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Taliesin West, built by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1937, rests low on a mesa at the foot of the cactus-mottled McDowell Mountains northeast of Phoenix, with little to announce it but a stand of power lines the architect abhorred. Named for Wright's beloved Wisconsin farm-country home, Taliesin West is now a National Historic Landmark and home of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. The foundation maintains two Taliesins (the original in Wisconsin and this one), archives that contain about 22,000 original drawings, Wright's still-functioning design firm and the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, which grew out of a fellowship of young apprentices who paid for the privilege of working at the master's shoulder.
Though Wright's fortunes waxed and waned during his long life (he was born in 1867 and died in 1959, at age 91), he is now considered foremost among American architects. His ideas continue to inspire as well as mystify, and he is credited with plans for about 800 buildings, including his enchanting first home and studio in Oak Park, Ill., Pennsylvania's Fallingwater (ranked by many architects as the most important American building of the last century), the modernist S.C. Johnson & Son Administration Center in Racine, Wis., and the visionary Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Thousands of visitors pay their respects to these and other Wright buildings every year, and the shelves in libraries sag under the weight of tomes written about him. And this week filmmaker Ken Burns weighs in on the Wright legacy as well, with a three-hour PBS television documentary on the architect (airing Tuesday and Wednesday nights at 9 on KCET).
My own appreciation for Wright began about a year ago with a casual visit to the recently restored Pope-Leighey house in northern Virginia. It is one of the dwellings the architect called Usonian (for the U.S.), designed to be affordable and to transform the lives of the ordinary people who lived in them. For instance, the Pope-Leighey house lacks an attic and adequate closet space because Wright felt Americans were too materialistic. Besides making me yearn to live in a Usonian, the experience convinced me that pictures and words cannot express the genius of Wright's best buildings, which act overtly and covertly on those who go to...