Wright From the Start

DROP ALMOST ANY ARCHITECT into the unfamiliar, seemingly hostile environment of the Sonoran Desert, and his or her instinctive reaction will be to design something defensive —  something to fend off the scorching sun, keep the critters at bay and swaddle the building’s occupants in a wrap of psychological comfort by reminding them of a softer, more civilized land.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s reaction, which began taking shape in the desert north of Scottsdale 70 years ago this month, was nothing of the sort. It was nothing of any sort ever seen before. Taliesin West had no antecedent in the history of architecture, and even in Wright’s own career the only rehearsal for it was a cluster of tentlike cabins built nine years earlier south of Phoenix. Taliesin West is not only Wright’s most original work, it may also be his greatest — fearless, beautiful, embracing a whole philosophical world and bonded almost spiritually to its setting.

“Taliesin West, to me, is a place that came right out of his gut,” says Vernon Swaback, a Scottsdale architect who apprenticed with Wright in 1957, and lived in the Taliesin Fellowship for the next 22 years. “What he wrote later was just concocted to explain it to the public. I think the desert just spoke to him, and he created something right for it.”

Wright first visited Arizona from Wisconsin in 1928 to “consult” on the textile block construction of the Arizona Biltmore. Albert Chase McArthur, who had begun his career as a draftsman in Wright’s Oak Park, Illinois, office in 1907, was the architect. Wright’s Olympian ego rendered him spectacularly unsuited as a consultant to anyone, and the relationship lasted just four months. The elegant guest cottages are likely Wright’s design; the main building is McArthur’s. More significantly, Wright’s first Arizona winter led to a relationship with another hotel developer, Alexander Chandler, who hired him to design a world-class resort on the southern slope of what is now Phoenix’s South Mountain Park.
 

Wright and an entourage of family and draftsmen returned to Arizona in 1929 to design the hotel. Instead of renting apartments, they quickly cobbled together a desert camp that Wright called “Ocatilla,” misspelling the name of the spidery, flowering shrub (ocotillo) that flourished on the site. It consisted of 15 wooden cabins with asymmetrical white canvas roofs and scarlet flaps in lieu of windows. 

Wright claimed to love the “agreeable diffusion of light” that the translucent canvas afforded, but it also was an economic necessity — he was broke, as usual. Still, the cabins accomplished something that no non-Indian architecture in the Southwest had done before: They harmonized with the land by abstracting nature’s own forms, the pointy ridgelines and slopes of the camp’s mountain backdrop.

The resort erupted from Wright’s pencils as nothing less than a complete design vocabulary and ethic for desert architecture, but the stock market crash of October 1929 demolished Chandler’s fortune. The hotel wasn’t built, Wright saw only $2,500 of his $40,000 fee, and local Indians —  Wright assumed this, at least —  carted off Ocatilla’s remains for shelter or firewood.

But a potent seed had germinated. Camping in the desert for five months had infused Wright with that “gut” feeling for the landscape. “The spiritual cathartic that was the desert worked — swept the spirit clean of stagnant ways and habitual forms ready for fresh adventure,” he wrote. That adventure would be Taliesin West.

Back in Wisconsin, Wright contracted pneumonia during the winter of 1935-1936, and a physician told his third wife, Olgivanna, that if he would migrate to Arizona every winter it would prolong his life by 20 years. Because Wright was already 68, this was either kindly optimism or eerie prescience. (He lived 23 more years, the most productive of his life.) The following December, the Wrights trundled to Phoenix to prospect for land, and in January 1938 they bought acreage at the foot of a small mountain 10 miles north of Scottsdale. The isolation was essential; Wright reviled cities as “vampires,” “tumors” and “monster leviathans.” No utilities or water? No problem. Wright hired a driller to sink a well — the gamble paid off at the frightening depth of 478 feet — and wired the fellowship back in Wisconsin to:

. . . BRING SHOVELS, RAKES, HOES, AND ALSO HOSE. EIGHTEEN DRAFTING BOARDS AND TOOLS… OIL STOVES FOR COOKING AND HEATING, WATER HEATER, VIOLA, CELLO, RUGS NOT IN USE AND WHATEVER ELSE WE NEED.
 

Wright set up the drafting tables on the site, drawing on brown butcher paper to cut the glare. His “boys,” the apprentices in his private architecture school, provided most of the construction labor. Everyone, Mr. and Mrs. Wright included, camped onsite.

Apprentice Cornelia Brierly, decidedly female but regarded as one of the “boys,” recalled that packrats would whisk away her jewelry, trading the shiny pieces for pebbles. Mustangs would brush against the tents in the night, and mountain lions would slip into camp to drink water. “One dry summer during the war, when our buildings were still quite open, a starved cow wandered into the open-air kitchen and ate the ration books lying on the counter,” Brierly said. “The story made the newspapers as the best excuse offered to the Ration Board for the loss of a ration book.”

Wright never conceived of Taliesin West as a luxurious winter retreat. It was a camp, intended to provide modest shelter from the elements while remaining quite open to landscape and sky. There were no glass windows until 1945 —  the living quarters had canvas flaps, and the great drafting studio was essentially a pavilion, open to the sun, bugs and dust. It was also an experimental laboratory for his ideas about architecture and the desert. He ordered changes incessantly.

“You could almost hear his brain whirring,” recalls Arnold Roy, who joined the fellowship in 1952. “He’d say, ‘Boys, let’s do this!’ And the concrete would fly.”

The compound’s design grew out of its site, literally and metaphorically. As perhaps befits a camp, there was no foundation — the buildings rest on the natural caliche just beneath the desert sand. (Caliche, a natural deposit of calcium carbonate common in deserts, essentially is cement.) For the walls, Wright had his “boys” raid the site for its colorful quartzite boulders and mine the arroyos for sand. 

Wright would orchestrate the precise placement of the boulders in the plywood forms, and then concrete would be poured around them. The walls cost almost nothing and harmonized exquisitely with the surrounding landscape. Frugality was ever the watch­word. Once a wall was in place, the apprentices would break down the forms and reuse them. “When the pieces finally got too small, we’d burn them in a 50-gallon drum to keep warm,” Roy recalls.
 

In a typical trumpet blast of grandiosity, published in An Autobiography, Wright wrote, “Our new desert camp belonged to the Arizona desert as though it had stood there during creation.” But this wasn’t an empty boast. Taliesin West is perhaps more intimately connected to its landscape and environment than any building on Earth.

It doesn’t only adopt texture and color from its surroundings. Its wedgelike forms abstract the mountains around it. The horizontal grooves in its walls evoke the erosion lines in desert canyons, and also create interplay of sun and shadow. The finlike trusses elbowed over the drafting studio give the entire compound a defensive posture, like the body armor of a horned lizard, and yet on a winter evening when pink streaks rake the sky overhead, the armor melts into the heavens. This precisely reflects Wright’s vision of the desert as a duality of intense hostility, where “every­thing is ready to fight everything else,” and ineffable beauty, “all beyond reach of the finite mind.”

Of course the compound was, and is, dysfunctional. The roofs leaked in the 1930s —  after many modifications they leak today. (The rain gutters in the Wrights’ living room run inside, under the ceiling.) The big redwood crossbeams of the pergola, a dramatic walkway between the drafting studio and garden court, were originally only 6 feet high —  taller people were continually ducking and bumping. (After Wright’s death, the “boys” raised them 8 inches.) Taliesin West is decidedly no green building; electricity bills in summer are so high —  about $10,000 a month — that the Fellowship is thinking about buying a fuel cell to generate its own power.

Even if he were here today, and had absorbed a bit of the 21st century’s conservation consciousness, Wright would be uninterested in these complaints. Taliesin West was a demonstration of an ethic that remains as radical today as it was in 1938. A building, Wright was showing us, shouldn’t be a refuge from nature. It should be a means to enhance human interaction with nature. Quality of life isn’t a function of comfort, it’s about richness of experience.

Here’s an example: The drafting studio’s roof is translucent. Originally canvas, today’s acrylic panels admit a similar quality of light. When a cloud lazes across the sun, the mood of the room suddenly changes, like one of those startling major-to-parallel-minor key shifts in a Schubert sonata. Most architects, then or now, would say that light in any workroom should be controlled and consistent. But spend an afternoon in Wright’s studio, and you begin to think differently: Maybe work should be affected by emotion and a connection to the cadences of nature. We are not, after all, machines.
 

Until his death in 1959, Wright talked and wrote incessantly about “organic architecture,” but his words and sentences could seem maddeningly slippery. Taliesin West, however, stands as an example of precisely what he meant. It’s the complete integration of architecture, nature and human life —  so complete, in fact, that it’s not a matter of architectural style at all. It’s an entire philosophical system, a Utopia both aesthetic and social.

This is why Taliesin West, despite its universally admired beauty, has had little influence on the way we’ve built Arizona over the last 70 years. A few architects and builders have learned from the way it physically relates to its landscape. Tucson architect Les Wallach’s Boyce Thompson Arboretum in Superior doesn’t look anything like a Wright building, but it folds into its site with consummate respect and grace. Loews Ventana Canyon Resort in Tucson, designed by FHMB of San Francisco in the early 1980s, echoes the craggy character of the mountain behind it, much as Wright might have done it. But these are isolated examples. Wright’s admirers and disciples believe Taliesin West could, and should, exert more influence.

Swaback, now an architect in private practice in Scottsdale, orchestrates Taliesin West’s transformation from a kind of living museum to a center for inspiration and study centered on Wright’s ideas. During his two decades with the Fellowship, he alternated between the original Taliesin in Wisconsin and the winter camp in Scottsdale. The experience left him with the “unquenchable desire” to look for ways to integrate life, work, archi-
tecture and nature, he says. And considering the world’s increasing population and dwindling energy supplies, Swaback adds, “The notion of embracing the fact that you’re going to be affected by weather is something that’s ahead of us somewhere.”

Arnold Roy, who still lives in one of the apartments at Taliesin West and conducts his own architectural practice in Wright’s drafting studio, says his life has been immeasurably enriched by living in an environment “where there’s beauty everywhere you look.” And something deeper. “It’s been an opportunity to reflect and think about how things might be in the world if people had the courage, as Mr. Wright did, to act on their ideas.” 

Taliesin West is open daily except holidays for docent-guided tours; costs range from $10 to $35. For more information, visit franklloydwright.org or call 480-860-2700, ext. 494.  
 

Lawrence W. Cheek, a longtime contributor to Arizona Highways, is the architecture critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. His 2006 book, Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona, was published by Rio Nuevo Publishers.

After living in Oak Park, Illinois, home of the world’s largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright-designed buildings and houses, photographer David H. Smith enjoys every opportunity that comes his way to walk the hallowed grounds of Taliesin West.