If you’re interested in Frank Lloyd Wright, you should definitely pay a visit to his home town someday.

Taliesin, and related buildings (Hillside Home School, the windmill, etc.) are beautiful, and the setting, in the hills by the Wisconsin River, is romantic and poetic.

If you want to understand Wright, his aesthetic and his ideas, I think it’s useful to see Taliesin. It’s also interesting to visit the family cemetery across the road, next to Unity Chapel. Wright isn’t buried there any more (Mrs. Wright had him exhumed, cremated and moved to Arizona after her death), but his very dramatic grave is still there, and Mamah Borthwick Cheney is not far away.

Madison (where Wright actually grew up) is kind of a museaum of Wright’s architecture, with examples from most stages of his life, including the Unitarian Church, the first Usonian house, and Monona Terrace, which is more or less his design, even though it was not built until the 1990’s.

I think Mr. Wright can hardly be blamed for the state of the american suburbs. In fact, Wright was working against that status quo in his Usonian scheme.

That said, I don’t think he was infallible… Wright made mistakes and claimed credit for others successes (while learning from both). Even so, I still feel that his art, architecture, planning projects, and general strife towards human decency show that his heart was, for the most part, in the right place.