CENTRE POINT
We cannot all sit and commune with nature in the desert wilderness
SIMON JENKINS
Tucson, Arizona inter in Arizona!' was the advice Galsworthy gave J.B. Priestley. Successful writers should be able to afford such luxu- ries. Besides, D.H. Lawrence had ruined New Mexico. Priestley took the advice and found Arizona full of charm, 'first cousin to the moon'. It was, he said, a wonderland that should be reached only 'by floating down a rabbit-hole'.
Arizona still strives after the Mad Hat- ter's tea-party. It must contain more raw eccentricity than any other spot on earth. It claims the world record for UFO kidnap- Pings and alien visitations. Earlier this month the management of the state's $150 million 'ecological capsule', Biosphere 2, was sacked by its billionaire creator, Ed Bass. Two staff members reacted by break- ing the atmospheric seals on its closed envi- ronment. Bass called in the sheriff. North across the desert (past the giant Titan mis- sile site) architect Paolo Soleri's megalopo- lis, Arcosanti, is still struggling to emerge above the sand. This giant city-in-one- building remains uncompleted ten years and millions of dollars after it was begun.
Round them all is spreading an even greater madness, the stain of Arizona's sub- urban colonisation. Phoenix and Tucson are the fastest-growing cities in America. Sucking water from deep beneath the earth and apparently without limit, their grid can- tonments make Los Angeles seem as com- pact as Montmartre. Their inhabitants outdo even Californians in nuttiness. News- papers abound in energy clinics, transfor- mational joy breathing, solarial chan- nelling, next-level empowerment and seances at the local crystal sanctuary.
By these standards, the 600-acre shrine to the cult of Frank Lloyd Wright at Tal- iesin West is an oasis of sanity. Here in 1937 Wright 'looked over the rim of the world' and hacked a summer domain from the desert cactus and pink rock. Here his wife Olgivanna set new standards in marital euphoria. Her husband would 'weave him- self like a cobra round the mountain and rear like a flying Pegasus to the highest pin- nacle'. Small wonder that when Wright had to appear as witness at a trial he described himself as 'the greatest architect in the world'. When asked if this might be an exaggeration he replied, 'But I am under oath, your honour.'
I confess I am a Wright fan. He is one of the few architects produced by this century to whom I would apply the word genius. If Taliesin West has become a shrine to his cult I am ready for a brief homage. The place is anything but megalomaniac. It is, as he promised, architecture humbled by nature. The village of one-storey buildings heaves gently from the contours of a desert mountainside. The walls are of rocks found on the spot, born of the earth and attended by staghom, prickly pear and many-limbed saguaro trees. The high external timbers of the tilted roofs point towards the moun- tains and throw long, cool shadows over the ceilings beneath. Wright's maxim that a building should enhance the charm of its site, not crush it, is honoured. From this wild redoubt, Wright hurled his thunderbolts at the 'evil crusade of the totalitarian Modernists', at Mies and Cor- busier, at Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson. He brought the European aes- thetic of Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts movement, and applied it to his search for beauty in the landscape and vegetation of America. He remained true to this search even when its unfashionableness nearly bankrupted him in the 1930s and '40s. Wright was a true bridge between the Victorians and Post-Modernism. He believed that Americans wanted an archi- tecture of space, an escape from cities and machines into the land that had drawn them away from Europe. He gave them the Robie House and Fallingwater, the Bilt- more Hotel, the Johnson Building and the Guggenheim. Only towards the end did he dare design a skyscraper, which was never built. He must have meant it as a joke. Today 60 student-acolytes tend the shrine, paying $72,000 a year to mimic Wright's eccentricity and repeat his architectural babble. They still practise music each morning: Wright said the symphony was an `edifice of sound'. They still cook and wash up to learn 'the meaning of the kitchen' (or to save the Wright Foundation money). They still wear dinner jackets and perform cabaret in Wright's primitive night club at weekends. They parrot the great man's aphorisms: 'a room is an explosion of space • . destroy the box . . . learn the art of see- ing . . . bring the outside in.' This last applies with particular force to any Wright house on which rain has the temerity to fall.
Yet for all its dottiness, Taliesin West is no Arizona fantasy. Wright hated cities and believed that America's truest building was a ranch in the prairie. If no prairie was to hand, then the desert would do, and if no desert, then that great American institu- tion, the suburb. He was right about what Americans wanted. The Modernists with their mechanistic cities were wrong. But Arizona is now awash with a thousand Tal- iesins. Suburbia laps round the foot of Wright's mountain. He had to suffer elec- tricity pylons strung across his beloved desert view: he even telephoned President Truman in a rage to protest. But the pylons are still there today.
Wright was an architect of space, but space is expensive. Democratise Wright's architecture, give a prairie house to every citizen, and space is soon exhausted. We cannot all sit and commune with nature in the desert wilderness. There are too many of us. Frank Lloyd Wright was in fact no democrat. He was as totalitarian in his idea of communal architecture as in his treat- ment of his many wives and apprentices. He was the architect of privilege, and nobody was more privileged than those early residents of Arizona. One of his more glib maxims was, 'Look after the luxuries and the necessities will look after them- selves.' Today's luxuries need wider, and emptier, horizons than those offered in Arizona's former deserts, Simon Jenkins write for the Times.
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