Back to Nature to Learn About Buildings

As a budding architect, Jacqueline Norman lived in the desert without electricity or running water in a shelter that began as two concrete walls, a fireplace and a few support columns.

She spent 21 months in the small abode, transforming it into a roofed dwelling with glass walls, a solar battery and even a private cove for her cats.

Despite the occasional surprise visit by snakes, scorpions and javelinas, Norman said living in the shelter taught her about construction, space, light and a building’s environment.

It was the way that Frank Lloyd Wright envisioned architects learning their craft--by living close to nature.

“It’s probably the most beautiful thing about being here,” says Norman, who earned her master’s degree last winter from the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.

“It’s not very often an architect gets to see a project from start to finish. Living in the shelter teaches you a thinking process that’s applicable to any situation. You learn to ask the right questions.”

About 60 to 70 shelters--in use or abandoned--dot the desert foothills surrounding Taliesin West, a complex that Wright built as his winter home, studio and architecture school.

The renowned architect, who died in 1959, advocated a well-rounded education rooted in experience. He and his wife encouraged apprentices to live in the desert, to paint, to sculpt, to sing and to cook together. Those traditions continue today.

“Frank Lloyd Wright wanted us to put our hands in the mud,” says architect Arnold Roy, who spent several years studying with Wright in the 1950s. “The apprentices very early on get to be an architect, owner and contractor all in one.”

Wright himself camped in the dusty, flat desert when he arrived in 1937 to build Taliesin West.

He often looked to nature as a role model--even modeling parts of the Johnson Wax building in Wisconsin after the skeleton of a cholla plant--and encouraged his apprentices to do the same.

Dozens of students at the Frank Lloyd Wright school have since lived in the desert shelters, which range from 8-by-8-foot canvas tents to Norman’s top-of-the-line structure of glass and wood.

The students, called apprentices, also may choose to live in a dormitory. Those who pick shelters can build their own or remodel existing ones.

“It’s like being a hermit crab--you go into a shelter and you build it to your own liking,” says Christopher Bernotas, who spent a year in a modest stone structure built by previous apprentices.

Bernotas learned about materials when he lugged doormat-sized stones from the desert to build stairs leading from a dirt road to his desert perch. At night, he had lessons on ventilation as he listened and felt the wind blow through the open-air shelter.

“The night is the best part,” Bernotas says. “My greatest joy was being able to see the stars and watch the Big Dipper rotate in the sky.”

Candles, fires, kerosene lamps and flashlights are the only sources of light at night for the desert dwellers. To reach a communal facility with showers, toilets and lockers, they must trek across rocky terrain peppered with prickly vegetation.

“People living in college dorms complain about how small it is. Then I moved into an 8-by-8 tent,” says apprentice Victor Sidy.

Sidy spent two years in a canvas tent just big enough to fit a bed, a rug, his radio and two candles. He plans to move into Norman’s state-of-the-art desert shelter, where metal basins resembling giant golf tees have replaced some of the overgrown bushes.

Students at the Frank Lloyd Wright school spend half the year at Taliesin West and the other half at Taliesin, Wright’s former summer home and studio in Spring Green, Wis.

To preserve Wright’s ideal of students living in a tight community, the school accepts only about 35 apprentices. People can apply year-round and are judged more on their way of thinking than on their academic record.

The apprentices do not receive grades, but must demonstrate skills in areas such as drafting and construction to graduate.

For many, those skills develop as they tinker with the pyramid tents and wooden structures they call home.

“It’s the hardest part--leaving my own place,” Norman says as she surveys her desert shelter. “I built this myself. It’s the first thing I’ve ever built.”