T HE result was Taliesin West, "shining brow" in Welsh and the same name as his Wisconsin base, but this time a sharp-edged sculpture inspired by the desert landscape of mountain, mesa and cactus. The land cost $6 to $9 an acre, and Wright paid only $600 for the cement - every boulder was a sack of cement he didn't have to buy - and another $600 for wood and canvas, which was rolled up and down to regulate the light and air.
Wright was 70 and lived in a tent with his third wife, Olgivanna, while apprentices cut huge rocks and poured concrete around them to create walls that literally grow out of the desert. Finally the Depression drove him to Arizona, where he arrived virtually penniless in the 1930s to recover from pneumonia and begin a new career, like a latter-day pioneer. By the late 1920s, his bohemian and melodramatic life (which has just been made into an opera) cost him many of his clients. He was an inspiration for the clean but sterile lines of the International Style of the Bauhaus, which he loathed. If Europe is all about exploring humanity and America about taming nature, there is no more striking change-of-pace vacation than a visit to the desert workshop of America's most original architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, with side trips to some icons of the Old West.Īpprenticed in 1887 in Chicago to Louis Sullivan, the inventor of the skyscraper, Wright developed his own organic style echoing the long horizons and broad spaces of the prairie.
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