University of Wisconsin Madison - Badger Yearbook (Madison, WI)

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22 anything higher, now, than conventional or pecuniary success, the sincerity inevitable to high aim becomes a quality of the hero, while such art as we know can only be had by way of taste. ■ But I know of no great civilization ever built by way of “taste. Art must always take the lead, as it has in any true form of culture. Every living people leaving us a record of their life to read as great art, lived that art as their own life or the other end around lived their lives as great art. We are not a happy people in this sense. We are missing something of immense consequence. And what is missing cannot be taught. It may be engendered. Therefore we need engendering culture more and need informative education much less. Dutchmen made the queen of the garden from the lowly larkspur by way of culture, not by way of education. They studied the nature of the Larkspur, the climatic and soil conditions it loved and planted it where these abounded: took the finer specimens that grew and gave them more of the thing natural to their growth until we got the Delphinium. The Taliesin ' Fellowship ■RANK U.OYD WRIGHT ARCHITECT tea room under K kitchen L bo i rooms M qiris rooms N machine shops O p r i n f shop P leader R associate leoders S quest house T foremen help U qaraqrr 'Z light plont reserve wafer nippb ! barns stable

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21 But I like the noble word “radical. It means of the root or to the root. The radical must know things from the ground up. He must know how and why the thing is as it is because he knows that life can be kept living only by growing. Growth is his passionate concern. Iking radical he is therefore truly conservative and is the only man to be trusted with the life of anything or able to invest the changes natural to organic growth in either law or edu-cation. The radical alone sees that life itself is growth, and to avoid the agony of disestablishment he would pre-pare for it in any necessary form he would make. ■ Now popular education, being from the top down, is not radical in any sense. ■ As already said “education is a coward where life or action is concerned and cowardly to such an extent that in all forms of self expression other than classical conformity or money-getting we seem to have no soul to call our own nor do we seem to be very deeply interested in one of any kind. ■ We are pretty comfortable, thank you, and fairly rich by way of what has been developed by way of the other fellow. ■ The history of what he did is with us as our popular “art and we live in houses built by the dead for the living—practice all forms of obsolescence from an antique Jewish money-changers' money-system and the old fuedal system of landlord and tenant to a wholly subservient religion, politics and art. ■ Too much comfort seems to have murdered what passion young souls might have known and has done so by advice of counsel “Education. ■ But signs of revolt are not lacking. Going about the country from coast to coast and from North to South pleading the cause of architecture, even in our universities 1 find healthy resentment growing against arm-chair education. Rebellion is as necessary as amity if life is to go on worthwhile as any affair of our own. Rebellion is necessary if the organic law of natural change is to be acknowledged and made a feature of our establishment in order that we may not continually live in fear, tortured by economic anxiety, frustrate from beginning to end. If we aim at St. Mark's as Exhibited in the Frank Lloyd Wright Show at the Wisconsin Union Gallery

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23 ■ IJbelieve we can get creative men and women that way and only in that way. Atmosphere and Action. In an atmosphere of sincere hard work and ideas taking shape as reality—in a life where ideas are the form of action and action the form of ideas—only there the quali-ties our life now most needs can grow. That is why—finally—I have taken a hand in making architects as well as in making architecture. The Taliesin Fellowship aims to give such spiritual climate and soil to youth as Dutchmen gave, physically, to the Larkspur, encouraging free growth according to nature and in much the same way the Larkspur was encouraged. ■ The culture of the Larkspur was an experiment with the Dutch. And the Taliesin Fellowship is likewise an experiment. But it is an experiment along the lines of normal growth with a chance of life for the individual soul. And is that not much better than inevitable sterility of the individual and certainly the death of the soul as individual? ■ Only superior human material can shed and survive the popular education of today. Whenever education really “takes” we seldom hear of its brilliant successes outside the classroom—either in the chair or on the benches. | Our “experiment” in civilization—we call it democracy- needs another type of success. Machine-age life, if it is to be happy or continue very long, needs real interpretation and creative self-expression. And this is no matter of complex “Education” as we practice it—but is a more simple matter of Culture as we have not yet learned to practice it. For the Badger Taliesin April - 1933