Design in the desert inspiration for organic architecture in the West
• Frank Lloyd Wright was regarded as one of the greatest architects
There “could be nothing more inspiring to an architect on this earth”, wrote Frank Lloyd Wright, “than that spot of pure Arizona desert.” Thus began the love affair of the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest architect” with the Sonoran Desert, the harsh, sun-baked landscape in which he would build his winter home and from which he would inspire an entirely new architecture and a spirit of utopianism.
Remarkably, it still pervades some scattered spots of desert 150 years after his birth.
Wright came to Scottsdale in 1928 as a consultant on the Arizona Biltmore Hotel. This resort in the desert — then still way outside the city, now subsumed in the great sprawl of Phoenix — quickly became a favourite hideaway for Hollywood royalty, presidents and politicians.
It is a stunning and surprising place, a dark bronze and gilded cocoon and a shady shelter from the harsh desert light. Its rich and beautiful Art Deco interior was officially designed by Albert Chase McArthur, brother of the hotel’s developers and one-time pupil of Wright’s, but in almost every detail, it reeks of Wright’s obsessive architecture.
Since it opened in 1929, the hotel has hosted everyone from Clark Gable (who had a favourite room near the illicit bar in the days of prohibition) and Marilyn Monroe, to presidents putting on its absurdly green greens.
Even though Wright was never credited for the design, it introduced the architect to Arizona, where, a few years later, he would establish Taliesin West, his office-cum-schoolcum-cult headquarters which would, in turn, radically influence the emerging modern architecture of the West.
The edges of Scottsdale, blurring into the searing Sonora desert and punctuated by cowboy cacti, the saguaro, turn out to be a bit of a modernist mecca, a gathering place of the weird and wonderful, the cultish and the contemporary.
It all started with Taliesin and Wright. The architect ran a camp-cum-school in his native Wisconsin and called it Taliesin in honour of the medieval bard from his ancestral home, all the way back in Wales.
Wright had made his name with his “prairie houses”, a series of low-slung, fantastically rich and inventive dwellings around Chicago, at about the turn of the 20th century.
By the 1930s, his status as the greatest US architect was waning as the country fell for the rigour of European modernism and the seductive stepping and streamlining of Art Deco.
Struggling personally and financially, Wright developed a system in which students — or “apprentices”— would pay to work for him while staying at his Taliesin camps (summer in Wisconsin, winter in Arizona), which they would also help design and physically construct as part of their training. Any contemporary abuses of internships pale in comparison with Wright’s creative exploitation.
Taliesin remains an architecture school and the wonderful thing about it is that every part of it is used. This is no museum but a living, working place in which visitors can wander around his house and even sit on Wright’s own chairs.
For an architect who, with surprising candour, said, “I have been black and blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life from too intimate contacts with my own furniture”, these late plywood versions turn out to be surprisingly comfortable.
Wright developed what he termed an “organic architecture”, in which buildings were at one with the landscape, working with, and not against, the earth.
The buildings are low-slung and broad; you need to sit down to get the view, to level with the horizon. The structures were once open to the elements, shaded only by retractable canvas covers.
There is a wonderful spot where glazing has been added, but Wright refused to change the layout of the rooms, so two holes have been cut in the glass to accommodate the bulges of a pair of vases that had to stay just where they were.
In the low-lying forms, the shallow pitches, the rocky, Flintstones fireplaces and the quirky timber trusses, there’s something else, too.
Taliesin West is, arguably, the genesis of the midcentury style that has recently become so revered and so desirable.
It’s the style of sprawl, the horizontal spread suited to a vast landscape, freeways, warm winters and the cocktail of European modernism, homegrown western suburbanism and cheap fossil fuels.
When people think of midcentury architecture, they probably think of Palm Springs, that celebrity hang-out and a distant desert suburb. But Scottsdale does pretty well.
Its famous Hotel Valley Ho, with its gently arcing wings, is a fine example.
Designed by architect Edward L Varney in 1956, it too was populated with movie and particularly sports stars.
The geometric concrete balcony fronts echo Wright’s blocky designs at the Biltmore, while the pivoting screens separating the balconies presented an ingenious solution to discreet bedroom-hopping.
The hotel was substantially enlarged in 2005 and a tower added but its midcentury spirit was maintained and it retains that slightly louche air of a retreat resort downtown.
There are other midcentury gems, now valued and re-energised. The designers of Postino Highlands, a restaurant on North Scottsdale Road, have done a lovely job, for instance, in repurposing a near Aztec-influenced bank into a buzzy diner.
The area’s other big architectural attraction is similarly midcentury but its spirit is very different indeed.
Architect Paolo Soleri had been an acolyte of Wright’s at Taliesin but, departing from Wright’s orthodoxies, he set up his own outpost in the desert, Cosanti. Its strange, antiestablishment and very alternative beginnings are inherent in its name, which blends the Italian cosa, meaning “thing” or “property”, with “anti”.
It is an antimaterialist experimental landscape. And it is, quite frankly, like nothing else. A weird, dusty village of rough concrete domes and vaults, this is very much still a place of production and a place under construction but also a foundry and a ceramics factory.
Cosanti’s fruit are hanging everywhere—the odd, abstract patterned bronze and ceramic bells he designed and which remain its main source of income. There are slender concrete vaults and shells inscribed with patterns that look like the remnants of some alien civilisation.
There are oddly-cast domes and hobbit holes, the faintest memories of Gaudi and Expressionism along with sci-fi futurism. Soleri died in 2013 but his spirit still pervades the place.
Like Wright, he made his colleagues work, under the scorching sun, casting metal and digging desert earth, but he was clearly beloved.
While Wright advocated a super-sized suburbia — an acre for everyone and a huge automobile — Soleri brought a more European sensibility.
You can see it 110km outside the city in Arcosanti, his futuristic sci-fi settlement, which he intended as a multilevel, sunworshipping minimetropolis.
Only a fraction of the visionary city was built but these two strange settlements are a glimpse into the potential of an early eco-city, fascinating, eccentric and exhibiting an endlessly inventive architecture.
The future belonged more to Wright than Soleri.
Phoenix and the oddly attenuated Scottsdale (a city of fewer than 250,000, which somehow manages to stretch for 56km) are prime sprawl but contain some wonderful architectural gems.
Wright’s spiralling David and Gladys Wright House was the test-bed for New York’s Guggenheim, for instance.
His eccentrically wonderful Gammage Auditorium at Arizona State University is, allegedly, a reinterpretation of an unused plan for Baghdad, while his First Christian Church in Phoenix is a kind of roadside religiousness, midcentury mass. Its spiky tower looks a little like the unrealised one he designed for Phoenix City Hall, a smaller, tackier version of which was recently erected in Scottsdale.
Of Taliesin, Wright said, “Boys, what I’ve done here is a charcoal sketch. It’s up to you to finish it when I’m gone.”
Like Cosanti and Arcosanti, it still looks a little sketchy, a work in progress. As, in a way, do all these cities, still expanding inexorably into the desert.