THE WRIGHT STUFF
In addition to being a master architect, Frank Lloyd Wright was a master storyteller and a master showman, skills he put to excellent use constructing his own outsized persona. Many of his buildings (particularly the houses) can be understood independently of the man, but Taliesin West, his Arizona home and school, cannot. It’s a vivid, eccentric work forged from the disparate influences that shaped his personality. It’s name is Celtic, derived from a Welsh word meaning “shining brow.” Its materials, plantings and colorings reference, gently, Native American traditions. And its geometries and planning exploit, magnificently, modernist principles of free space.
The buildings that make up the complex possess a monstrous sculptural charisma, real-world
presence, that owes less to good planning and composition than to inventive, unorthodox
construction. They have few of the traits we associate with canonical
modernism (insistent grids, reduced facades, restrained materiality). Instead they are crafted from a rich, varied palette of materials, including stones culled from the site, rough concrete pours, stained hardwood, and painted steel, all combined with dazzling elan (if not always good sense). The buildings seem less “constructed” than “assembled,” with elements conventional architects might shy away from: bare canvas roofing, mitered glass corner windows, steeply sloping masonry retaining walls, and exposed wood frames tipped dramatically from the horizontal.
In fact the buildings at Taliesin were built by hand, by Wright’s apprentices (i.e. paying students). Though their designs were likely drawn and studied painstakingly, the buildings feel loosely-structured, concocted. In their formal ambition, willful eccentricity, happy syncretism and irreducible physicality, Taliesin is the most Wrightian of Wright’s projects that I’ve seen. The campus embodies a vision so peculiar, so evocative, so expressive, that it seems to have sprung directly from his head onto the land.