“Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of being a guest at Taliesin West, the Scottsdale, Arizona, campus of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. On one of those trips, I ventured out into the far reaches of Wright’s desert acreage to study the dwellings designed and built by the school’s students as part of their learning-by-doing education. Youthful creative energy, ideas, and confidence + small plot of land + trifling financial resources for materials + the ghost of Frank Lloyd Wright = ingenious solutions to small-space living? Yes—mostly.
Working within the safe zone of the campus, the students could laugh at common code restrictions, so pushing the envelope of design and construction was possible, if not a given.
Architectural salvage stands out in the materials palette, and it’s frequently worth noting how much those rugged bits and pieces invigorate the students’ handling of the refined Wrightian design vocab and “desert concrete construction” system.…”
