Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West

The Creation of an Architectural Fellowship in the Arizona Desert

May 28, 2009 Jeanne Lombardo

The story of Taliesin West is one of salvation, rebirth and love. Here, the aging architect regenerated his personal and professional life from the ashes of disaster.

When Wright first traveled to Arizona in 1928, his life already seemed to parallel the myth of the Phoenix with its theme of fiery death followed by glorious rebirth. In 1914 Wright had endured the destruction by fire of his Wisconsin residence, Taliesin, and the murder of his companion and her children during that same event. He had weathered divorce, social ostracism brought on by his affair with Mamah Borthwick – the murder victim – another fire in 1925, and professional and financial setbacks.

Yet, at over sixty years of age, newly married to a woman thirty years younger than himself, he began his encounter with the Arizona desert. It was a love affair that, like that with Olgivanna, would last the rest of his life. It took ten years for Wright to establish roots near Phoenix and he did so just in time to witness its transformation from a sleepy farming center surrounded by pristine desert to the burgeoning metropolis it showed signs of becoming by the time he died in 1959.

A Winter Home for the Taliesin Fellowship

When Frank Lloyd Wright first selected the site as winter home for his Fellowship in 1937, it was “bold, expansive and raw,” and as his wife described it, “strewn with rocks, and gutted by deep, dry washes.” In what is today North Scottsdale, the 600 acres lie twenty-six miles northeast of Phoenix, on land then both remote and unforgiving. Wright’s Fellowship would demand total commitment to architecture as a way of life.

Taliesin West was constructed piecemeal from 1938 when the first ground was excavated and roads built to the early 1940s when the interiors were given finishing touches. In the order of construction, Wright seems to have taken his early mentor, Louis Henry Sullivan’s dictum “Form follows function” to its starting point and working areas came first with real living quarters following later.

A Way of Life Dedicated to Architecture and the Arts

Conceived of as “the camp,” the center of a way of life dedicated to architecture and based on the life of the Taliesin Fellowship, the first room constructed was the drafting room followed by the kitchen, dining room, apprentices’ apartments, Wright’s office, and finally the “Kiva,” a half-submerged underground chamber based on the dwellings of the Pueblo Indians.

Rustic as the setting was, however, it was a space devoted to beauty and culture. In the early 1950s, when the Kiva proved too small to accommodate the expanded activities, a larger playhouse was built – the Cabaret-Theater. Here the company enjoyed formal dinners on the weekends with movies and music following.

An Architectural Style that Opens up Space

And while the camp-like atmosphere was maintained – indeed from 1937-1945 the entire compound was open-air and used no glass whatsoever - he eventually enclosed certain areas that had been open to the elements with glass, taking care, however, to miter the edges of the glass together to maintain an unobstructed view of the outside. For Wright as for other twentieth-century architects, interior space should not be cut off from but reflect and integrate the exterior.

Now as then the low rise supporting the structure affords splendid views of the entire Valley of the Sun below. In the distance, the landmark Camelback Mountain rises up in the middle of a broad mesa ringed by different mountain ranges. “Living in the desert is the spiritual cathartic a great many people need. I am one of them,” Wright wrote. In this as in his views on modern architecture, Wright would prove to be a prescient sage, as the tremendous growth of the American Southwest attests.

References

Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Encounter with the Arizona Desert (Taliesin West, Scottsdale Arizona: Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Winter, 2005), 5-7.
Kathryn Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin and Taliesin West (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 88.

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Taliesin West nestled in the McDowell Mountains