At work, while trying to comprehend a mass shooting where a man killed 20 children, I thought, "if only everyone lived in a Wright-designed building, they would find joy and happiness.... Oh." I remembered the damned 1914 massacre.
Here's what the man wrote about the aftermath later in his autobiography:
The tragedy that resulted in the destruction of Taliesin the first left me in strange plight.
From the moment of my return to that devastating scene of horror I had wanted to see no one and I would see no one but the workmen.
....
Those nights in the little back room were black, filled with strange unreasoning terrors. No moon seemed to shine. No stars in the sky. No frog-song from the pond below. Strange, unnatural silence, the smoke still rising from certain portions of the ruin.
Unable to sleep, I would get up, numb, take a cold bath to bring myself alive, go out alone on the hills in the night, not really knowing where. But I would come safely back again with only a sense of black night and strange fear, no beauty visible. Grope how I might–no help from that source. And I would grope my way to bed.
Strange! Instead of feeling that she, whose life had joined mine there at Taliesin was a spirit near, that too was utterly gone....
This is not fanciful word painting. It is what happened. Gone into this blackness of oblivion for several years to come was all sense of her whom I had loved as having really lived at all.
This was merciful? I believe the equivalent of years passed in the course of weeks, in my consciousness. Time ceased to exist. Days passed into nights, numb to all but the automatic steps toward rebuilding.
....
I do not understand this any better now than I did then. But so it was. Months went by, but they might have been, and I believe they were, for me, a lifetime....
... [T]he fact remains—until many years after, to turn my thoughts backward to what had transpired in the life we lived together at Taliesin was like trying to see into a dark room in which terror lurked, strange shadows—moved—and I would do well to turn away....
....
So the rage that grew when I felt the inimical weight of human censure on my soul began to fade away and finally took refuge in the idea that Taliesin should live to show something more for its mortal sacrifice than a charred and terrible ruin on a lonely hillside in the beloved Valley.
There is release from anguish in action. Anguish would not leave Taliesin until action for renewal began. Again, and at once, all that had been in motion before at the will of the architect was set in motion. Steadily, again, stone by stone, board by board, Taliesin the II began to rise from Taliesin the first.
Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, vol. 2 (1992; Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York City, 1992), p. 240-241.
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