In 1937 Frank Lloyd Wright, then aged 70, was advised by his doctors to go south for the winters. Since 1932 he had been running a Fellowship at Taliesin for students to learn architecture by doing. It was not an accredited School of Architecture and could award no degree or diploma because Wright was not an accredited architect himself. When he received his doctor's advice he bought 650 acres of land (@ $12.50 per acre) outside of Phoenix which was then only a small town and decamped his whole school by train and walking to live in tents on the land and start building a winter school. the Scottsdale area of Phoenix has now grown round the site. The Taliesin campuses are still run as a now accredited architecture school and the students had just left the week before we visited to return to Wisconsin for the summer.
The first building built on the site had no windows and was built as a safe house in case of a wildfire whilst every one was in tents.
Wright who always spent to his income had little funds at the time because of the depression so he conceived of a mode of construction using only a dry mix cement (the cement was cheap but water expensive), plywood, and rocks and pebbles found on site. The plywood was used to make a frame filled with rocks and pebbles and concrete mix to make a slab, then opened and reused for the next slab and so on. the method was perfected by trial and error in accordance with his "learning by doing " philosophy. Here is a picture of his office showing how the slabs put together. the roof is of canvas supported by douglas fir beams and it was a decade after it was first built that his wife persuaded him to put glass in the windows.
Like the Earthships these buildings have no foundations their weight keeping them in place.
Earlier in his life Wright had collected Japanese prints and had visited Japan. This gave him a great fondness for the colour red as it had good associations. He had 90 cars and painted all of them red (he crashed 30). He also used red in his architecture and all his furnishings.He used slightly different shades,one for the cars and two for the furnishings and although he did not patent the colours, as Yves Klein did his Blue, the colours have passed into the lexicon of America's major paint manufacturer.
Wright designed the furniture for the communal living room, red of course.
Later Wright was able to purchase the water rights for $7 per acre and drilled a borehole which found an underground river at 500ft. Thus he was able to add water features which vastly enhance the campus.
Wright had a habit of getting up in the middle of the night when he had an idea so he and his wife had adjacent and communicating separate bedrooms. He had a desk where he could work looking out onto the garden.
It was a requirement of Wright's original school that all students could play an instrument. At weekends. He would invite rich Hollywood acquaintances to stay in the upper floor guest rooms at Taliesin
and have the students give concerts and shows. It was a successful strategy he was working on 135 different projects at the time of his death in 1959, aged 92.
He built both a concert hall and a dining cabaret to assist with the shows.
The concert hall/theatre had curtains hung from rods which could be moved like great doors as well as drawing the curtains to make a very flexible performance space.
The dining cabaret was based on those he encountered in Berlin which he visited frequently. No microphones are needed because the musicians perform on a sounding board (there is an alcove extension of the board to fit the piano).The room is 2/3 below ground and has no right angles widening from th stage end and the inclined seating following the natural line of the hill so that there are naturally near perfect acoustics.
Originally all the rooms had been orientated toward the SW to apprciat the view over the valley.
I had to take that view very carefully because in 1947 two lines of electric pylon were built in the valley damaging the view. Wright was furious he could not get them to bury the lines and moved the communal dining room so that it faces away from the valley towards the mountain.
That may be why the furnishings are not red but blue. It is still used for communal meals today. The have a chef and the bell went a 12.30 towards the end of our tour.
Dotted round the site are various porcelain Chinese opera scenes which Wright picked up in LA very cheaply as they had been damaged in transit and rejected by the purchaser.
There are also many statues some of which are for sale.
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