Location
The valley in which Taliesin sits was originally settled by Wright's maternal family, the Lloyd Joneses, during the Civil War. Immigrants from Wales, Wright's maternal grandfather and uncle were Unitarian ministers, and his two aunts began a co-educational school in the family valley in 1887.
Wright's mother, Anna Lloyd Jones Wright, began sending her son to the valley every summer, beginning when he was eleven years old. The family, their ideas, religion, and ideals, greatly influenced the young Wright, who later changed his middle name from Lincoln (in honor of Abraham Lincoln) to Lloyd in deference to this side of the family.
When Wright decided to construct a home in this valley, he chose the name of the Welsh bard Taliesin, whose name means "shining brow" or "radiant brow". Wright positioned the home on the "brow" of a hill, a favorite of his from childhood, rather than on the peak so that Taliesin would appear as though it arose naturally from the landscape. In his words, "...not on the land, but of the land". The home was designed with three wings that included his living quarters, an office, and farm buildings.
Aside from placing the building into the landscape, Wright used Taliesin as a way to explore his ideas of organic architecture. The chimneys and stone piers were built from local limestone, laid by the stonemasons in a way that evoked the outcroppings of Wisconsin's surrounding Driftless Area (the area unaccompanied by glacial drift), and sand from the nearby Wisconsin River was mixed into the stucco walls to evoke the river's sandbars
Read more about this topic: Taliesin (studio)