Inside Frank Lloyd Wright’s Design Workshop Built From The Desert

[gentle music]

During Frank Lloyd Wright's own lifetime,

he became America's most renowned

and intriguing architect.

Here at Taliesin West,

Frank Lloyd Wright and his apprentices were building a home

and a school of sorts.

They lived here during the winter months,

where they studied architecture

and also worked in Wright's practice,

but they also studied other art forms.

There were film screenings, there were lectures.

They would cook and caretake the community together.

I frequently get asked how I got into working

on Frank Lloyd Wright in my own research.

And he was talking about many of the issues

that we are dealing with today.

How to design in harmony with the environment.

How to deal with social inequalities.

How to use architecture to improve cities.

I always think of Taliesin West

as a laboratory for learning.

It was a very experimental place.

It was constantly being changed and adapted.

This makes Taliesin West a particularly compelling place

to come and engage with Wright's ideas and theories,

and try to think more about the questions he's asking,

the experiments he's doing, how he can apply them today,

and really dig into some of these areas of his practice

that could use more thought.

So we're at Taliesin West,

which is located in Scottsdale, Arizona.

In 1932, when Wright established the Taliesin Fellowship,

his architecture community, if you will,

they were based out of Wisconsin, out of Taliesin.

They were learners of architecture,

but also a much broader set of ideas that they practiced,

and decided maybe it was time to set up a third home

and studio in the desert so they could winter here.

And so the apprentices essentially stockpiled their cars,

and they drove all the way down here from Wisconsin.

And just to keep in mind, this is the 1930s.

It's before the interstates. It's before highways.

And so the trip itself, it's called a migration,

was quite its own journey,

and they would camp along the way.

Infrastructures like motels

and roadside food services were in their infancy,

and so they would have to bring food with them.

They actually customized a truck

that they called the Dinky Diner

to serve as their sort of, like, mobile diner.

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Interestingly, in terms of architecture and photography,

it's quite hard to grasp Taliesin West with just an image.

It's a series of processional spaces.

You're constantly turning a corner

and you're surprised by a view

or you're surprised by an entry.

And so it really is meant to be walked through, the space.

We're standing on what's called the prow of Taliesin West.

When Wright and the apprentices came out here,

there was no money or any materials to build Taliesin West.

So the entire property was constructed

and designed by Wright and by the apprentices.

One of Wright's core architectural principles was

that architecture should really relate strongly

to its surrounding landscape and to nature.

And so you might notice that many of the sloped roofs,

they're almost at the same angle as the mountains.

And the color of the wooden beams that hold the roofs up,

during the sunsets, it literally is almost the same color

as the mountains.

All of Taliesin West is constructed

of what Wright called desert masonry.

So he had the apprentices gather these materials

from the site.

They used wood to build formwork.

They wired the rocks in some cases

or just placed them against the formwork.

Then he would use a little bit of Portland cement,

which he had to purchase,

aggregate and water from the site again,

and just poured concrete into here, let it harden.

And then you take off the wood,

and you've got these structural walls.

One of Wright's theories concerns the nature of materials.

And so letting the rocks really just be here as rocks.

Oftentimes, they even protrude a bit here.

He allows them to be the material that they are

instead of trying to, let's say,

even them out or chisel them down.

And so this is, again,

part of his theory of organic architecture,

is respecting the nature of materials

and working with them rather than against them.

[gentle music]

Scattered throughout Taliesin West are numerous

of these blue-green reliefs embedded into the concrete.

Frank Lloyd Wright was a major collector of Asian art.

In this case, he makes it part of the building itself,

and he uses them to mark kind of key thresholds.

So when he wants you to kind of turn into a doorway

or notice that you're in a different kind of space,

and he wants you to kind of slow down for a moment

and take note of your surroundings.

[gentle upbeat music]

So walking around Taliesin West,

you can see many examples of Wright's interest in Asian art.

And even the architecture,

while it might not look Japanese, the processional route,

the way it's integrated into the landscape and nature,

these are things he's pulling from his experiences in Japan.

But his first introduction to all this goes for decades

before he's in Arizona building Taliesin West.

At the 1893 Chicago World's Fair,

we know that he saw the Ho-o-Den.

He writes about this in his autobiography.

And this was a Japanese temple, if you will,

that was constructed by Japanese craftsmen.

And Wright's not alone in being interested

in Japanese culture in the late 19th century.

It's kind of a widespread interest among many intellectuals

and artists and thinkers.

It has to do with the opening of Japan

that had happened earlier to Western trade.

And so suddenly there was the opportunity for people

to look at Japanese artwork, for example,

and buy Japanese goods.

I think it's interesting to note

that Wright's first trip abroad is to Japan.

This is in 1905.

At this point, he had become kind

of a known woodblock print collector.

He was working on behalf of gallery owners

in different cities.

So he's there to do that, but he, of course,

also goes to see the architecture.

And 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.

So you would want to go see the antique monuments

of the Western architectural tradition.

And he doesn't do that. He goes to Japan instead.

He ultimately would end up building

a very important hotel commission, the Imperial Hotel,

in Tokyo, along with a school and some houses.

Before 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.

[gentle music]

We are now entering what's called the Garden Room.

And this was Wright

and Olgivanna Wright's private living space,

but they also used it quite a bit for the fellowship.

You can see that I'm standing

in a pretty tight, compressed space.

He often will have a space that's, you know,

narrow and kind of confined and maybe a little dark

to sort of almost make you uncomfortable.

And it kind of pushes you through into the main space,

which is typically very open and bright.

And so that set of tensions and kind of contradictions,

it's one of his key techniques in architecture.

Musical performance is what happened here. Lectures.

These community gatherings were a very important part

of the fellowship.

The fellowship was a very unorthodox school, if you will.

And Wright would've really hesitated

to even call it a school.

He was very critical of formal education.

He writes frequently about it.

The fellowship, people were learning here,

but it was not following those kind of standard guidelines.

And so you came and you lived at Taliesin and Taliesin West,

and you migrated between the two properties.

And you learned on the job, essentially,

by doing architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright.

It wasn't just design.

You were also responsible

for the caretaking of the community.

So cooking was part of the lifestyle.

Cleaning was part of the lifestyle. Choir practice, music.

So it's more helpful, I think, to think of it

as a community than to think of it as a school.

As we move further into the Garden Room,

it's a wonderful place to talk about the roofing system

of the Garden Room, but also the Drafting Studio

and Wright's office.

They share a similar roofing system.

The original roofing system were canvas panels.

Today, this is an acrylic combined with some fabric

to give the appearance of fabric panels,

but originally, it had more of a tent feel.

And so the glass that you see behind me wasn't glass.

It was open air to the environment.

And so you've got contradiction

between the kind of solid primordial walls

and then the sort of ephemeral nature of the canvas roof.

The Garden Room, like all the spaces at Taliesin West,

underwent numerous changes and adaptations over the years.

Again, Wright and his wife were living here.

And even after Wright died in 1959,

Olgivanna continued to live here

and run the fellowship for many decades.

Currently, we have it restored back to

how it was in the 1950s, during Wright's lifetime.

The origami chair that you see here,

this was one of his experiments after World War Ii.

It's a plywood chair.

It's called this because of the bends and folds.

Plastic and plywood were experimented

with heavily during World War II due to metal rationing.

And so Wright would've obviously been aware

of all these cultural changes.

So he too is experimenting with how

to get these complex forms out of an everyday,

kind of banal material.

One of the key parts

of this room is actually this corner over here.

It might seem counterintuitive,

but many of Wright's sort of beautiful theories

and design elements come together in this corner.

So up here you can see these square blocks, if you will,

attached to the wood here.

And what happens is when the sun comes in

and hits that, it creates a dotted line.

And Wright had a theory about every line

in the desert is a dotted line.

And what he's referring to is the kind of natural landscape

around us, particularly the cactuses.

So if you think of a cactus,

with all the needles coming out,

it creates dotted lines and shadows.

And so when the sun rakes it,

it's light, dark, light, dark, light, dark.

So that shadow play

and that dotted line is something he's really trying

to bring into the architecture as well.

Originally, there would not have been glass

that you see here.

It would've been open air.

But since the wood continues both inside and outside,

he's making that boundary condition ambiguous, right?

Are we inside? Are we outside?

Is it nature? Is it architecture?

[gentle music]

We're now entering the Apprentice Court.

When the fellows

and Wright first started constructing Taliesin West

and living here, it didn't exist.

And so they were sleeping in tents.

And so over time they kept adding spaces,

and eventually added some bedroom wings for Wright himself

and also for the kind of long-term apprentices

that ended up staying and working

at Wright's practice for many years.

And so this is this kind set of cottages

that are all interconnected around this courtyard,

which is where these more senior fellows, if you will,

lived at Taliesin West.

The Sun Cottage behind me is one of the earliest

and one of the kind of larger ones.

So we're gonna take a look inside.

[gentle music]

Taliesin West was in a constant state of evolution.

It was also a home to many people.

And so people added their personal touches.

So, you know, keep in mind it's a living space,

and it still continues to be today.

In the Sun Cottage, we can see several of Wright's kind

of earmark architectural techniques,

built-in furniture like the couch that you see behind me.

He would often include built-in cabinetry

and built-in shelving and things like this

to make the architecture more unified and integrated.

But also the fireplace, again, to heat these places,

it's central to what is basically a large open-concept plan.

This room is the living room.

It's the piano room for entertainment.

It's also the dining room, anchored by the hearth.

The windows in the Sun Cottage are placed lower down

on the walls, which is a bit counterintuitive,

but it's intentional on Wright's part

because he wants you to sit down,

essentially, in the space.

And when you sit down,

you have a totally different view of the landscape

than you had when you were standing.

When you're standing,

you almost more see the ground right in front of you.

When you sit, you see the distant mountains,

the cinder cones.

So he's really framing your view of the landscape

and nature beyond the architecture

through the way he handles the fenestration.

And so if you look at the clerestory level up here,

we've got this beautiful pattern of blues and purples

and yellows in the clerestory glass.

And when the sun rakes in early in the morning

and later in the afternoon, as it's setting,

beautiful rainbows of colors come

into the space and light it up.

The Sun Cottage is a larger residence, if you will,

than many of the Apprentice Court residences.

Sun Cottage has a kitchen, for example,

and a separate bedroom from the living space.

The Apprentice Court, for the most part,

those residences don't have kitchens

and kind of other amenities.

The point of this was manyfold.

One is that Wright wanted to encourage the apprentices

to live together communally.

So they ate together, they cooked together,

they were in the Drafting Studio together.

[gentle music]

Wright is such a well-known, arguably famous architect.

We might almost say he's the first architect being

on television and on Time magazine.

But as a result of that, there's a lot of mythologies

that have kind of attached to him and a lot of stories

that really deserve some unpacking and further scrutiny

rather than repeating the same stories.

We're now in the Drafting Studio of Taliesin West,

which is really the kind of heart, if you will,

or the core, of the complex.

This is the room where Wright and the apprentices worked

on the drawings and designed the drawings.

The roof of the Drafting Studio is on a slope.

And you'll see this in many of the key spaces

at Taliesin West.

Originally, again, these were canvas panels

that were stretched and stacked kind of

at an angle on top of each other.

So the effect was more like a pavilion or open tent.

And so this Drafting Studio would've been open

to the elements to some degree, with the breeze coming in.

It's sited in such a way that the breezes,

as they come in from the valley,

they do come right into the Drafting Studio.

So 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, just to take advantage

of the natural surroundings.

And today, we tend to think of computers,

and there's all sorts of software

that help us to design buildings.

But during Wright's lifetime, it was done by hand.

And so the apprentices were a big part of this machinery,

if you will, that helped him to do so many projects,

'cause they could help with the drawings.

Now, Wright was very aware of the power of drawings,

and he was very smart about developing,

with the help of his apprentices,

different styles of renderings, if you will,

that he would use to kind of market himself.

[gentle upbeat music]

He surrounded himself

with some really brilliant draftspeople.

Marion Mahony was Wright's first employee.

She was the first woman ever in the state of Illinois

to be licensed to practice architecture.

Marion Mahony would go on

to become arguably Wright's most talented draftsperson

in the early years of his practice.

At this time, he's practicing in Oak Park,

which is a suburb of Chicago.

And she develops a graphic identity

that looks very much to the Japanese print for inspiration.

And eventually, this style that she develops,

or brand identity, it's used in a Wasmuth Portfolio,

which is a publication of Wright's work.

It becomes a real way that he is disseminating his work

to a global audience, certainly to Europe.

It was a major contribution that she made to his practice,

among many other contributions, I should say.

I think there's a lot more on that in terms of,

you know, his role or his interface

with questions of gender roles and feminism,

even locating his homes and studios.

The first one in Oak Park, it's in a suburb.

It's not in Chicago.

So he's not in the Loop with all the other,

like, the downtown Loop of Chicago,

with all the other firms, essentially.

Some scholars have argued

that locating his practice in a suburb and in a house,

basically, was a bit more welcoming

to many of his female clients.

[gentle music]

We are now entering Wright's office.

And this would've been the first space that clients

and visitors would've come to engage with him

in terms of working together.

In Wright's office, there's a large fireplace.

And these appear throughout Taliesin West,

in all of the main spaces.

Wright would use the fireplace,

or the hearth, as he called it, in many, many of his houses.

Sometimes, they're unusual shapes, like round fireplaces.

And 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.

Wright's office in particular has a few moments

where the desert masonry is really unique

and interesting to look at in some detail.

One of them is here.

Wright would pull these large boulders

from the desert floor.

Oftentimes, they have a flat face that work well

to kind of go close to flesh with a wall,

but not all of them do.

And so this one here,

that you see it's more of a curved kind of shape,

but it's a wonderful color.

It's a very rich color.

So when Wright would use a rock like this,

he would gather smaller rocks

that we call goose eggs from the washes,

and he would put them on top of the big boulder,

so when the concrete was poured,

it would not run over that rock face.

'Cause he wanted you to see the rock face

as part of the ornament integrated

into the actual structure of the building.

Every office needs a desk,

and so Wright, of course, also had large tables.

He designed the drafting tables himself in the studio,

as well as here in his private office.

His secretary, Eugene Masselink,

who was also a very talented graphic designer, I should add,

would sit at the table with him

and type up notes from the client meetings

and correspondence on a typewriter

that is specially customized to be able

to do some architectural symbols.

On this desk, we have some of, again,

the projects that were on the boards at the time

that he was working.

The large color rendering is an unbuilt project

for the Arizona State Capitol.

And then the blueprint here has a blueprint

for the Guggenheim Museum.

[gentle music]

Now we're inside of the Cabaret.

And when you access this theater space,

you enter through a long corridor.

At the end of the corridor is a fireplace.

And so in the evenings, when the fire would be lit,

you would be literally walking down this long hallway,

approaching a fireplace that's glowing like

in the heart of a cave almost.

Most of the Cabaret is subterranean.

It was a lot of excavation.

In this case, Wright actually had to hire a contractor

with a bulldozer to come out and excavate the space.

It's so far underground,

the apprentices couldn't do it by hand,

like they did the rest of the spaces.

The panels that you see on my left and right,

these were canvas panels initially.

Now they're plywood. But they're movable.

So you can open these to see the desert floor.

You can flip these up to make it even darker.

So it's another just clever way

that Wright makes the space quite flexible

and adaptable to your needs.

But it's not necessarily very expensive or high tech.

He's just creative about using the means at hand.

And unlike the Garden Room and the Drafting Studio

and Wright's office,

the roof in this case is the desert masonry.

So we really have an entirely kind of concrete structure.

This is the main space of the Cabaret.

It was a dinner theater. It was a lecture space.

Film screenings were actually a very important part

of Wright's culture and kind of community, if you will.

They added in these tables that are,

again, you can kind of change them to make them bigger.

You can put the flaps down to make them smaller.

These are just chairs that you move around.

And so this was a place, again,

you could eat and dine and have some snacks.

And 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.

The Cabaret is quite irregularly shaped,

but it actually has wonderful acoustics.

Wright trained initially in Chicago

with a firm named Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan.

Huge influence on him.

And one of the key projects that was on the boards

when Wright was working there was the Auditorium Building

in Chicago, which again was a kind of signal building

in terms of acoustics and performance.

And here's the main stage, if you will.

There's a piano highlighted here.

It's put into a nook in the concrete wall,

which is a bit unexpected.

And you would think that that was not helpful for acoustics.

But actually, the sound bounces off of this floor here

and puts it out into the space.

Wright also designed the lighting fixtures

in many of his homes, including at Taliesin West.

And so here you'll see these modern, unique designs

of indirect lighting.

Up here on the roof,

you can see a sense of how large these boulders are

that are in the desert masonry.

So the roof is quite heavy, as you can imagine.

So in this case,

Wright had to use steel to reinforce the roof

so it wouldn't fall down.

They let it cure for an entire season

to get maximum strength for the concrete

because they knew this was a heavy lift.

[gentle music]

Personally, I think it's important not

to put Wright on a pedestal or to hero worship him

or to perpetuate the kind of grand myths, if you will.

It's an important act to really go in there critically

and try and understand both sides of what he's trying to do,

to ask difficult questions,

and to get to some of the more meaty issues.

He very much wanted to design beautiful buildings.

We're all impacted by the buildings that we occupy,

by the landscape around us.

And so now, today, at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation,

this is really our mission:

is to advance Wright's legacy

in terms of organic architecture,

which is centered on concepts of, you know,

the open spaces we've talked about,

respecting nature and respecting materials.

That's where I think we find the substance

of how we can use Wright as, you know,

a vehicle for thinking about contemporary issues.

[uplifting music]