TO ARIZONA

TO ARIZONA..... EXCERPTS FROM MAY 1940 ISSUE OF ARIZONA

What a scientific marvel of construction that longlived Saguaro! Or the latticed stalk of the Cholla! Nature, driven to economize materials by hard conditions, develops in the Saguaro a system of economy by reinforcement of vertical rods, a plaiting of tendons that holds the structure bolt upright for six centuries or more. And go study the stalk of that wicked Cholla for a pattern of latticed steel structure. You will find it the plaiting of the stalks. Or study of the stem of the fibrous Ocotillo waving its red flag from the tops of a spray of slender plaited whips fifteen feet long. What a building might be that that had a proper respect for Arizona's streamlined spaces, its structure walled like the Saguaro, textured like it too, by the nature of its construction. No. The Arizona desert is no place for the hard boxwalls of the houses of the Middle West and East. Here all is sculptured by wind and water, patterned in color and texture. Rocks and reptiles no less so than the cacti. A desert building should be nobly simple in out-

HIGHWAYS. BY FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

line as the region itself is sculptured: should have learned from the cactus many secrets of straight-line patterns for its forms, playing with the light and softening the building into its proper place among the organic desert creations the man-made building heightening the beauty of the desert and the desert more beautiful because of the building. A dream, but realization is coming.

We do not yet understand such pattern in form because it is an attribute of a very high and perhaps older Culture. We are just now trying to think ornament useless or continue to go wrong with it by trying to emphasize with it when Nature intended it to soften, conceal, and harmonize. Nature herself does just that thing with it, always, as you will see if you will go to school to the Desert.

Nature never sticks ornaments onto anything. She gets it all out from the inside of the thing the way it grows. It is always of the thing. Integral. Plain white walls defy the sun and jump to your eyes from the desert forty miles or more away. They are not true desert buildings in any cultivated sense.

Nor is the Indian Hopi-house a desert house in any true sense. Even were the Hopi imitation no base imitation for us, it is too loud. The projecting poles soften it with shadows a very little; the native Indian got that far with it. But the Indian learned from the desert when he made pots or mats or beadwork or clothed himself. He got something of the spirit of the desert into all those things as we may see. The rattlesnake, the Gila Monster, and the Cacti may have taught him something we don't learn.

But, Architecture, the great art, except on very primitive terms, was beyond him as Music and Literature. The Fine Arts are in themselves a finer civilization-or ought to be. They once were and will be again. What better opportunity to throw off the old shackles and begin than right in Arizona, now?

I suggest that the dotted line is the line for the desert; not the hard line nor the knife edge. And in the line comes a new type of structure for the Arizona spaces to save the desert from the invasion of the fashionable builder with his now famous 57 varieties.

Anyone may see that the desert abhors sun-defiance as nature abhors a vacuum. This universal sun-acceptance by way of pattern is a condition of survival and is everywhere evident. That means integral-ornaments in everything. Sun-acceptance in building means that doted-line in outline and wall-surfaces that eagerly take the light and play with it and break it up and render it harmless or drink it in until sunlight blends the building into place with the creation around it. Man's imagination is none too lively, at best, but the task is not too great to harmonize his building masses with topography and typify his building-walls with the nature-creation they consort with, by taking the abstract design inherent in all desert fabric of his own work whenever he, himself, makes anything. That is to say, he should be able to make the essential spirit of the thing, however or whatever it is, come through as objective.

The ever advancing human threat to the integral beauty of Arizona might be avoided if the architect would only go to school to the Desert in this sense and humbly learn harmonious contrasts or sympathetic treatments that would, thus, quietly, "belong." The climate of this region abhors the "box." Is this organic abstraction, as expression, too difficult for us at this stake of our development? All right then. Cover up your walls, plant trees and vines and water them well. But plant trees and vines native to the conditions here. Be quiet will you at any cost. Blot out your clumsy intrusions as you best can. It is the only apology you can make to Arizona.