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April 28, 2008
With the commision money he earned from the Falling Water home in Pennsylvania Frank Lloyd Wright bought 500+ acres in Scottsdale, AZ. At the time Scottsdale was a little desert outpost with about two hundred residents, not the trendy fashion-laden suburb it is now. Wright used his land, Taliesin West, to develop ideas on Organic Architecture as well as establish an architectural school for many students. Plus it allowed him to avoid the bitter Wisconsin winters.
Many innovations came out of Taliesin West; the great room as seen in the photo above, track lighting, floor lighting that could be walked on, use of steel reinforcement in concrete, rooms that integrated with the landscape and canvas roofing that allowed for uniform natural light to flow into the room. We can celebrate Wright as innovator, but we can't really celebrate him at Taliesin West as a designer. The place looks cheap, nasty, haphazard, unfinished, incoherent and inconsistent. It is not 'designed' but rather reflects the changing and eccentric interests of Wright himself.
A good example of the inconsistency is the Asian sculptures. They are ceramic and he picked them up cheaply in a crate because they were broken. They do not fit with the buildings or site at all, rather they just represent his cheap nature and interests. But then Wright was cheap except when he was expensive. His bathroom in his bedroom has polished aluminium walls and fixtures; which cost a fortune back then. That style is common and fashionable (as well as expensive) today, so he was innovative, but again it just represents his whimsical interests rather than being an integrated and flowing design.
Still; the place definitely has its moments, like the sloped and triangular buttresses of the design offices[below].
Taliesin West is worth a look but it is not a showroom. It is basically the physical constructs stemming from the changing and incoherent interests of an innovative and difficult man. It is no architectural nirvana.
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Cam,
the inside room looks very light and it is spacious--it makes a radical break with the dark inside cluttered world of Victorian architecture.