'Space to space'
Walking toward the sky with Frank Lloyd Wright
By Joanna Beresford 08/06/2009
“Taliesin” is a Welsh word meaning “shining brow.” It’s the name Frank Lloyd Wright chose for his home and studio in Spring Green, Wis., in 1911. Years later, he named his companion retreat in Arizona Taliesin West — a shining brow overlooking the wild new frontier of mountains and desert that Wright discovered outside Scottsdale. I visited Taliesin West last week, in the midst of a road trip across the Southwest.
“These buildings were wrested by his [man’s] tireless energy from the earth and erected in the eye of the sun,” Wright wrote in “Architecture and Modern Life” in 1937. “It was originally the conscious creation, out of man himself, of a higher self. His building, in order to be architecture, was the true spirit of himself made manifest …”
Wright’s principles of “Organic Architecture” resonate through every rock, beam, light and shadow at Taliesin West, and whether you know what those principles are or not, almost any visitor — including my 10-year-old daughter and her best friend and travel buddy — responds at some level to the orchestrations of the buildings.
“Mr. Wright always told you what to do,” said Loa, our tour guide, from under her wide-brimmed straw hat. When you walk into the office space, for example, you experience the very small enclosure that would have been inhabited by a receptionist or secretary/apprentice. Because we instinctively seek broader vistas and more open space, Loa explained, Wright was deliberately whisking us through the cramped anteroom into the larger, soaring space of his private office and workplace. This implication of motion, and direction is true of almost every room at the compound.
Wright often returned to the metaphor of a ship, sailing across a sea of desert, when he described Taliesin West. It’s also a ship that travels across a sea of time. In his determination to “eliminate the box” in architecture, Wright developed sweeping and geometrically innovative forms, rooms and silhouettes that jutted into the skies and reflected and responded to their surrounding landscapes — another foundation of Wright’s philosophy. Having burst free of the box (maybe Wright wasn’t thinking of teepee and cave dwellers when he identified the dreaded box as a universal tradition in architecture, from which he would depart), Wright felt released.
“Making away with the box both in plan and elevation … opened the way for feeling the space within as the Reality of all true modern building …” he wrote. “These structures now bear the message of this liberation of space to space.” By liberating, or opening up “space to space,” he opens up moment to moment and, therefore, opens up time itself. Because the rooms at Taliesin West exert a continual reach toward the heights of the desert sky and a stretch toward the mountainous horizons, and because they continually enact Wright’s will and vision on the visitor, they imply a forever-movement. Thus, Wright’s work, at least in this instance, is not just modern; it is beyond modern, without period. The easy word to use is “timeless,” but that’s not true at all. As Taliesin West suggests movement across a sea of desert, it also embodies movement along our concept of a sea or, more accurately, a river of time.
Wright’s efforts in Los Angeles, mostly completed during the 1920s, inspired their own flights of innovation and lots of delicious myths and stories. The Hollyhock House, built for Aline Barnsdall between 1917 and 1920, appears to be Wright’s first encounter with the Southern California climate. Here in Pasadena, Wright experimented with more vertical elements and with the system of “textile block construction” that Wright redefined in designing and building the Alice Millard House, also known as “La Miniatura.”
If you want to get a piece of Frank Lloyd Wright, in the literal sense, and call him your own, you should visit the Charles Ennis House, built in Los Angeles in 1923 and 1924. Located near Griffith Park, it is currently for sale, listed at $15 million. It needs a little work, mainly due to rain damage, which plagued Wright (curses on Mother Nature for her destructive temperament), but the home is stunning and iconic and perhaps familiar from its roles in films, including “Black Rain,” in which it represents a Japanese mafia headquarters.
If you can’t afford the Ennis House, you can visit Wright’s public constructions, the most famous of which is probably the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, or Taliesin West in Arizona.
As we left the Arizona desert behind, my fellow travelers and I each composed six-word sentences to describe our experiences. Mine was: Walking toward the sky, going home.
Joanna Dehn Beresford can be reached at truewrite@yahoo.com.
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT