building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

stockings, and slippers fastened with artificial roses, that distinguish the
pastoral people of poetry and the stage. In outward show, I humbly
conceive, we looked rather like a gang of beggars, or banditti, than
either a company of honest laboring men, or a conclave of philosophers.
Whatever might be our points of difference, we all of us seemed to have
come to Blithedale with the one thrifty and laudable idea of wearing out
our old clothes. 117
Ironically we could make a parallel with the Taliesin community founded by Frank
Lloyd Wright in Spring Green (1911‐1959). Besides, the outcome of some of
Wright’s convictions, in particular the relationship between man and nature, is
probably to be attributed not only to his religious creed, but also to his cultural
references. As is well‐known, Wright, a Unitarian like George Ripley, offered hard
living conditions, and forced his collaborators and the apprentices of the Taliesin
Fellowship (established in 1932) to perform physical labour in the fields and/or in
the construction of new buildings‐pavilions: many details of these events are told by
Wright himself in his autobiography 118 .
The comparison between Brook Farm and Taliesin is suggested mainly by a fire. The
Phalanstery of Brook Farm, just built in 1846, was completely destroyed by the
flames the very evening of its inauguration. Ripley‘s community thus set out on the
sad road towards the sunset, which took place definitively in 1849, when the
buildings and the land were auctioned. Even considering the different outcomes of
the Taliesin fires, a similar destiny was reserved several times to Wright's
buildings 119 .
An experience of similar interest is that already mentioned of Fruitlands, Harvard,
Massachusetts (1843), founded by Charles Lane and Amos Bronson Alcott on the
basis of the transcendentalist principles, a few miles from Concord, a spiritual
centre of the American intellectuals of the time.
Lane, who was of English origin and an admirer of Alcott’s ideas regarding the
education of the minors, was the “preacher” and the promoter of the experiment.
117 HOWTHORNE, Nathaniel, The Blithedale Romance, Boston, Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1852, cit. pp.
74‐76
118 WRIGHT, Frank Lloyd, An Autobiography, New York, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1943 (Italian
translation by Bruno Oddera, Un’Autobiografia, Milan, Editoriale Jaca Book, 2003)
119 See McCARTER, Robert, Frank Lloyd Wright, London, Reaktion Books Ltd, 2006; and WRIGHT,
Frank Lloyd, An Autobiography, New York, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1943
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