Text and pictures by Mark Lakeman, January 2015
I have just returned from a journey to Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. The trip was extremely successful, and also deeply inspiring.
As many of our friends know, communitecture does a tremendous amount of outreach as part of our goal to inspire and activate people everywhere. We travel all over North America, to as many as four cities per month to share stories of how we have been able to achieve great things by working together with people to design and create sustainable and beautiful environments where communities may thrive together. These stories are always told as being in the context of Portland, Oregon where the larger culture is steadily evolving and becoming more sustainable as a whole. Our hope is that we motivate people to act where they live, to get off the couch and work to transform the spaces where they live into vital, beautiful, and sustainable places.
This recent journey took me to Frank Lloyd Wright's home in the desert, the legendary nexus of visionary design known as Taliesin West. There is so much to say about the place, and of the experience of being there, and can share a little of it now. Foremost that it is a shockingly beautiful place that embodies and expresses all that Wright espoused during his long and brilliant life. The people who remain there are a thriving community, working well to understand and further develop Wright's ideas so that they are broadly owned, diverse, applicable to contemporary culture, and timely in their ecological relevance.
As many of our friends know, communitecture does a tremendous amount of outreach as part of our goal to inspire and activate people everywhere. We travel all over North America, to as many as four cities per month to share stories of how we have been able to achieve great things by working together with people to design and create sustainable and beautiful environments where communities may thrive together. These stories are always told as being in the context of Portland, Oregon where the larger culture is steadily evolving and becoming more sustainable as a whole. Our hope is that we motivate people to act where they live, to get off the couch and work to transform the spaces where they live into vital, beautiful, and sustainable places.
This recent journey took me to Frank Lloyd Wright's home in the desert, the legendary nexus of visionary design known as Taliesin West. There is so much to say about the place, and of the experience of being there, and can share a little of it now. Foremost that it is a shockingly beautiful place that embodies and expresses all that Wright espoused during his long and brilliant life. The people who remain there are a thriving community, working well to understand and further develop Wright's ideas so that they are broadly owned, diverse, applicable to contemporary culture, and timely in their ecological relevance.
Any visitor to Taliesin – and the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture that still thrives there – will be blown away by the sheer power of its architectural reality and the living legacy of the culture and school that carries on more than 56 years after Wright's death. They have gone through a series of inevitable growing pains over those years, and have come through the other side still standing strong. The architecture school has an excellent, highly qualified faculty who bring a broad set of backgrounds and experiences to the design studio. They are doing an outstanding job of preparing their students for a very high rate of graduation and placement in the field, more than 90% in both categories.
The professors are doing well at interpreting an extremely strong design tradition that is the most creative of all schools in the USA, while at the same time instilling new ideas that appear to push the boundaries of what even Wright understood in his time. Urban issues, sustainability, and ephemeral projects all sparkle on the design boards of the studio, where an endless stream of brilliant ideas have been hatched before, for nearly a century.
The professors are doing well at interpreting an extremely strong design tradition that is the most creative of all schools in the USA, while at the same time instilling new ideas that appear to push the boundaries of what even Wright understood in his time. Urban issues, sustainability, and ephemeral projects all sparkle on the design boards of the studio, where an endless stream of brilliant ideas have been hatched before, for nearly a century.
Talk about an inspiring atmosphere: inside the design studio of Frank Lloyd Wright & now the students at Taliesin West.
 It's all smiles & thought-provoking conversation with faculty Michael DesBarres (left), student Daniel Chapman (right) and me, Mark Lakeman (middle) |  A peek inside the theatre where I presented on January 15th. |
The Frank Lloyd Wright School has an accredited master's degree program, and the student body is as diverse and inspired as any. The students are energized, respectful, and immensely helpful to all who pass through their home. Out in the desert beyond the amazing campus that seems to rise out of the landscape and gleam, the students have built generations of amazing experimental housing projects. Some nestle into the landscape quietly, while other designs declare themselves in the sun and harshness of the relentless heat and climate of Arizona.
Here are just a few examples of the creative, student-built structures in the Taliesin landscape; this aspect of the architectural curriculum truly embodies the “learning by doing” educational approach advocated by Frank Lloyd Wright.
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The whole experience was viscerally transformative and it is difficult many days later not to continue feeling absolutely motivated. Wright proved that design could transform the world, to help people come closer to nature, to reflect the best of their character, to express solutions to vexing problems into the built world. Though he is no longer living, his ideas live on and are becoming stronger, not weaker, through designers like us who live on to carry forth the work of designing a better world.
 This is how Frank Lloyd Wright deals with a decorative vase that's too big for the window shelf: cut a hole in the glass!  Every one of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings includes his red "signature" tile; I found it at Taliesin! |  Even his building's doors are no simple design, but an elegant and expressive craft.  Even the giant LEGO model of Taliesin is on display here! |
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