Faustina ("MaryBud") Roberts and could not afford the fees, so Vida approached MaryBud's mother, who agreed to pay for the couple to join the program. John soon realized that he had little interest in formal drafting and avoided the Taliesin drafting room, preferring daily duties of "carpenter, plumber, farmer, cook and dishwasher, that is an apprentice, which I still believe is the real way to learn". From 1933 to 1939, he worked and studied under Wright at the studios in Wisconsin and Arizona. Lautner progressed rapidly under Wright's mentorship. By 1934, the year he and MaryBud married, he was preparing design details for a Wright house in Los Angeles for Alice Millard, working on the Playhouse and Studios at Taliesin, and he had the first of many articles (under the masthead "At Taliesin") published in the Wisconsin State Journal and Capital Times. The following year, he was assigned to what became a two-year project supervising a Wright-designed house in Marquette for MaryBud's mother. In 1937, he agreed to oversee the construction of the Johnson residence "Wingspread" (his personal favorite among the Wright projects he worked on) near Racine, Wisconsin and traveled with Wright to supervise photography of the Malcolm Willey House in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which became a key source for his own small houses. He was also deeply involved in the construction of the Drafting Room at Taliesin West – which influenced the design of his Mauer House (1946) – collated photographs of Wright's work for a 1938 special issue of Architectural Forum and later briefly returned to Taliesin to help assemble models and materials for a 1940 Museum of Modern Art exhibition. Lautner left the Fellowship in early 1938 (primarily because MaryBud was pregnant) to establish his own architecture practice in Los Angeles, but he told his mentor that, while seeking an independent career, he remained "ready to do anything you or your Fellowship need". They worked together on around eleven Los Angeles projects over the next five years and their association continued sporadically. The Lautners arrived in Los Angeles in March 1938 and their first child Karol was born in May. Lautner's first independent project was a low-cost $2500 one-bedroom frame house for the Springer family, built with his contractor friend Paul Speer, but this was to be the only product of their brief collaboration. In September 1938, Wright contacted him and this led to Lautner's supervision of