LIVING IN THE DESERT

LIVING IN THE DESERT PART ONE-WE FOUND PARADISE

Living in the Desert is the spiritual cathartic a great many people need. I am one of them.

Fed up with too sweet Midwest pastoral domesticity, I began taking the desert when the Arizona Biltmore was being constructed; came back to take it some more when Dr. Alexander Chandler (1927) wanted me to plan a perfect desert-resort for jaded New York millionaires out there on the Salt River Range about ten miles from his prosperous hotel at his own town of Chandler. Then the Taliesin Fellowship kept coming out from Wisconsin every year thereafter, at first to Dr. Chandler's Hacienda in Chandler. A few years later, having found 26 miles from Phoenix the grand Maricopa Mesa stretching away for 20 miles each way from the foot of McDowell Peak, we finally decided to build ourselves into the life of the desert there according to the life and character of the great desert itself. You know life in the desert is especially a revelation of sun-life-not that all life isn't sun-life. But in the Arizona desert the sun is seen at its creative best because more stark and simple in the method of making life: one might say more primitive in its design and so nearer to the significance of point, line, and plane that we call Architecture.

The spiritual cathartic that was the desert workedswept the spirit clean of stagnant ways and habitual forms ready for fresh adventure. As that fresh adventure, for one thing, I designed the camp which we began to build. Our camp was freshly inspired by the native forms of the Arizona desert itself. How simply true and beautiful these infinite patterns were!

Arizona hadn't had much attention where humanbuilding had been coming to roost upon her dramatic terrain. Mostly what got there came from stuffy pie, porch and ice-water domesticity mostly provincial Middlewest and Southwest. Some little arty touches here and there came in from the Hopi Indians. Cape Cod got in, too. But each and all took no stake nor any account at all of Arizona's nature and native charm of character.

We were just beginning to earn money enough when we came out to Phoenix to go building ourselves into our desert land but we were then a group of about thirty husky young architects and engineers from all over the country, all in love with Architecture as we saw it everywhere up and down and around us in the desert. "Every prospect pleased; only man was vile" but (thank God) no power lines! So we recklessly used what money we earned to buy building materials and went to work upor the design I had made. That design seemed an unreasonable dream but the realization stands there now. The natives (no, not the Indians) were friendly as in all resort towns. But they were very, very suspicious.

No one “out West” ever asks how another got there. But we managed because we didn't need much credit nor much labor outside our own. Even so, materials were difficult to get in such large quantities as we needed. Nevertheless our desert camp grew from year to year until now—some ten years later—practically the whole world has come to look upon it and has marvelled, even when it couldn't understand. You may now see Taliesin West in every detail in all the cultural centers of the great civilized nations of the world. We have looked upon the original constantly ourselves and we have found it pretty good, too. Even we as shouldn't.

Well, outside the two miles which we built by ourselves out there in raw desert, there were no roads at all to call anything but bad names. We found no way of getting attention either. We were not farmers. We had gone off the State-roads on to County-roads that had a hard time keeping the farmer's lettuce, grapefruit, etc., etc., moving. On that far-away desert-way (ten miles out to our camp from the outpost called Scottsdale) our fleet of fifteen cars and trucks would sometimes get stuck. At least the fleet was continually wrecked. We limped along on about half of it which was all we could keep in motion at any one time under the circumstances.

We paid for that same lettuce and grapefruit moving on Arizona roads what we paid back home in Spring Green, Wisconsin, until we tried to cut down resort-town prices by buying a big ten-ton motor truck, loading it with our own farm produce in Wisconsin and hauling it across the country. But even so, living costs in the desert mounted to double those at home, what with water and transportation. But we persevered. We were aiming high. We soon learned to bargain a little wholesale with farmers and fruit growers. But provender in the main was resort-town market so far as we could go after it. No, sir, we couldn't live on grapefruit and oranges but we used to pick them ourselves, haul them in and dump them in great yellow piles around the camp to look at as well as eat. We loved the look of things more than most, I guess.

We had a lot of fine work to do around the States, too, beside building the desert-camp itself. We kept all that work going while we got materials to build with. Just the same, try our best, our investment in light, water

time, of our environment and is closest to our very life itself. But our Phoenix people seem to get along very well, indeed, with what they've got. So it's all in our stride as a matter of fate to wait and work and think all the more of our own incomparable desert.

We have managed to stay there on the Desert contented for five or six months of every year for eleven years now, planning, playing, working, singing, dreaming all to pretty good purpose. Ask anybody anywhere in the world familiar with Architecture and get the answer.

PART TWO-TROUBLE IN PARADISE

But characteristic calamity has now befallen our famous Paradise Valley. Going away out twenty six miles from civilization, picking up eight hundred acres of desert to be free of “nuisance-building” has availed us less than nothing. What has happened? Incomparable Paradise Valley has itself at last fallen under the characteristic blight of “Eminent Domain.” “Eminent Domain” means a power-company's “right” (or political license) for hamstringing the landscape of a region-yes, any landscape anywhere. Now power high-lines are striking right across the valley with towers 85 feet high, cross arms 65 feet wide-going hell-bent across to run more motors to pump more water on more lettuce, etc., etc. These power lines will eventually transport electricity from the Colorado River to the Salt River Valley.

But the last remains of this now world-famed cherished Arizona desert called Paradise Valley is to become the high road of the negative pole and positive wire gentry (modern highwaymen of the desert). Strange to say, the gang try to operate just as they operated one hundred years ago. Ignoring all modern improvements in transmission of power because the old way is cheaper, “Eminent Domain” it seems can still make more money out of the people the same old way. And the same old way is the shortest distance between two points high up in the air!

You see, the people's interest in power still means less than nothing to “Power” unless “Power” can share the people's interest among itself without having to consider any higher interest the people might possess. So like pigs in a cornfield, old-fashioned high-lines destroy more than they can presently eat or ever atone for. Their mark-up of Cain is all over the forehead of our no longer young country.

We confess, nothing anyone could do or say could save Paradise Valley from this depredation. The indicative pole and sinister wire gentry comes with more than ever authority, without conscience, further damning the great gift of beautiful land entrusted to a people. Unique irreplaceable asset that native Arizona itself is to America must go hang!

From Fowler McCormick's beautiful place to mine, many of us are all dropping deals for hundreds of thousands of acres more of Paradise Valley to preserve its beauty. It is perhaps natural that those of us who would invest our earnings in “Arizona natural” to preserve and develop its beauty should be sacrificed to those who invest theirs in “Arizona synthetic” to make money.

Europe says Tourism is by far the easiest way to earn these always badly needed dollars. England says that last year Tourism earned more than any of her manufacturing industries. From France comes similar testimony. “The importance of the tourist trade cannot be exaggerated,” says all European countries. Will visitors to Arizona-this probably greatest of all the playgrounds of these United States appreciate the destruction of its enormous tourist-dollar wrought by “Eminent Domain” to earn more pennies for more farmers?

Why must human-property-rights, if they are invested in Arizona natural instead of Arizona synthetic, be sacrificed?