Taliesin West

Author's Comments

Wright understood the desert in a way most architects never have, and Taliesin West is the proof. The buildings rise out of the McDowell foothills as if they were quarried in place, which in a real sense they were. The stone walls hold chunks of the same desert that surrounds them, and at certain hours of the morning the line between built and unbuilt almost disappears. January is when I would come. The low winter sun in the Sonoran is doing something specific to the angles of this place. It rakes across the long stone walls and finds the geometry that Wright buried in them - the diagonals, the cantilevered beams, the deliberate way a roofline echoes the ridge behind it. By ten in the morning the contrast has flattened and the magic is mostly gone. Be there at seven. Be there before the first tour group assembles in the courtyard. The interior tours are worth booking, but the photographs I keep are nearly all from outside. The terraces, the petroglyph stones at the entry, the way a single saguaro stands sentinel against a wall of desert masonry. Bring a wide lens for the long elevations and something longer for the details - the redwood joinery, the cast concrete, the texture of the stone up close where you can see the individual rocks the apprentices set by hand in the late thirties. This is not a place that gives you the photograph immediately. It asks you to walk it twice, to notice how the light moves across a wall in ten minutes, to wait for a cloud. The reward is an image that feels earned rather than taken.

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