After Frank Lloyd Wright married his third wife, he built Taliesin West in Scottsdale as a personal winter home, studio and training academy for aspiring young architects. Today it is no longer a home for any of his descendants, but is still a school for "apprentices", fully accredited as a college and post graduate school. The house is used for a wide variety of purposes including architectural classrooms, studios, and for performance. The apprentices live at Taliesin West and often build their own shelters in the nearby desert as part of their training. To view these shelters, you have to take a separate tour which we didn't do. But they are imaginative and interesting, as we were told.
Our tour was of the house and the immediately surrounding grounds. This house was built starting in 1937. Wright believed that a home should be an integral part of the environment, so materials are natural and local, and the design as unobtrusive as possible. As our wonderful tour guide said, it is a work in process because needs and uses change, and materials need to be repaired or even replaced, like the canvas roof coverings. Much of the home is now air conditioned.
It is a wonderful location with views of the valley below. It is a serene place and a timeless design from a man who changed the face of architecture in the US.
This photo is from the Web site.
So is this one. We weren't allowed to take any interior photos of the former living areas.
These are mine.
In the evening we went to a Colorado Rockies baseball game at Salt River Fields. Rockies won handily over the SF Giants 7-0. I don't know what the Giants were doing that night in terms of goals for the game, but it wasn't to try to win! They were awful. But Spring Training is for all kinds of purposes, not just winning. They, maybe, were looking at the starting pitcher and several minor league players. Buster Posey and The Beard were not seen which was a disappointment.
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