted, “One of our best plasterers on the ceilings in the theater was a woman,” and added that “women had the opportunity to be involved in anything at Taliesin.” This egalitarian ethos extended to all facets of life, including the Gurdjieff Movements, where participation was balanced among men and women.
Children and families were also an integral part of the Taliesin community. Oliver recalled, “If you had a child here… you just dragged the child along,” he laughed, reflecting the community’s acceptance of children and teenagers who worked alongside adults. He notes, “there were several children… and that was not unusual.” Teenagers like Wes Peters’ son Brandoch participated in community work outside school hours, reinforcing the inclusive environment.
Hillside 1949. Photo Courtesy Kelly Oliver.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Final Days and Enduring Legacy
Oliver vividly remembers the day of Frank Lloyd Wright’s death on April 9, 1959. “It was rather sudden,” he recalled. While working on the Dallas Theater Center project, he received the unexpected news from Eugene Masselink and shortly thereafter from the theater foreman asking if he should shut the job down, which Oliver said would be “normal under normal circumstances.”
Recalling a fond memory of Frank Lloyd Wright, Oliver reminisces,
“We were hammering away in Mr. Wright’s bedroom on a small addition when Mr. Wright came in to take a nap. We paused, thinking we should stop, but he said, ‘No, keep working. Construction is music to my ears.’ So, he lay down on that little bed, and we just kept banging away. That memory guided my decision; I told the foreman to keep working.”
Wright’s death profoundly affected the Taliesin community. Kelly had taken the night train to Spring Green and spent the night in a spare bedroom above the lower parking lot at Taliesin. “First thing the next morning I heard a car arriving in the parking lot. Wes Peters and several seniors had driven all night from Taliesin West in a station wagon with Mr. Wright’s body.”
Oliver describes the somber mood as they prepared to honor Wright’s passing:
“I joined several ex-apprentices from the local area who had congregated under the bridge and later helped decorate the farm wagon with pine branches that would be used to take Mr. Wright to the church graveyard. Wes Peters asked me to help him in the house and we placed the coffin on two small tables in the Living Room where Mrs. Wright would sit later to receive mourners from the local area. Later, the coffin was placed on a farm wagon and, pulled by a team of horses and driven by Wes Peters and Gene Masselink followed on foot by Mrs. Wright, Iovanna, and myself, then ex-apprentices and others from the area, proceeded down the county road and then the highway to the family graveyard. Following the burial, a short service was held in the family chapel…It was a sad day.”
In reflecting on Wright’s legacy, Oliver offers a portrait of a visionary architect whose presence, processes, and influence shaped not just buildings, but the very lives of those who worked with him, especially Oliver’s. “Mr. Wright’s influence was more than an influence, it was the only architecture I knew. So, I had no problem adapting to what I thought Mr. Wright would approve of. That was always in the back of my mind” and remained there throughout his career.
After completing the construction of the Dallas Theater Center and several years in practice with David George, another ex-apprentice in Dallas, Kelly was invited by Mrs. Wright to join the Taliesin Associated Architects (TAA), where he worked for several years before being assigned as the TAA representative on a high-rise office building in Louisville Kentucky for Lincoln Income Life. After completing Lincoln Income, he left the Fellowship, got married, and opened his own office in Denver, Colorado. Though his firm was relatively small, consisting of just himself, a partner, and up to six draftsmen, it handled about 50 projects for Taliesin, including several churches and notably, the Vail Pass project in Colorado. Kelly’s office was also an early adopter of computer drafting, which allowed them to produce projects as efficiently as the Fellowship at the time, and were designated as the Denver Office of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Despite the changes in his career and location, Kelly maintained a continuous association with Taliesin, reflecting the lasting impact of the Fellowship and Wright’s teachings on his professional life.
Eager to learn more? Watch Kelly Oliver’s 2023 interview with Frank Baron:
