TALIESIN WEST

Taliesin West

The studio in Arizona that incubated some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most iconic works.

In the depression winter of 1935, architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his apprentices (known as the Taliesin Fellowship) had enough of the malaise that was rolling in as the warm Wisconsin sun transformed into a depressive gloomy grey. As autumn began they packed up shop and trekked from the Taliesin Studio in Wisconsin to Scottsdale, Arizona and set up camp.

In 1935, Scottsdale resembled much of the American southwest at the time: empty, dry, and shockingly beautiful. Wright and his disciples would spend two winter seasons there before purchasing the plot of land that would soon become Taliesin West. Allegedly he paid $3.50 an acre for 620 acres of land:

“Finally I learned of a site twenty-six miles from Phoenix, across the desert of the vast Paradise Valley. On up to a great mesa in the mountains. On the mesa just below McDowell Peak we stopped, turned, and looked around. The top of the world," Wright would later explain. ⠀⠀
Over the next 22 years Wright, his family, and his disciples would use Taliesin West as an architectural laboratory, allowing them to experiment with designs, shapes, and materials that would go on to inspire his work around the world.

The structures at Talesin West itself evolved over that period, but the principles stayed the same: sharp angles and dramatic geometric patterns had to reflect the surroundings and be made from as many local materials as possible. Concrete was mixed from local sand by his students and then shaped by them, using wooden molds, around which found rocks and boulders were used as structural material. It gives the impression in person of at once being organic from the earth and alien from a divine hand all the same: “Arizona needs its own architecture…long, low, sweeping lines, uptilting planes. Surfaces patterned after such abstraction in line and color as we find 'realism' in the patterns of the rattlesnake, the Gila monster, and the saguaro, cholla or staghorn." Wright encouraged this thinking, and based many of the geometric patterns found in his Taliesin West designs on the Native American artworks he and his team found nearby.

Wright and his disciples would spend two winter seasons there before purchasing the plot of land that would soon become Taliesin West. Allegedly he paid $3.50 an acre for 620 acres.

Many of Wright’s most famous buildings were designed in the drafting room at Taliesin West, including the Guggenheim Museum in NYC, and the Grady Gammage Auditorium at Arizona State University - a building that was originally intended for Wright’s grand city plan in Baghdad, before a coup removed the ruling power which had commissioned it.

It remains to this day as the headquarters of The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, as well as the winter home for the School of Architecture at Taliesin, providing a Master of Architecture degree based on Wright’s core principles of design. In 2008 it achieved Unesco World Heritage status.