Location: Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
Completed: 1937
12 Photographs
One thing that I found striking about the southwestern USA, was how familiar it felt. It makes perfect sense, given the similarities in climate between the American desert and the place where we grew up on the edge of a desert in Australia, but it wasn’t just the warm dry air and the expanses of sand. What also felt familiar was the landscape, in particular the plants, which have evolved to cope with the harsh dry desert conditions, protecting themselves from the sun, heat, and drought, striking against the raw redness of the dust, dirt and rocks. Our grandmother was a renowned collector of cacti and succulents, so we grew up surrounded by these kinds of plants.
I felt a similar level of familiarity with the architecture of Taliesin West. I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t know the building well before we visited. I’ve never studied FLW at length and while it is one of the most prominent of Frank Lloyd Wrights works, he built so much that I just never looked too hard at any individual projects.
What is clear, is how much this his thinking has influenced generations to come. It is most evident in some of the case study houses, but also works further afield, from Australia to London. This building made me think of the early work of Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio in Alabama, raw, immediate, and utilitarian, definitively buildings of spirit. It also reminded me of the work and spirit of my old friend and teacher, David Morris at the Louis Laybourne Smith School of Architecture and of a lot of the architects who have influenced me from back home. In this, it seems the influence of the work extends beyond the landscape in which it is set.
I found it to be a very powerful and evocative architecture, at times almost spiritual. It is literally and figuratively both embedded in and crafted from the earth on which it sits. Splendid stuff.
HWLK