Content area
Full Text
Wisconsin is justifiably proud of its native son, architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Tourists flock to the buildings he and his disciples designed, including Madison's long-debated Monona Terrace project, finally completed in 1997. Wright's popularity keeps growing nearly four decades after his death.
After years of living and working year-around at his magnificent Taliesin estate near Spring Green, Wright moved his winter base here, to an equally expansive layout he dubbed Taliesin West.
Begun as a rather primitive camp site in 1937, it evolved, like the Spring Green location, into a sprawling school/office/home and the headquarters of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. The Foundation operates the Wright School of Architecture and the Wright Archives.
Taliesin West is also the main office for Taliesin Architects, a professional design firm specializing in the principles of organic architecture. Today, two-thirds of its business is residential, the rest commercial. The firm has 15 principal architects 10 based in Arizona and a professional staff of 55. A national landmark, Taliesin West is far less a museum than a living, working enterprise that welcomes hundreds of visitors daily.
Many of its architects and apprentices return to Spring Green for the summer months, but Taliesin West is now the main focus of Wright activities. That has some advantages for Wright's Wisconsin admirers. Like the master, they can escape the harsh Midwestern winters by migrating here.
The area contains several other Wright-designed structures, notably the Arizona Biltmore Hotel and Tempe's Gammage Memorial Auditorium.
At Taliesin West, Wright admirers will note close similarities to Spring Green. Of course, the architecture is organic inspired by, and wedded to, its environment. Wright and his associates found, in the...