Talking About Honesty

We are on the last leg of our trip in Arizona, before hitting the airport and heading east we stopped at Taliesin West the winter home and architectural school of Frank Lloyd Wright, the American architect.  It was really neat being there, the buildings and land surrounding are very beautiful and fit well together. 


We had a really nice tour guide who was um....very informative about certain aspects of FLW's life and had the beautiful ability to be able to glaze over other aspects in order to make the man look like a saint.  If you have never had the rare pleasure of knowing an architect personally let me clue you in on a few things.  First, architects are artists and as anyone can guess like all artists they are needy and can be extremely difficult.  This is not a negative personality trait, after all, without the ability to think outside (and live outside) of the proverbial box, there would be no art.  Living outside of the box regardless of whether it is a foot or a mile, is a challenge, you are automatically different and noted as such.  BUT once you become an icon, an American icon especially I have noticed your story is retold as if you have never even thought to set a pinkie toe outside the box and were still able to thrive and create and manipulate your surroundings in ways that no one else ever thought of.


A perfect example is that FLW was married 3 times, this was mentioned during the tour, however our lovely guide merely mentioned that his second marriage was "not good" and nothing more.  What she really meant to say was that the second wife was the wife of a client originally and they ran off to Europe together, later in his summer home located in Wisconsin and also called Taliesin, a fire was set (supposedly by a servant) and anyone who tried to escape the building was killed with an axe by same said servant.  Seven people died in that fire, FLW walked away clean as a whistle and lived to marry again. 


I ask myself, why was this part skipped?  There were many other parts that were conveniently skipped but I am not here to drag all of this man's skeleton's out of the closet I wanted merely to give an example so that I can once more post the question.  Why not embrace the fact that he was different?  It may actually make him more interesting and worth knowing about.  To keep repeating that he was "difficult" really does not cut it for me.  After all I am a Van Gogh fan so I get and appreciate extreme.


We got some phenomenal photos, saw some really cool places and met some interesting people too.  Once I get home and find my camera cord I will get some items posted for all to enjoy.


Till then.........
~CM