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| - Taliesin West introduced me to Frank Lloyd Wright's lens on the Sonoran Desert. The 1:30 hr tour was pricey, but worth it to see the interiors and further understand Wright's life and aesthetic mission here.
Wright's architecture frames and creates a symbiotic relationship with the desert. It both creates a lens through which nature can be seen through art and the daily processes of human life and challenges the human to be jolted into interacting with unvarnished nature. From occasionally drastically low ceilings to rock material in the walls that incorporates desert, indoor/outdoor corridors as one room snakes into an outdoor pyramid pool and back into another, rooms that open outward to nature, Frank Lloyd Wright melds challenging natural architecture, the urge to live aesthetically and beautifully, and a daily life that emphasizes both the communal and theoretical for students. The cheerfully brick colored, but modernist interiors do not provide a glossy, contemporary escape from the tedium and majesty of nature, but frame a theoretical enjoyment of the theory of proportions against it. The architectural art and the natural art jar with each other and co-exist, to create a living space where one lives artfully.
As someone who escapes into beautifully designed interiors to dream of a flashy relief to certain tedium in life, I found this both jarring, yet it oddly made me happy.
Wright wore the flashy, decisive, and well cut clothes (capes, pork pie hats, tweed suits) of an architect who understands the intersection of living and creating art that can be lived in. His students lived in dwellings among nature and existed mostly communally, with communal meals, occasional art viewings and concerts, weekly fancy parties, and doing a lot of "learning by doing." The fancy and even wasteful, such as parties with celebrities and fleets of fancy cars, co-existed with the minimal and well curated architecture and sparse, well chosen art such as the beautifully scuffed and flawed Chinese opera tile scenes that mark the entrance to different rooms. Taliesin West did not remain static, but changed as Frank Lloyd Wright made different decisions or had to put in glass or canvas to protect from weather, or as other people and his wife used it.
I often wonder about the lives of people that create art. Whether they leave them in shambles, lead lives that have nothing to do with their artistic ideals, or strive to live artfully. Creating is such an outward gesture, something that requires striving and disarray in the soul. I think a lot of Anna Karenina's Levin, someone who understands the art of a beautifully lived life and strives to improve it almost obsessively. I think that Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West gives us a reflection of someone who created living spaces and was able to live in a way that reflected his creative philosophy, aesthetically, decadently, minimally, artfully, communally, and beautifully. I left this place challenged by the sparse and stark melding of minimalism and opulent detail (I really like early 20th century interiors and stuffy Victorian ones, basically I like to be crowded with furniture), but oddly happy and unburdened.
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