SPRING GREEN, Wis. -- The great house known as Taliesin floats above the Iowa County countryside like a Prairie-style dream palace.
Viewed from the highway below, Taliesin, the home, school and testament of architectural giant Frank Lloyd Wright, is a shimmering vision of gently sloping roofs and neatly arrayed windows, fanciful chimneys and winding walkways, integrated into a soaring, tree-dappled hill.
In the view of some historians, Taliesin, begun in 1911, is the crowning achievement of Wright's Prairie period. Others see it as a precursor to his sharp turn toward modernism.
Taliesin, which in Welsh means "Shining Brow," "stands for Wright the way Monticello stands for Thomas Jefferson," said Neil Levine, Gleason professor of art and architecture at Harvard University, "in that you perceive the person in the building. It's the story of his whole life and world system."
House is crumbling
A closer look reveals that the great house, unlike the Wright legend, is crumbling.
Nature, the source of Wright's organic designs and building materials, is struggling to reclaim the site on which he built the constantly mutating home and studio.
The very hill around which Wright wrapped his sprawling residence is shifting. Walls are sagging at odd angles, under pressure from the expanding roots of ancient trees.
Stone walkways, betrayed by a collapsed maintenance tunnel, are sinking and cracking. Bricks edging patios are slowly, inexorably tilting upward.
Clearly, one of the rare gems of architecture is at risk.
"It's irreplaceable," Robert Greenstreet, dean of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's School of Architecture and Urban Design, said of the endangered Wright landmark. "It represents far more than bricks and mortar in terms of architectural thinking. It would be unthinkable for Taliesin not to be there."
To save Taliesin, said James E. Goulka, president and chief executive officer of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which owns the house, school and architectural firm, may cost as much as $60 million.
And raising that kind of money in today's economy won't be an easy task, he conceded.
Surviving its history
But Taliesin's history is one of facing, and surviving, great challenges.
It was set afire in 1914 by a butler who murdered Wright's mistress, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, her two children and several draftsmen.
It burned again in 1925.
It has been beset by the Great Depression, the threat of seizure by angry creditors and the hostility of local townspeople.
In 1959, following Wright's death at age 91, the estate was subjected to a flurry of tax bills that took 10 years to pay off.
Four years ago, water-saturated earth adjoining the "tea circle" gave way, letting a 225-year-old oak fall into the roof of the studio in which Wright had, eight decades before, designed Hollyhock House for Los Angeles oil heiress Aline Barnsdall.
A rebuilt studio
Out of the wreckage of this disaster emerged a rebuilt studio, impressively replicating Wright's original workplace.
Everywhere in the rebuilt studio, now Goulka's office, is evidence of Wright's amazing eye for detail, his gift for planning every aspect of an environment.
A Japanese screen showing a red cedar meshes perfectly with a red cedar growing just outside the window.
A 1922 portrait of Wright's mother, Anna Lloyd Jones, gazes sternly down on her son's presentation table, which today serves as Goulka's desk.
And, as if to prove that nothing of substance is ever wasted at Taliesin, pencils fashioned out of wood from the fallen oak can be purchased in the nearby Visitor Destination Center.
"This is what we have to repair," said Goulka, 55, taking a visitor on a walking tour of the house and grounds. "Now is the time to get to fixing all of this. It's too important to let go."
Goulka isn't letting the sad state of the fragile, nine-decade-old residential complex get him down.
Spirituality
He's convinced that Taliesin's greatest strength lies in its spirituality -- the sense of health, vigor and uplift that comes from living and working in a Wright building.
Realistically, though, he is also aware that if the property is allowed to decline further, the world will lose one of its enduring architectural treasures.
"This is the place for Wright," he said. "It's the center of his creativity, the practice palette for everything he did elsewhere. So it's an extraordinarily important place to preserve."
Taliesin, as it stands today, is more than simply a showcase for its maker's vision. It also serves as:
A prototype for the artist's residence and studio. A home for Wright's surviving apprentices. A functioning, accredited school of architecture. And a working, for-profit architectural firm. Members of the architectural firm serve as professors at the school. Students, in turn, work with their teachers on specific projects. The system is a continuation of Wright's theory of learning by doing.
Dozens of future architects from Milwaukee have benefitted from exposure to Wright's legacy and mystique over the past 10 years, UWM's Greenstreet said. Each summer, six to eight UWM students travel to Taliesin to work with the apprentices.
That continuing tradition, Greenstreet said, is one more reason why Taliesin must not only be saved but returned to its original splendor.
'Not a museum'
"Taliesin is not a museum," Goulka said. "It's not Fallingwater [in Pennsylvania] or the Dana House [in Illinois]. We have people who live here, work here, play here. That makes what we do with these historic buildings far more complex."
Crews at Taliesin are getting ready to embark on a $900,000 project aimed at stabilizing the hill on which the house stands.
Workers will temporarily remove the well-worn stones from the walkway that connects the old studio to the great house, rebuild the maintenance tunnel and install a system of pipes that will prevent water from building up in the hillside.
The foundation has enough money on hand to create new drainage from the top of the hill down to the pond. The work is being paid for out of a $1.16 million matching grant from the Save America's Treasures program, which is administered by the National Park Service. Private gifts, solicited separately, are expected to amount to an additional $1 million.
After the hillside has been stabilized, workers will pay attention to the property's foundation.
Once this has been done, workers will be in a position to start shoring up the formal living room and the bedrooms occupied by Wright and his third wife, Olgivanna, as well as the guest wing that lies directly beneath those rooms.
It will take eight to 10 years to complete the necessary restoration and create an endowment to keep the facilities in order, Goulka said.
Hundreds of other spaces at Taliesin, among them the Hillside complex and the Midway barns, also await conservation and rejuvenation.
Goulka hopes that the grounds of the estate eventually can be restored to the way they looked in the late 1950s, when Wright was still active. Fifty-year-old aerial photographs will help the architects return the landscape to what Wright visualized and experienced.
It's a daunting task.
Goulka's own pathway to a leadership post at Taliesin was long and tortuous.
He was conceived, he enjoys telling interviewers, in a house in Oak Park, Ill., just across the street from the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, where the budding designer spent much of his early career.
Early in his career, Goulka worked at several banks in the area of corporate finance.
He then became chief operating officer of Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., and led a Web-related technology company. He came to the Wright Foundation this year, succeeding H. Nicholas Muller III as chairman and CEO.
For his part, Goulka is not starting from scratch.
Tourism booming
Tourism is booming, both in Wisconsin and in Scottsdale, Ariz., where the foundation maintains Taliesin West, an outpost that has become the main headquarters of the school and architectural firm.
In addition, the foundation has established ownership rights to Wright's intellectual property. As a result, franchising fees for the use and manufacture of Wright's designs, from wristwatches and clocks to dinnerware and replicas of Wright furniture, topped $1 million last year -- and are still climbing.
Each year, about 30,000 paying customers tour the picturesque Wisconsin property; 130,000 view the Arizona site.
Goulka hopes that sprucing up and publicizing the original Taliesin will boost interest in the Spring Green buildings which, for many Wright enthusiasts, are the heart of his legacy. It was here that Wright spent most of his nine decades and designed many of his great works.
That history, when considered from a strictly preservationist point of view, "presents some major conundrums" for conservators, Harvard's Levine said.
Levine, a renowned Wright authority, agrees with Goulka that Taliesin is a prime Wright site. However, determining exactly what point in time to return it to is difficult since Taliesin was never really finished.
Usually, Levine said, you return a building to the date that the architect left it when it was officially completed.
But Taliesin has no completion date, since even after Wright's death it continued to be worked on by people who had worked with him when he was alive.
Taliesin, Levine said, "poses probably as complicated a situation as any building I can think of."