Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice Vern Swaback shares experience at Taliesin West

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was published in 2017. Vernon D. Swaback died on March 15, 2024.

The legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright influenced the future of design in many ways — but one important one is in the legacy he left behind in his apprentices.

Vern Swaback was one of them. He studied under Wright from 1957 until 1978 at Taliesin West, his Scottsdale home, studio and school. Swaback went on to become a celebrated architect in his own right as the founder and managing partner of Swaback Partners.

Last night, Swaback spoke at Taliesin West about his experience working under Wright, and The Show spoke more with him about this..

Vern Swaback was an apprentice to the late architect Frank Lloyd Wright. His new book is called “Designing for the Life of Community at a Time of Great Change.”

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: Swaback says that what Frank Lloyd Wright managed to create at Taliesin West was a true community, and he sees architecture and design as a way to reshape our society. When I sat down with him, I asked him more about how Wright shaped his own life and work — and why he decided to go study at Taliesin West to begin with.

SWABACK: My first exposure to Frank Lloyd Wright was seeing the homes that he had designed in Oak Park, Illinois, which was not too far from where I lived, and I was I think 8 years old at the time.

And if we can accept that his architecture was not just different in style but absolutely different in its whole spiritual sense of things, it could, therefore, move somebody to want to design their life around it.

It wasn’t like, “I like colonial, you like Spanish.” I mean, there was nothing to that. It was really an expression of something perhaps as deep as nature itself. I didn’t have the words, and I’m not sure having the words makes it any more meaningful because it just speaks to the whole human sense of need and desire and celebration.

And then in the fall of 1956, the Mayor (Richard J.) Daley of Chicago proclaimed Frank Lloyd Wright Day, and there was a great celebration and an unveiling of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mile High building. And I went to that, and that just sort of clinched it all. I knew then that I just had to somehow find this man.

So I wrote a letter to Taliesin in Wisconsin, and I always remember clearly that about an hour after I wrote the letter, I called. I said, “I’m very concerned that my letter will get lost.” There was an urgency about it.

And we went to Taliesin in Wisconsin. I sat between my mother and my father, and Frank Lloyd Wright looked at me and said, “Why do you want to leave the university?” I have no idea where this answer came from, but I said, “Because they’re beginning to teach preconceived ideas.”

He looked at my mother, and then my father, and he said, “Where does he get it? From you or from you?” I knew from that moment on my life had been changed.

GILGER: So what was he like as a mentor, as a teacher?

SWABACK: I can’t think of him without thinking of him as being terribly humorous. He was a joyful man. He was always exploring, you know? I mean, nothing had any meaning to him other than what he could do with it.

And you would almost have to be there to see this. He would hold up a brick and say, “A brick is just a brick, but, oh, what you can do with it.” And then if you look at things like the Johnson Wax building in Racine, Wisconsin, and other buildings, he turned the brick into a piece of magic.

GILGER: Yeah. So that’s kind of what he was like. What I wonder, also, is what did you learn? How did your aesthetic change? How did your theories behind what you wanted to do with the rest of your life change during that experience?

SWABACK: Well, long before I was at Taliesin, I was interested in design, and I remember the feeling of designing various building shapes and so forth. And I would think, “But I don’t see that this has any meaning.” I mean, it might be circular, it might be triangular or square, fancy or plain. But I I couldn’t feel that it had meaning.

And it was this search for meaning that was central to everything that radiated from him. And so, all of a sudden, there became a reason for doing something one way or another, and a very significant reason.

GILGER: So obviously this experience working under Frank Lloyd Wright, you said it changed your life and has obviously affected what you do now. How would you like that sort of theory and what it is that he taught you carried forward?

SWABACK: Well, I’d like to swing kind of a wide range to answer that because it’s not surprising that most of the people who can hire an architect tend to be rather well off and able to do things that more easily can slip into grandeur than into meaning. And so, in 2011, I formed a nonprofit called Two Worlds Community Foundation, and that gave me the sort of the corridor in which to crusade, write books and whatever about things that no one had commissioned but that I believe to be essential to life.

But there is something that goes beyond what any one client can commission, and perhaps the strongest umbrella word for that is community. And community is sort of the sum total of what all things add up to becoming, and if they add up in an artful way, then they’re worthy of the word community.

And I feel so strongly about it that the opposite of community is war. Peace is not the opposite of war because peace is just some sort of notion that nobody’s being bothered. Community may be as hard won as war, but it just has such a very different outcome.

And these words perhaps have less meaning to most people than they do to me because if you heard Frank Lloyd Wright talking about them, it was almost something injected into your bloodstream. I mean, the words were just a guide to induce a feeling. Feelings last longer than the memory of words. And there wasn’t anything about him that was inconsistent with this obvious dedication.

GILGER: You’ve said that you believe that Frank Lloyd Wright would become more relevant, more famous in the future rather than in his own time. Why do you think that is?

SWABACK: What I experienced at Frank Lloyd Wright’s side was a true community. We talk now about farm-to-fork initiatives, neighborhood gardens and so forth. That was normal for us. That’s all. That’s the only kind of food we had.

We talk about Uber, shared vehicles. That’s all that we did. We had a certain amount of vehicles, and we shared them.

We talk about the whole notion of being green. He’s now being called not only our greatest architect ever, but he’s being called our first green, our first sustainable architect.

So these things that were happening produced what you almost would consider to be a society independent of the exchange of money. Taliesin West is a World Treasure site that was built from the ground up without any employees. People who lived there, people who studied there, people who enjoyed the culture built that place.

Think of how that could change the future prospects for people who may indeed live 30 years longer than their bank account would provide. Retirement ought to become a thing of the past. We have continuing care retirement communities where people are cut off from the life of whatever would inspire them to continue to assert themselves, continue to learn.

What if, instead of that, those people could still be part of a community in which young people could learn from the elders, and elders could gain a sense of vitality and promise from the young people?

That has to be in our future. If that isn’t in our future, we probably don’t have a future. And the place to look for that as a prototype was the life lived at Taliesin West with Frank Lloyd Wright.

GILGER: Vern Swaback, thanks so much.

SWABACK: Thank you.

STEVE GOLDSTEIN: Vern Swaback was an apprentice to the late architect Frank Lloyd Wright. His new book is called “Designing for the Life of Community: At a Time of Great Change.”