Today, Architectural Digest travels to Scottsdale, Arizona, to tour Taliesin West—Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic desert laboratory and winter home. Designed as a seasonal escape from the brutal Wisconsin winters, Taliesin West became both a personal sanctuary and a working campus for Wright and his architecture students. Nestled in the stunning foothills of the McDowell Mountains, this National Historic Landmark was built almost entirely by Wright’s apprentices. More than just a building, it’s a prime embodiment of his philosophy of organic architecture, where structure and landscape are one.
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00:00During Franklin Wright's own lifetime, he became America's most renowned and intriguing architect.
00:16Here at Taliesin West, Franklin Wright and his apprentices were building a home and a school of sorts.
00:23They lived here during the winter months where they studied architecture and also worked in Wright's practice,
00:29but they also studied other art forms. There were film screenings, there were lectures, they would cook and care-take the community together.
00:37I frequently get asked how I got into working on Franklin Wright in my own research,
00:41and he was talking about many of the issues that we are dealing with today.
00:46How to design in harmony with the environment, how to deal with social inequalities, how to use architecture to improve cities.
00:54I always think of Taliesin West as a laboratory for learning.
00:58It was a very experimental place, it was constantly being changed and adapted.
01:02This makes Taliesin West a particularly compelling place to come and engage with Wright's ideas and theories
01:08and try to think more about the questions he's asking, the experiments he's doing, how we can apply them today,
01:13and really dig into some of these areas of his practice that could use more thought.
01:17So we're at Taliesin West, which is located in Scottsdale, Arizona.
01:26In 1932, when Wright established the Taliesin Fellowship, his architecture community if you will,
01:31they were based out of Wisconsin, out of Taliesin.
01:33They were learners of architecture, but also a much broader set of ideas that they practiced,
01:37and decided maybe it was time to set up a third home and studio in the desert so they could winter here.
01:43And so the apprentices essentially stockpiled their cars and they drove all the way down here from Wisconsin.
01:49And just to keep in mind, this is the 1930s.
01:51It's before the interstates, it's before highways, and so the trip itself, it's called the Migration,
01:56was quite its own journey, and they would camp along the way.
01:59Infrastructures like motels and roadside food services were in their infancy,
02:03and so they would have to bring food with them.
02:05They actually customized a truck that they called the Dinky Diner to serve as their sort of like mobile diner.
02:21Interestingly, in terms of architecture and photography,
02:23it's quite hard to grasp Taliesin West with just an image.
02:28It's a series of processional spaces.
02:31You're constantly turning a corner and you're surprised by a view or you're surprised by an entry,
02:36and so it really is meant to be walked through the space.
02:43We're standing on what's called the Prow of Taliesin West.
02:46When Wright and the apprentices came out here, there was no money or any materials to build Taliesin West,
02:51so the entire property was constructed and designed by Wright and by the apprentices.
02:56One of Wright's core architectural principles was that architecture should really relate strongly to its surrounding landscape and to nature,
03:03and so you might notice that many of the sloped roofs, they're almost at the same angle as the mountains,
03:07and the color of the wooden beams that hold the roofs up during the sunsets,
03:11it literally is almost the same color as the mountains.
03:13All of Taliesin West is constructed of what Wright called desert masonry.
03:18So we had the apprentices just gather these materials from the site.
03:22They used wood to build formwork.
03:24They wired the rocks in some cases or just placed them against the formwork.
03:28Then he would use a little bit of Portland cement, which you had to purchase,
03:31aggregate and water from the site again and just pour concrete into here, let it harden,
03:35and then you take off the wood and you've got these structural walls.
03:38One of Wright's theories concerns the nature of materials,
03:42and so letting the rocks really just be here as rocks, oftentimes they even protrude a bit here,
03:48he allows them to be the material that they are instead of trying to, let's say, even them out or chisel them down.
03:53And so this is again part of his theory of organic architecture,
03:56is respecting the nature of materials and working with them rather than against them.
04:00Scattered throughout Taliesin West are numerous of these blue-green reliefs embedded into the concrete.
04:12Franklin Wright was a major collector of Asian art.
04:15In this case, he makes it part of the building itself and he uses them to mark kind of key thresholds.
04:21So when he wants you to kind of turn into a doorway or notice that you're in a different kind of space
04:25and he wants you to kind of slow down for a moment and take note of your surroundings.
04:29So walking around Taliesin West, you can see many examples of Wright's interest in Asian art,
04:39and even the architecture, while it might not look Japanese, the processional route,
04:44the way it's integrated into the landscape and nature, these are things he's pulling from his experiences in Japan.
04:49But his first introduction to all this goes much for decades before he's in Arizona building Taliesin West.
04:55At the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, we know that he saw the Hohoden.
04:59He writes about this in his autobiography.
05:01And this was a Japanese temple, if you will, that was constructed by Japanese craftsmen.
05:05And Wright's not alone in being interested in Japanese culture in the late 19th century.
05:08It's kind of a widespread interest among many intellectuals and artists and thinkers.
05:12It has to do with the opening of Japan that had happened earlier to Western trade.
05:16And so suddenly there was the opportunity for people to look at Japanese artwork, for example, and buy Japanese goods.
05:22I think it's interesting to note that Wright's first trip abroad is to Japan.
05:26This is in 1905. At this point, he had become kind of a known woodblock print collector.
05:31He was working on behalf of gallery owners in different cities.
05:34So he's there to do that, but he, of course, also goes to see the architecture.
05:38And this is a bit unusual. An American architect at this time would typically go to Europe and they would do the grand tour, it was called.
05:45So you would want to go see the antique monuments of the Western architectural tradition.
05:49And he doesn't do that. He goes to Japan instead.
05:52He ultimately would end up building a very important hotel commission, the Imperial Hotel, in Tokyo, along with a school and some houses.
05:59Before we even get to the Taliesin Fellowship, which starts in 1932, there's already this kind of international, global exchange of people and ideas coming in and out through Wright's practice.
06:20We're now entering what's called the Garden Room.
06:22And this was Wright and Olgavana Wright's private living space, but they also used it quite a bit for the fellowship.
06:28You can see that I'm standing in a pretty tight, compressed space.
06:31We often will have a space that's narrow and kind of confined and maybe a little dark to sort of almost make you uncomfortable.
06:36And it kind of pushes you through into the main space, which is typically very open and bright.
06:41And so that set of tensions and kind of contradictions, it's one of his key techniques in architecture.
06:48Musical performance is what happened here, lectures, these community gatherings were a very important part of the fellowship.
06:54The fellowship was a very unorthodox school, if you will, and Wright would have really hesitated to even call it a school.
07:00He was very critical of formal education.
07:02He writes frequently about it.
07:03The fellowship, people were learning here, but it was not following those kind of standard guidelines.
07:08And so you came and you lived at Taliesin and Taliesin West, and you migrated between the two properties.
07:14And you learned by, on the job essentially, by doing architecture with Franklin Wright.
07:18It wasn't just design, you were also responsible for the caretaking of the community.
07:22So cooking was part of the lifestyle, cleaning was part of the lifestyle, choir practice, music.
07:27So it's more helpful, I think, to think of it as a community than to think of it as a school.
07:31As we move further into the garden room, it's a wonderful place to talk about the roofing system of the garden room,
07:38but also the drafting studio and Wright's office, they share a similar roofing system.
07:42The original roofing system were canvas panels.
07:45Today this is an acrylic combined with some fabric to give the appearance of fabric panels,
07:50but originally it had more of a tent feel.
07:52And so the glass that you see behind me wasn't glass, it was open air to the environment.
07:56And so you've got contradiction between the kind of solid, primordial walls,
08:00and then the sort of ephemeral nature of the canvas roof.
08:04The garden room, like all the spaces at Taliesin West, underwent numerous changes and adaptations over the years.
08:10Again, Wright and his wife were living here.
08:12And even after Wright died in 1959, Olga Vanya continued to live here and run the fellowship for many decades.
08:18Currently we have it restored back to how it was in the 1950s during Wright's lifetime.
08:24The origami chair that you see here, this was one of his experiments after World War II.
08:29It's a plywood chair. It's called this because of the bends and folds.
08:33Plastic and plywood were experimented with heavily during World War II due to metal rationing,
08:38and so Wright would have obviously been aware of all these cultural changes,
08:40so he too is experimenting with how to get these complex forms out of an everyday kind of banal material.
08:46One of the key parts of this room is actually this corner over here.
08:50It might seem counterintuitive, but many of Wright's sort of beautiful theories and design elements come together in this corner.
08:56So up here you can see these square blocks, if you will, attached to the wood here.
09:00And what happens is when the sun comes in and hits that, it creates a dotted line.
09:05And Wright had a theory about every line in the desert is a dotted line.
09:09And what he's referring to is the kind of natural landscape around us, particularly the cactuses.
09:14So if you think of a cactus with all the needles coming out, it creates dotted lines and shadows.
09:18And so when the sun rakes it, it's light, dark, light, dark, light, dark.
09:21So that shadow play in that dotted line is something he's really trying to bring in to the architecture as well.
09:26Originally, there would not have been glass that you see here. It would have been open air.
09:30But since the wood continues both inside and outside, he's making that boundary condition ambiguous, right?
09:36Are we inside? Are we outside? Is it nature? Is it architecture?
09:52We're now entering the apprentice court.
09:54When the fellows in Wright first started constructing Taliesin West and living here, it didn't exist.
09:59And so they were sleeping in tents.
10:01And so over time, they kept adding spaces and eventually added some bedroom wings for Wright himself
10:05and also for the kind of long-term apprentices that ended up staying and working at Wright's practice for many years.
10:10And so this is this kind of set of cottages that are all interconnected around this courtyard,
10:14which is where these more senior fellows, if you will, lived at Taliesin West.
10:18The sun cottage behind me is one of the earliest and one of the kind of larger ones.
10:22So we're going to take a look inside.
10:29Taliesin West was in a constant state of evolution.
10:32It was also a home to many people. And so people added their personal touches.
10:35So, you know, keep in mind the living space and it still continues to be today.
10:39In the sun cottage, we can see several of Wright's kind of earmark architectural techniques,
10:43built-in furniture, like the couch that you see behind me.
10:46He would often include built-in cabinetry and built-in shelving and things like this
10:50to make the architecture more unified and integrated.
10:52But also the fireplace, again, to heat these places, it's central to what is basically a large open concept plan.
10:58This room is the living room. It's the piano room for entertainment.
11:01It's also the dining room anchored by the hearth.
11:05The windows in the sun cottage are placed lower down on the walls,
11:08which is a bit counterintuitive, but it's intentional on Wright's part
11:11because he wants you to sit down, essentially, in the space.
11:14And when you sit down, you have a totally different view of the landscape
11:18than you had when you were standing.
11:19When you're standing, you almost more see the ground right in front of you.
11:22When you sit, you see the distant mountains, the cinder cones.
11:25So he's really framing your view of the landscape and nature beyond the architecture
11:30through the way he handles the fenestration.
11:32And so if you look at the clerestory level up here, we've got this beautiful pattern of blues
11:36and purples and yellows in the clerestory glass.
11:38And when the sun rakes in early in the morning and later in the afternoon as it's setting,
11:42beautiful rainbows of colors come into the space and light it up.
11:47The sun cottage is a larger residence, if you will, than many of the apprentice court residences.
11:51The sun cottage has a kitchen, for example, and a separate bedroom from the living space.
11:55The apprentice court, for the most part, those residences don't have kitchens and kind of other amenities.
12:01The point of this was many-fold.
12:03One is that Wright wanted to encourage the apprentices to live together communally.
12:07So they ate together, they cooked together, they were in the drafting studio together.
12:10Wright is such a well-known, arguably famous architect.
12:25We might almost say he's the first Starkitect being on television and on Time magazine.
12:29But as a result of that, there's a lot of mythologies that have kind of attached to him
12:32and a lot of stories that really deserve some unpacking and further scrutiny
12:35rather than keep repeating the same stories.
12:38We're now in the drafting studio of Taliesin West, which was really the kind of heart, if you will,
12:43or the core of the complex.
12:45This is the room where Wright and the apprentices worked on the drawings and designed the drawings.
12:50The roof of the drafting studio is on a slope, and you'll see this in many of the key spaces at Taliesin West.
12:55Originally, again, these were canvas panels that were stretched and stacked kind of at an angle on top of each other,
13:00so the effect was more like a pavilion, an open tent.
13:03And so this drafting studio would have been open to the elements to some degree, with the breeze coming in.
13:07It's sited in such a way that the breezes, as they come in from the valley, they do come right into the drafting studio.
13:12So it's another case where Wright is being very smart about how to cool and heat spaces in kind of a passive way, if you will,
13:18just to take advantage of the natural surroundings.
13:21And today, we tend to think of computers, and there's all sorts of software that help us to design buildings.
13:26But during Wright's lifetime, it was done by hand.
13:28And so the apprentices were a big part of this machinery, if you will, that helped him to do so many projects because they could help with the drawings.
13:35Now, Wright was very aware of the power of drawings, and he was very smart about developing, with the help of his apprentices,
13:42different styles of renderings, if you will, that he would use to kind of market himself.
13:46He surrounded himself with some really brilliant draftspeople.
13:52Marion Mahoney was Wright's first employee.
13:56She was the first woman ever in the state of Illinois to be licensed to practice architecture.
14:01Marion Mahoney would go on to become arguably Wright's most talented draftsperson in the early years of his practice.
14:07At this time, he's practicing in Oak Park, which is a suburb of Chicago.
14:11And she develops a graphic identity that looks very much to the Japanese print for inspiration.
14:15And eventually, this style that she develops, her brand identity, it's used in a Vossmith portfolio,
14:22which is a publication of Wright's work.
14:25It becomes a real way that he is disseminating his work to a global audience, certainly to Europe.
14:30It was a major contribution that she made to his practice, among many other contributions, I should say.
14:34I think there's a lot more on that in terms of his role or his interface with questions of gender roles and feminism.
14:43Even locating his homes and studios, the first one in Oak Park, it's in a suburb. It's not in Chicago.
14:49So he's not in the downtown loop of Chicago with all the other firms, essentially.
14:54Some scholars have argued that locating his practice in a suburb and in a house, basically,
14:59was a bit more welcoming to many of his female clients.
15:03We're now entering Wright's office.
15:18And this would have been the first space that clients and visitors would have come to engage with him in terms of working together.
15:24In Wright's office, there's a large fireplace, and these appear throughout Taliesin West and all of the main spaces.
15:30Wright would use the fireplace, or the hearth as he called it, in many, many of his houses.
15:35Sometimes they're unusual shapes, like round fireplaces.
15:38And so he would really use materials and form and shape and location of the fireplaces to convey a lot of different ideas and make them architectural moments.
15:45Wright's office in particular has a few moments where the desert masonry is really unique and interesting to look at in some detail.
15:51One of them is here. Wright would pull these large boulders from the desert floor.
15:56Oftentimes they have a flat face that work well to kind of go close to flush with a wall, but not all of them do.
16:01And so this one here that you see, it's more of a curved kind of shape, but it's a wonderful color.
16:06It's a very rich color.
16:07So when Wright would use a rock like this, he would gather smaller rocks that we call goose eggs from the washes,
16:14and he would put them on top of the big boulder so when the concrete was poured it would not run over that rock face,
16:21because he wanted you to see the rock face as part of the ornament integrated into the actual structure of the building.
16:26Every office needs a desk.
16:28And so Wright, of course, also had large tables.
16:30He designed the drafting tables himself in the studio as well as here in his private office.
16:35His secretary, Eugene Massilink, who was also a very talented graphic designer, I should add,
16:39would sit at the table with him and type up notes from the client meetings and correspondence on a typewriter
16:44that especially customized to be able to do some architectural symbols.
16:47On this desk we have some of, again, the projects that were on the boards at the time that he was working.
16:51The large color rendering is an unbuilt project for the Arizona State Capitol.
16:55And then the blueprint here is a blueprint for the Guggenheim Museum.
16:58Now we're inside of the cabaret.
17:15And when you access this theater space, you enter through a long corridor.
17:21At the end of the corridor is a fireplace.
17:23And so in the evenings when the fire would be lit,
17:25you would be literally walking down this long hallway approaching a fireplace that's glowing like in the heart of a cave almost.
17:32Most of the cabaret is subterranean.
17:34It was a lot of excavation.
17:35In this case, the Wright actually had to hire a contractor with a bulldozer to come out and excavate the space.
17:41It's so far underground.
17:42The apprentices couldn't do it by hand like they did the rest of the spaces.
17:45The panels that you see on my left and right, these were canvas panels initially.
17:49Now they're plywood, but they're movable.
17:51So you can open these to see the desert floor.
17:53You can flip these up to make it even darker.
17:55So it's another just clever way that Wright makes the space quite flexible and adaptable to your needs.
17:59But it's not necessarily very expensive or high tech.
18:01He's just creative about using the means at hand.
18:04And unlike the garden room and the drafting studio and Wright's office, the roof in this case is the desert masonry.
18:10So we really have an entirely kind of concrete structure.
18:12This is the main space of the cabaret.
18:15It was a dinner theater.
18:16It was a lecture space.
18:18Film screenings were actually a very important part of Wright's culture and kind of community, if you will.
18:22They added in these tables that are, again, you can kind of change them to make them bigger.
18:26You can put the flaps down to make them smaller.
18:28These are just chairs that you move around.
18:30And so this was a place, again, you could eat and dine and have some snacks.
18:33And you could change the furniture a bit when it was time to watch the film or listen to the lecture or listen to the musical performance.
18:38The cabaret is quite irregularly shaped, but it actually has wonderful acoustics.
18:43Wright trained initially in Chicago with a firm named Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan.
18:47Huge influence on him.
18:49And one of the key projects that was on the boards when Wright was working there was the auditorium building in Chicago,
18:54which, again, was a kind of signal building in terms of acoustics and performance.
18:58And here's the main stage, if you will.
19:00There's a piano highlighted here.
19:02It's put into a nook in the concrete wall, which is a bit unexpected.
19:05And you would think that that was not helpful for acoustics.
19:08But actually, the sound bounces off of this floor here and puts it out into the space.
19:12Wright also designed the lighting fixtures in many of his homes, including at Taliesin West.
19:16And so here you'll see these modern, unique designs of indirect lighting.
19:20Up here on the roof, you can see a sense of how large these boulders are that are in the desert masonry.
19:25So the roof is quite heavy, as you can imagine.
19:28So in this case, Wright had to use steel to reinforce the roof so that it wouldn't fall down.
19:33They let it cure for an entire season to get maximum strength for the concrete because they knew this was a heavy lift.
19:49Personally, I think it's important not to put right on a pedestal or to hero worship him or to perpetuate the kind of grand myths, if you will.
19:56It's an important act to really go in there critically and try and understand both sides of what he's trying to do,
20:01to ask difficult questions and to get to some of the more meaty issues.
20:05He very much wanted to design beautiful buildings.
20:07We're all impacted by the buildings that we occupy, by the landscape around us.
20:11And so now today at the Frank the Wright Foundation, this is really our mission,
20:14is to advance Wright's legacy in terms of organic architecture,
20:18which is centered on concepts of, you know, the open spaces we've talked about, respecting nature and respecting materials.
20:24That's where I think we find the substance of how we can use Wright as, you know, a vehicle for thinking about contemporary issues.
20:31.