The Wright Way

Melanie, Kristen, Nicole, and I all descended upon Jill's condo for a long weekend and a much needed reunion.

Jill and I began our Friday early with a trip to Jill's yoga class. Jill is a Bikram Yoga instructor as well as a lawyer, and I was excited to get to experience this part of her life for the first time. Bikram Yoga is intense. The room is heated to a 101 degrees and the humidity has to be just right as well. You perform 26 poses, a standing series and a mat series. After all the horror stories I'd heard about first timers, I was pretty pleased with myself. I actually really enjoyed it.

After we picked Nicole up from the airport we headed out to Taliesin West for a tour. Here's our tour guide. He was very passionate about Wright and Taliesin.
Frank Lloyd Wright was quite a character. He came to Scottsdale after a really bad bout of pneumonia. His doctor basically told him he could not endure another Wisconsin winter. So he began wintering in Arizona, and he built the second of his two architectural schools there. His students, like him, traveled back and forth between Taliesin East and Taliesin West. Taliesin is a Welsh word that means "shining brow." Our tour guide said that Wright liked to nestle his buildings into the brow of the hill rather than placing them on the crown.

Frank Lloyd Wright was really excited about Scottsdale and one of the reasons was because it was such a small place that there weren't any building inspectors, meaning he could do whatever he wanted.

Wright called Taliesin West his "winter camp" and he designed all the building so they were very tent-like. He covered the roofs with canvas (meaning he had to install inside rain gutters) and left all the windows open for years until his wife, Olga Vanna, finally prevailed in her quest for glass. The buildings were built with stone quarried near the cite and a concrete mixture. Wright also decorated the area with petroglyphs that he plundered from the surrounding area.

This is the main building. The large pool of water was Wright's insurance in case of a fire (remember Scottsdale is tiny), and Wright was terrified of fire (Taliesin East had burnt down twice). Luckily they never had to use the pool for this purpose. The grass kind of goes against Wright's whole "blending into the landscape," "native materials" philosophy, but he wanted the kids to have a place to play.
The theme of the tour was how much work Wright's students had to do. They basically built all of Taliesin West, mined the stones, grated the roads, cooked the meals, you name it. They also reassembled these Chinese sculptures that Wright had purchased for a song because they had been smashed into smithereens. Once they were glued back together Wright used them to decorate the school.
Next to the Chinese ceramic you can see a small red plaque. These were plagues that Wright gave out to authenticate his buildings, but apparently he only gave them to preferred customers, and to be a preferred customer you could not ask for any alterations of his architectural plans for your building.

The school has a lovely view of Camelback (which we would be climbing the next day). Wright was very, very upset about these power lines that were put in to ruin his view. He was doing just fine without power at his winter camp, thank you very much.
We also went to see Wright's personal quarters. We weren't allowed to take pictures in these rooms so I found some on the internet.

The living room had lots of seating (and they let us sit in it!) because the Wright's liked to entertain.
This is my favorite. Below is Wright's bedroom. He built a wall in the middle of his bed so that his students would know whether or not they could disturb him when he was asleep. If he was asleep on one side of the wall you could wake him up, but if he was asleep on the other side you had to leave him alone. Seriously.
Wright built his buildings on what he called "the human scale," which really meant "the Wright scale." See Wright was short, about 5'8", and he didn't see why you would need doorways any taller than 6'. I know quite a few people who would beg to differ. Here Jill acts as a human measuring stick. See, Jill wouldn't mind a taller doorway.
There's an artist who lives at Taliesin West. She's been living there since the 1930s, I believe. She came to do an sculptural apprenticeship and never left. Now she is 93 years old. This is one of her sculptures.
Taliesin West has two theaters. The Wrights really liked entertainment. And guess who put on the shows. That's right, the students.
And the students built and still do build (Taliesin is still a school today) their own lodgings in the desert. This one won an award recently for modular/prefabricated structures.
The other theater at Taliesin West is a small dinner theater modeled after the underground cabarets of Europe. Here we all descend.
The theater, of course, was built by the students who first shoveled and then dynamited the hole in which we were sitting. Those hard-working students. Wright tilted all of the chairs so that in order to face the stage you had to sit the way we are all seated below, with our right legs crossed over our leg legs and our right arms around the person next to us. That, my friends, is the only Wright way to sit.
After Taliesin it was time for some food, so we headed to the Bario Cafe.
Then that evening we went to the Mesa Temple, which seemed huge to me, by the way, because I am always going to small or medium sized temples. The Mesa Temple is a popular Friday night hang out, let me tell you. We had to wait our turn, but we didn't mind because it was really nice to go with such a good group of friends.