Frank Lloyd Wright by Charles River Editors Read Free Book Online Page A

those years of upheaval, Mrs. Alice Millard hired Frank to design a combination bookshop and house for her in Pasadena. Frank was not fond of the architecture he saw in California. He said so in words that seem inappropriate today when he described it as “Spain—by way of despised Mexico—gradually moved up into this homely invasion.”
    Not only was this a godsend after all Miriam had put him through, he also said he was proud that Alice and George Millard had “survived” the first house he built for them and were now asking him to build a second. “Out of 172 buildings, this one made only the eleventh time it had happened to me,” he said.
    The Millard home, La Miniatura, became not only a challenge to build something beautiful among the architecture he disrespected, but it also became a new phase in Wright’s architectural venture. It became the first block house, made of concrete blocks. The material was cheap and easy to haul, plus Alice was keen to prevent a firetrap for the books she'd warehoused for book collectors.

    La Miniatura
    Frank poured a concrete slab, then created double walls with concrete blocks. He called this educating the concrete block. The result was double concrete block walls with hollow spaces to promote coolness in the summer and warmth in the winter. As pictures indicate, it was a unique design.
    In 1927, his talent for the original inspired Dr. Alexander J. Chandler to hire Wright to build a resort in the desert. Wright and some 15 others, plus Ogilvana, drove cross-country, leaving in a snowstorm, to reach Arizona. When they arrived, they discovered they could not afford accommodations in the area. Undaunted, Dr. Chandler let them build their own camp. After all, land was plentiful, and Dr. Chandler owned 1,400 acres of it. Wright saw “San Marcos in the Desert” as a welcome challenge, discovering that nothing could be symmetrical in the desert. When the crew built their own accommodations, they named their camp Ocatillo, meaning “candle flame.”
    Viewing the landscape, Wright decided to base construction on the design of the Saguaro cactus, with its inner ribbing. He was grateful to be back at work and excited about the prospect of this new and exciting venture. Unfortunately, due to the stock market crash, the project folded in 1929.
    The structures at Ocatillo were intended to be ephemera and they were. The local Native Americans carted it all away during the following winter, but not before it was frequently photographed. Those photos are all that is left of Frank Lloyd Wright’s footprint there. Today, it is home to uninspired residential development.
    Of course, the erasure of Wright’s buildings proved few and far between, thankfully. A number of his houses and religious buildings open their doors for tours, and Taliesin: Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, continues to run two campuses.
    Taliesin, the evolution of Taliesin I, II and II, is a 600-acre campus in Wisconsin, and it offers courses during the summer term. But in 1933, Wright and a crew of others went west, again enjoying the hospitality of Dr. Chandler of the erstwhile San Marcos of the Desert, and there he established the Taliesin Fellowship, which eventually became, in 1937, a second campus. The 500-acre Taliesin West campus is in Scottsdale, Ariz., and is now considered the school's main campus, built over several years by Taliesin Fellowship apprentices. [30] Classes are taught at Taliesin West during spring and fall semesters. Students at Taliesin West have the option of living in experimental desert shelters while enrolled in class.
    The William Wesley Peters Memorial Library is housed on the Arizona campus, named for Frank Lloyd Wright’s first apprentice. The library houses 27,000 cataloged volumes of documents, maps, sound recordings, videos, slides photographs, drawings, books, pamphlets and correspondence. An additional 100 periodical titles are filed alphabetically, in addition to the