On the Wright Track in Arizona

Taliesin West, built by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1937, rests low on a mesa at the foot of the cactus-mottled McDowell Mountains northeast of Phoenix, with little to announce it but a stand of power lines the architect abhorred. Named for Wright’s beloved Wisconsin farm-country home, Taliesin West is now a National Historic Landmark and home of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. The foundation maintains two Taliesins (the original in Wisconsin and this one), archives that contain about 22,000 original drawings, Wright’s still-functioning design firm and the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, which grew out of a fellowship of young apprentices who paid for the privilege of working at the master’s shoulder.

Though Wright’s fortunes waxed and waned during his long life (he was born in 1867 and died in 1959, at age 91), he is now considered foremost among American architects. His ideas continue to inspire as well as mystify, and he is credited with plans for about 800 buildings, including his enchanting first home and studio in Oak Park, Ill., Pennsylvania’s Fallingwater (ranked by many architects as the most important American building of the last century), the modernist S.C. Johnson & Son Administration Center in Racine, Wis., and the visionary Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Thousands of visitors pay their respects to these and other Wright buildings every year, and the shelves in libraries sag under the weight of tomes written about him. And this week filmmaker Ken Burns weighs in on the Wright legacy as well, with a three-hour PBS television documentary on the architect (airing Tuesday and Wednesday nights at 9 on KCET).

My own appreciation for Wright began about a year ago with a casual visit to the recently restored Pope-Leighey house in northern Virginia. It is one of the dwellings the architect called Usonian (for the U.S.), designed to be affordable and to transform the lives of the ordinary people who lived in them. For instance, the Pope-Leighey house lacks an attic and adequate closet space because Wright felt Americans were too materialistic. Besides making me yearn to live in a Usonian, the experience convinced me that pictures and words cannot express the genius of Wright’s best buildings, which act overtly and covertly on those who go to see them.

When I moved to Southern California recently, I saw houses designed by Wright’s famous disciples Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler. Then last summer I toured his Oak Park home and studio, which speaks so eloquently of the young Wright, straining to move out of the orbit of his employer and architectural mentor, Louis Sullivan. There he brought his bride, Catherine Tobin, and quickly sired six children, later abandoning them all for the wife of an Oak Park client.

When the opportunity came, I was eager to see the Arizona Taliesin (pronounced tally-EH-sin, which means “shining brow” in Welsh) and signed up for a three-hour guided visit called the Behind the Scenes Tour ($35). I’d read Brendan Gill’s biography of Wright, both a curse and a blessing because to know Wright is not necessarily to like him.

In the book, “Many Masks,” Gill portrays Wright as a great artist but an arrogant man who manipulated and misled clients, refused to live within his means and brought pain to many of the people who loved him. “Despite his rich legacy,” Burns recently wrote in Vanity Fair magazine, “there is something inexcusable about Wright.” Consequently, for those familiar with the biographical details, every Wright building tells a story. It’s hard to visit one without recalling the particular mess he was mired in at the time it rose.

Taliesin West took shape during the somewhat less turbulent, prodigiously productive last 20 years of Wright’s life, when the master and his entourage made annual migrations between Wisconsin and Arizona, heading south shortly after Halloween and returning just after an Easter brunch. They were a hard-working community of kindred spirits who threw themselves with equal vigor into any task, from drafting Wright’s plans to dyeing hundreds of Easter eggs. “Taliesin has always valued a kind of total immersion over objectivity,” wrote former apprentice Vernon D. Swaback. To hold things together, there was Wright’s genius and the organizational skills of his third wife, Olgivanna. Indeed, it was she who kept the fellowship and Wright’s architectural firm going after he died.

But the story of Taliesin West really begins back in the winter of 1927, when Dr. Alexander Chandler, a successful Arizona veterinarian, asked Wright to come down to the desert to design a resort hotel (the architect considered the hotel one of his most perfect plans, but it was never built due to the stock market crash). Chandler envisioned something to rival the Arizona Biltmore, completed in 1929 by Albert Chase McArthur, a former draftsman of Wright’s--though Wright had been called in to design and engineer the rambling resort’s signature concrete blocks.

At the time Chandler contacted him, Wright was 60. The Prairie School homes he built in the suburbs of Chicago, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (since demolished) and numerous concrete block houses in the Los Angeles area (like Pasadena’s exquisite “La Miniatura”) were in the past. He was commissionless and broke but had started his architecture school, with 30 eager young apprentices. So, in a fleet of about 15 automobiles loaded with barrels of sauerkraut, canned peaches and preserves and just-harvested Wisconsin apples, master and acolytes headed for Arizona. The cars were painted Wright’s favorite color, Cherokee red, with Mr. Wright (nobody called him Frank) at the helm, swaddled in fur, in a Lincoln Continental convertible, top down. “Waving his hickory stick,” one fellow traveler remembered, “he pointed the way due south.”

When they reached Arizona 28 hours later, Wright couldn’t afford hotel accommodations. So he and his apprentices, whom he referred to as “the boys”--male and female--built a desert camp of box-board cabins with canvas doors and roofs, and called it Ocatilla. It had a grand piano but no toilets or running water (“So long as we had the luxuries, the necessities could pretty well take care of themselves,” Wright said.) The next winter it was gone, pillaged by locals and the desert wind, and now even its site 10 miles south of Phoenix has been obscured by strip malls and suburban sprawl.

Still, the spirit that gave Ocatilla life endures at Taliesin West, a rambling compound built largely of materials found at the 600-acre site 25 miles northeast of Phoenix. Taliesin West was one part desert camp, one part cave and one part fleet of ships. The latter was the visual effect given by its sail-like canvas roofs, which admitted an even light perfect for architectural drafting but which leaked when it rained and were impractical. (Mrs. Wright eventually convinced her husband to introduce plastics and glass.)

Apprentices--considered by critics to be Wright’s slaves--dug the 484-foot well that still brings water to Taliesin West. They also cut roads to reach it, gathered the great boulders that anchor its low masonry walls (two-, four- and six-man rocks, they called them, depending on how many people it took to pick one up), raised the redwood beams that frame its angled roofs and laid walkways to connect its structures in a seemingly planless maze.

But there was a plan. Wright was at it endlessly for the next two decades, changing, experimenting, keeping his apprentices busy. Taliesin West was a constant construction site, where Mrs. Wright napped to the happy hum of concrete mixers. As a result, to visit the place today is to begin to understand the Wrightian concept of organic architecture, which has to do with improvisation, craftsmanship and, above all, suiting buildings to their surroundings in order to put people back in basic harmony with nature. A building should be “a grace to the landscape, not a disgrace,” Wright said.

The tour I took included about 10 fellow visitors who weren’t Wright scholars but seemed to know the basic facts of the architect’s life. We convened in the orange-draped Music Pavilion, a long, rectangular building completed in 1957. There, lighted by high clerestory windows, special guests like Charles Laughton gave dramatic readings, and fellowship members played compositions written by Olgivanna or performed in lavishly costumed theatricals. Dr. Joe Rorke, a dapper man who appeared to be in his 70s, served as Wright’s personal physician and still lives in the compound with other fellows. He explained to our tour group that artistic endeavors of all kinds enriched the apprentices’ learning. And our guide showed us models of recently constructed Wright structures built from plans that went unrealized during the architect’s life. The Momona Terrace Community and Convention Center, for example, was completed last year in Madison, Wis.; the Waikapu Country Club, on the island of Maui, was based on designs for a Connecticut house originally commissioned by Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe.

In Wright’s office at the compound’s threshold, which has one of the architect’s signature mantel-less fireplaces and a broad presentation table, we learned that Wright was a lightning-fast sketcher who taught his apprentices to keep him supplied with a steady stream of pencils, sharpened with a knife. From there, the long, low-slung drafting studio, where architects and students work at computers, cuts across the mesa in a diagonal from northwest to southeast. The building demonstrates the way Wright scrutinized the effects of sunlight before breaking ground, avoiding north-south alignments that leave one side of a building chilly and the other hot. A promenade leads to the far side of the building, containing a kitchen, several apartments and a dining area, where we stopped for refreshments and a talk given by Indira Berendtson, who works in the archives and is a second-generation Taliesin fellow (her mother and father met while serving as apprentices to Wright).

The fellowship now includes 70 members who reside at the Taliesins in Arizona and Wisconsin (only 15 remain who actually worked with Wright). They take meals together and contribute to the sites in various ways, such as teaching classes or helping with tours, and give Taliesin West its lived-in, functioning feeling, preventing it from devolving into a museum.

When you enter the Garden Room, which is in many ways the compound’s crown jewel, with sloping translucent ceilings and a long window facing a courtyard to the east, you’re welcome to sit in one of four priceless original chairs designed by Wright to recall Japanese origami. The room’s south side once opened to a patio, but Wright walled it off when the offending power lines went in.

The Wrights held intimate gatherings here, surrounded by Native American pottery, Oriental art and a hard-won repose. Wright had lost his mistress, Mamah Cheney, in a fire set by a mass murderer at the Wisconsin Taliesin in 1914, and married again disastrously before meeting Olgivanna. She was darkly beautiful, from Montenegro, 30 years his junior--and remembered by fellowship members almost as reverently as Wright.

My tour also visited the kiva and cabaret theaters and the nearby modular-circular home of former apprentice Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, built from an unused Wright plan in 1971. I also took the Nature of the Desert Site Walk ($20), which strikes out into the desert to see Olgivanna’s masonry tea circle (and one of the more unusual aspects of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, now a fully accredited college). Secreted among the cholla and saguaro cactuses are “shepherd’s tents” and “desert dwellings,” constructed by Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture students. The students live in close contact with nature--including rattlesnakes and pack rats--with no running water, heat or toilets, as apprentices once did at Ocatilla. The idea, as Wright conceived it, is for students to learn how to live in the desert, and how to build hands-on.

During my stay in Phoenix, I also made pilgrimages to other buildings designed by Wright, such as the First Christian Church and Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium at Arizona State University in Tempe (both completed shortly after the architect’s death). Trying to see other Wright homes in the area, like the Carlson and Price private residences, is an unrewarding adventure: most are obscured by high walls and hedges.

I did stay one night at the 600-room Arizona Biltmore. Much renovated over the years, it still showcases a few authentically Wrightian features, such as its beautiful domed Aztec Room, Men’s Smoker, cottages (author Brendan Gill called them “ravishing little cubes”) and patterned concrete blocks. My room there was decorated in the Mission style and was probably about as close as I’ll ever come to sleeping in a Wright house.

I’m not sure why, but I drove back out to Taliesin West before my flight departed. Rapidly growing Phoenix is just about to engulf the Wright property, turning it into an island surrounded by deadeningly similar housing developments, where Wright saw average Americans being “boxed and crated.” But up on Maricopa Mesa, Wright’s compound looks--borrowing his words--”as if it had stood there for centuries.” The master is still there, I think. He’s in all his buildings. But at Taliesin West he isn’t troubled. He seems satisfied.

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GUIDEBOOK

Wright Stuff in Scottsdale

Getting there: United, Southwest and America West fly nonstop from LAX to Phoenix; fares begin at $78 round trip. You can also fly from Burbank, Ontario and Orange County. From Phoenix, it’s about a 50-minute drive to Taliesin West in Scottsdale.

Touring Taliesin West: There are five tours, from the one-hour Panorama Tour ($14, daily 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.) to a three-hour Behind the Scenes Tour ($35, Tuesdays and Thursdays 9 a.m.). It’s best to reserve ahead. 12621 N. Frank Lloyd Wright Blvd., Scottsdale; telephone (602) 860-2700.

Where to stay: The Wright-influenced Arizona Biltmore is at 24th St. and Missouri Ave. in Phoenix; tel. (800) 950-0086 or (602) 955-6600, fax (602) 954-2548. Brochure rates range from $145 to $620 depending on season (high season is Sept. 8 to Dec. 31). Another luxury option is the new Royal Palms Hotel, 5200 E. Camelback Road, Phoenix, tel. (800) 672-6011 or (602) 840-3610, rates $269 to $390.

Scottsdale Road, the route to Taliesin West, is lined with chain motels. For something on the modest side, try the Fifth Avenue Inn, tel. (800) 528-7396 or (602) 994-9461, with motel-style rooms near the center of downtown Scottsdale.

Where to eat: Wright’s at the Biltmore and T. Cook’s at the Royal Palms are excellent. Dinner for one with a glass of wine, $50 to $65.

For more information: The Scottsdale Convention and Visitors Bureau, 7343 Scottsdale Mall, Scottsdale, AZ 85251; tel. (800) 877-1117 or (602) 945-848.