The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture has had a rough go of things the last few years. The school, which is located at the historic winter home of Wright, Taliesin West, almost lost its accreditation because it wasn’t financially independent from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Things got so bad that they temporarily suspended new enrollment.

Then, the critic Aaron Betsky took over the deanship and was able to fundraise enough to keep the school accredited. Now, to mark their new, more-removed relationship to the Foundation, the school has been renamed the School of Architecture at Taliesin. 

“Adopting this new name, the School of Architecture at Taliesin, helps us to secure our identity as an experimental, forward-looking architecture program that is deeply rooted in the Taliesin Fellowship,” Betsky states. “The process in which we developed our new relationship with the Foundation and our accreditors has been an opportunity to closely examine who we are as a school and how to best position ourselves to advance our mission and create quality educational experiences for our students.”

Back in February 2015, at the beginning of his new job as dean, we talked with Betsky on Archinect Sessions about the challenge he had taken on—take a listen here:

Then we checked in with Betsky again over a year later in July 2016, not long after he had pulled the school back from the brink. Check out our interview here.