Reflections From The Shining Brow by Kamal Amin

About the book

My years with Frank Lloyd Wright and Olgivanna Lazovitch
Kamal Amin

A young architectural graduate travels to America to serve an apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright. When he arrives at Taliesin, Wright's headquarters, he discovers the pervasive presence of Olgivanna Lazovitch, Wright's third wife, of whom he had known nothing until he met her.

He soon realizes that Olgivanna has created the community in which the architectural group lives as a medium for disseminating the ideas of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, teacher, and mystic under whom she was a pupil in the twenties. She had joined him in the Caucuses and traveled with him and his group through Istanbul, Dusseldorff, Berlin and finally Paris. There he established his "Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man" as a means of teaching the ancient knowledge he had acquired from the secret societies he had visited during his extensive travels in the Middle and Far east.

Gurdjieff's mesmerizing presence and his unconventional methods of imparting his knowledge have for many decades made him one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century.

The new young apprentice plunges himself in the architectural work with Wright. But he also discovers the labyrinth of convoluted methods by which Olgivanna manipulated the attitudes, lives and sexuality of the individuals of the group in order to control the community in which she eventually creates her own school. She models it after her teacher's institute.

When Olgivanna migrated to America in 1924 in response to Gurdjieff's encouragement, her agenda was to continue her work by creating a community similar to the one she had shared with her teacher. She was twenty six when she met Frank Lloyd Wright soon after she arrived. Their marriage in 1928 provided her with the ideal opportunity to achieve her goal. Through monumental and sustained effort, clever manipulation and unfettered control, Olgivanna through her thirty five marriage to the great architect, created and personally managed the community that would later be known worldwide as the Taliesin Fellowship.

At Taliesin, Olgivanna integrated Gurdjieff's system into the culture already established around the genius of Wright. That system, lodged as subculture, eventually emerged as legitimate component of the educational principles at Taliesin. After Wright's death, it dominated the whole enterprise. Olgivanna's truth became The WORD.

Through individuals who left Taliesin, to start lives of their own, she recruited groups from Chicago, Pittsburgh, Toledo, Louisville and other places to come to seek her teachings which were rooted in Gurdjieff's principles. Her manipulation extends beyond the community to include prominent personalities such as Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva and a prominent neurosurgeon and his wife and others.

The author narrates encounters with notable personalities such as Henry and Clare Luce, Charles Laughton, Mike Todd, Anthony Quinn, Carl Sandburg and others.

The author had arrived from Egypt in 1951 at age twenty two to study with Wright. He worked with him during his crowning decade until Wright's death in 1959. From 1951 until her death in 1985, Olgivanna and the author continued a very close and complex relationship.

With no axe to grind, the author sheds new light on what has often been regarded as a shadowy, convoluted life style of this complex woman, who was vilified by many and worshiped by a few. He was personally involved in the events narrated in thus book to which he stood close. Frequently he walked into the picture and became a member of the cast.

Anyone interested in architecture, psychology, alternate communities, women's leadership roles, and the implications of personality cults will likely be interested in reading this book. Wright himself a giant, appears prominently throughout the book, but this is Olgivanna's story. Although much has been written about Wright, Olgivanna's influence at Taliesin has been only suggested. The author has expressed the strength of both of these imposing figures in a memoir that reveals his own life as it was affected by his association with each of them.

About the author

Kamal Amin, Architect, Structural Engineer, was born in Egypt. He obtained a bachelor degree in architecture from the University of Cairo. He came across the work of Frank Lloyd Wright at the cultural center in the United States Embassy in Cairo in 1948. Fascinated by Wright's work, he flew from Cairo to Phoenix immediately after his graduation in 1951, where he joined Wright at Taliesin near Scottsdale, Arizona. He worked with Wright eight years until Wright's death in 1959. Then he continued with the firm for the following eighteen years.

During his years at Taliesin, he studied and practiced the principles of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, as related by Olgivanna Lazovitch, Wright's third and most influential wife. She had been a student of Gurdjieff's in Paris in the early twenties.

In 1977, Amin founded his own architectural engineering office in Scottsdale where he continues to practice.

Amin paints with water colors, produces limited edition silk screen serigraphs and writes. His buildings stand in Arizona, California, Texas, Wisconsin, Virginia, Michigan and Louisiana. His work has been published in Italy, Japan, Sweden, Egypt and the United States.