The Legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West Endures

Frank Lloyd Wright, Olgivanna Wright (his wife), and their architectural apprentices began traveling to Arizona from Taliesin—Wright’s original Wisconsin home and studio—in the 1920s to consult on the Arizona Biltmore hotel and other projects. A near-fatal bout of pneumonia and the high cost of heating Taliesin during Depression-era winters convinced Wright in 1937 to search for a place to create a desert “camp” where the group could live cheaply and enjoy winter sunshine. Most of the buildings constructed at Taliesin West, as the Arizona location was called, were built by the apprentices under Wright's direction between 1938 and the mid-1950s.

“Wright used Taliesin West as an architecture lab where he experimented with materials, forms and technology,” says Stuart Graff, CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees both Taliesin locations. “His influence still holds today—how we live, how we build, how we affect the environment.”

The apprentices—young men and women who paid tuition to study architecture and building with Wright—constructed Taliesin West largely by hand using rocks culled from the site and concrete laid up in plywood forms to create “desert masonry” walls, redwood for beams, and, originally, canvas for the roofing material, which created a filtered, natural illumination for the interiors.

The materials were inexpensive and linked the buildings to the arid site. Wright designed the angled structures to mimic the forms of the nearby mountains, with details that were abstractions of cactuses and Native American imagery. Taliesin West’s director of preservation, Frederick Prozzillo Jr., says that the site is currently testing modern, more durable materials that replicate the original canvas roofs.