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SEE ALSO SIDEBAR (ANOTHER WRIGHT SIGHTING)
ON A BRIGHT winter day in the Arizona desert, especially after it's just rained, you'd swear you could see forever. The craggy mountains that ring the Valley of the Sun, which contains Phoenix and its neighbor, Scottsdale, seem close enough to touch. The air is so clear and the light so intense that every detail of the panorama spread before you is illuminated and magnified.
As I stood in the warm February sun on the rock-paved terrace of Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's winter headquarters in the foothills above Scottsdale, I could clearly make out the shimmering glass and metal towers of downtown Phoenix in the distance. In the foreground, stretching for miles around, an army of giant saguaro stood guard over earth-red boulders and clumps of spiky vegetation scattered across the sand. Here and there I spotted cacti already in flower.
I had left the shopping malls and green fairways of central Scottsdale only a half-hour earlier, heading into the desert on a wide and perfectly straight asphalt ribbon aimed toward the horizon. On the drive out to Taliesin West, I had tried to count up all the Wright-related sites I've admired throughout the world - houses from Los Angeles to Chicago, preserved interiors in London's Victoria & Albert Museum, government buildings in Marin County, the Guggenheim Museum in New York. And the list goes on.
When I started my unsystematic visits to these sites about 20 years ago, I was surprised at the crowds of other Wright aficionados I kept encountering - people like me who have no background in architecture but who nonetheless will make a wide detour to see a Wright building or exhibit. I'm no longer surprised, but I've continued to be puzzled by the architect's enduring mass appeal.
There's no doubt that Frank Lloyd Wright was a titan of architecture, a true genius whose designs still delight the eye, and I'm sure many people appreciate his work on a purely aesthetic level. But can mere aesthetics explain the 90,000 people who visited Taliesin West last year, or the 80,000 who toured Wright's Oak Park, Illinois, house and studio? When I visited Oak Park, where the architect lived and worked from 1890 to...