Taliesin is the
Wisconsin home and
studio of that
infamous egomaniac of
yore,
Frank Lloyd Wright. '
Taliesin' was the name of
Wright's home, but it now
refers to the entire
parcel of
land that his
family owned.
The main building, Wright's home of many years, is a good design, one that unmistakably bears his imprint and his early 20th century style. Low-slung from the outside, spacious inside, limestone bricks rising out of the grass field. It's maybe the first design of Wright's that fit beautifully with the countryside.
Also on the site is the Riverview Terrace Restaurant, with the almost-moderne repetition of zoomy triangles in the rafters, and the Romeo and Juliet Windmill, with its extremely stylized details and fine engineering. (Wright had a great intuitive grasp for engineering and the physics of load-bearing, but he'd too often let a cool idea get in the way of a good structure. Not here, though.) The Midway Barns takes to same idea as the Taliesin home, but is more a stylized barn than a rule-breaker and trendsetter. Lesser buildings on the site are the Unity Chapel and the Tan-y-deri house tailor-made to placate his in-laws.
Wright was known for his interior design, but Taliesin has no famous bits of furniture or layout that I know of. It does show his famous control-freakiness, however. He prevented cows from chewing cud on the compound grounds, because he didn't like the black-and-white on green grass. He preferred a Cherokee red, which is why all automobiles owned by tenants on the lot were required to be painted that color. He designed everything in each building, including the electricial system, which went very literally haywire in 1925 and severely burned the main Taliesin structure. (It was the second fire there - a previous tragedy happened there, where a cook supposedly lost sanity after some abuse, killed Wright's wife, and set Taliesin on fire.)