Scottsdale Arizona is indeed a desert. It reaches its first 100 degree weather in May. If the pool is not covered, all 6 feet of water will evaporate in one season. The tallest trees here happen to be Saguaro Cacti. Following it’s name, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West home is nestled in to the brow of the desert mountains above Scottsdale. The 90 minute Insights Tour was indeed a unique one. This desert gets 8 inches of rain a year and during our tour we were present for 2 of them. Thunder boomed above us, shaking the air between rooms, interrupting the guide’s monologue.
This was my first time within a Frank Lloyd Wright home and I was surprised at how subtle the details were. His architecture is well thought out, but on the interior, it is not glaring. He believed that the first thing people do when they walk into a room is sit down. So many of the best views in the house are seen only from a seated position. The chairs are simple, made of plywood, with strong angles. I had a seat in one that reminded me of a paper airplane and immediately relaxed. This chair was designed with the intention of giving the seated person perfect posture. The arms are sloped away and down, automatically moving my shoulders out and back. Wright once said, “No matter how you look at life, you look right in my chair.“ The windows were angled at the right height so that I could see the saddle of a bare hillside and not the power lines.
Wright believed in bringing the outside in. He was known for designing his buildings to fit into their surroundings, and many of his lights and windows are fashioned after trees, butterflies and mountains. The ceilings in several of the Taliesin West rooms are translucent glass or plastic supported by steel beams allowing an open air feel and an abundance of natural light. The home is built to not need electric lights, all the side windows are angled to allow in the maximum lighting. Even as the dark thunderheads encircled the area, the rooms were well lit. I sat with perfect posture watching the storm above me. As the rain pelted furiously and ran down the angled glass ceiling shifting the light, I sincerely hoped that in this instance the home would not invite the outside in.
I shifted my attention back into the room. Not on, but IN the table before me, sat a plant. Looking closely, I saw that the table was actually centered around the plant. And all the other tables in Taliesin West, from dining to music stands, have triangular holes in them for plants also. Wright saw the most prominent shape in Arizona as the triangle, like the mountains that surround Taliesin West, and the shape is prominent in the architecture here. Even the swimming pool outside is triangular. Strong geometric lines and direct corners span the outside of the house. Asian archways with many red beams, connect in a series of triangles. Walking around the exterior of the house is like walking through an M.C. Escher drawing in red ink. Red was Wright’s favorite color, very significant to this man’s personality and ego.
Wright met his third and last wife in Chicago in 1924. Olgivanna was a noblewoman visiting from Yugoslavia who was half his age. They were seated next to one another by chance at a Ballet. Sneaking glances at her in the dark, he could not help but notice that she wore no makeup. And she, eyeing him curiously was intrigued with his red velvet cape.
No wonder she found him charming, a gentleman of great posture and dry wit whose creativity moved beyond architecture. Wright said that had he not become an architect, he would have been a musician. Beethoven was his favorite, and in the evenings, he would play the piano. He loved interactive toys, books on Asian Architecture, scotch and movies. Wright’s niece, the actress Anne Baxter (Razor’s Edge) sent him the directors cuts so that during the cold desert winters, he could enjoy 10 hour movies by the fireplace and a projector screen that he designed.
Olgivanna and Wright were hardly lonely in Taliesin West. It was just the two of them and thirty students at all times. The accepted students generally needed three things: 30,000 dollars, an aptitude for desert climate and a creative talent in disciplines other than architecture. A student of his was commissioned by his wife to do a bust sculpture of Wright. The poor girl had never sculpted anything other than still life, and he was her first human form. The young nervous girl did a very unique and effective sculpture of Wright, capturing the strength and determination in his facial expression, while still allowing his creativity to shine out through the crystal prism that stands as the statue’s shoulders.
The last ten years of Wright’s life were some of his most inspired. He completed one third of this work between the ages of 81 and 91 and when he died, he had 166 ongoing projects on his bulletin board.
That same student, whose love for sculpture was ignited in her first bust portrait, gave up on architecture and studied under Wright in Taliesin West as a sculptor. She has her own garden near the entrance of the house. In the clearing after the storm, the statues held blue sky and bright thunderheads in their glistening palms. Nearly thirty sculptures total, they are all reaching in different postures, capturing the nature of their surroundings and dancing with it. Inviting outside in.
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