Architecture and utopia: Cornelia Brierly and the Taliesin Fellowship (Frank Lloyd Wright)

This dissertation is the biography of a remarkable woman named Cornelia Brierly. She has lived a unique life as a member of the Taliesin Fellowship, a communal school of architecture founded in 1932 by the renowned American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. After arriving at Taliesin in 1934, Brierly went on to become a successful landscape architect and interior designer as Wright's protege. With a career that now spans seven decades, she remains a vital member of the Fellowship at the age of ninety-two.; Brierly began her architectural studies in 1933 when she became one of only five coeds in the architecture program at Carnegie Technical Institute, which had just opened to female students. At the time, women were universally expected to marry and devote themselves to domesticity. Discouraged from working outside the home, they were a minority in college and the professions. Because architecture in particular was the exclusive domain of men, Brierly's career choice was most unusual.1 But she found the conventional approach to learning architecture at Carnegie stultifying and after learning about Wright's Fellowship, she left for Taliesin. There, her success was facilitated by her association with the Taliesin Fellowship, where women were encouraged even as their peers battled discrimination in the mainstream of society.; More than professional success, however, Brierly derives her greatest fulfillment from a life rich with culture and friendship within the Taliesin Fellowship. Seen through her eyes, the community emerges as a utopian haven with unique opportunities, especially for women.; Information for this biography came from a variety of sources including personal interviews with Cornelia Brierly and other Taliesin members (by myself and others), Brierly's memoir, Tales of Taliesin: A Memoir of Fellowship (1999), and the vast resources of the Taliesin archives. Relevant books, journal and newspaper articles, and U.S. Government statistical data were also utilized along with Frank Lloyd Wright's description of his life in An Autobiography: Frank Lloyd Wright (1977). I am also indebted to Indira Berndtson, Cornelia Brierly's younger daughter, for sharing family albums and personal information.; 1The 2000 United States Census listed 75% of all architects as male. As of 2003, the American Institute of Architects found the number had only advanced 2%, making women 27% of registered architects in America.