Laboring at the Taliesin Fellowship
But it was not always a leisurely life full of culture and learning architectural technique at the Taliesin Fellowship. Students worked under the philosophy of “Learning by doing.” Fellowship students performed manual labor and the farming tasks necessary to keep Taliesin and the Hillside Home School operational. Work tasks were assigned each week, rotating students between kitchen duty, construction, architectural drafting, and other tasks necessary around Taliesin. Yen Liang describes doing “masonry, carpentry, plumbing, furniture building, and even lumber milling.” Photos of the Fellowship show students performing hard labor around Taliesin. In later years, when Wright and Olgivanna built Taliesin West, the Fellowship would close the Hillside Home School, and the collective would road trip to Arizona to study with Wright in his secondary home. They performed the same labor functions at the Arizona site.