Skyroom

table of contents

Procession 10 SkyRoom I

51

Mythic House

71

SkyRoom II

97

Ghost Stories

107

Invisible Conversations

149

SkyRoom III

211

1-a

1-e

1-f

invisible conversations

The Practitioner: Frank Lloyd Wright

149

I’m trudging along in the arizona desert like I’ve just stepped onto a moving walkway that isn’t moving.

It’s the expectation of gliding—then disappointment when you’re not. I’m battling resistance in each step, the limitations of myself in time and space. It’s furnace-hot, a world without shadow at high noon. The breeze burns into me.

The desert, when contemplated from an abstract distance, much like the ocean and the prairie, can fool you into thinking it can be experienced with ease. How easy to underestimate nature.

On this dirt road flanking the front of Taliesen West, I’m watched in silence by towering saguaro cactuses all around me. From my vantage point, the visible planes of Wright’s compound, the sloping geometries of its timbered structure and cantilevered rooflines, the layering of plinth forms, suggest a ruin from a lost civilization that knew things we still don’t.

I step over the carcass of a small rodent, headless, shredded by who knows what.

He waits at the top of the pyramidal staircase behind the triangular reflecting pool, standing next to a petroglyph-etched boulder on its plinth. He’s wearing a dark blue suit and matching cape over it. A darker blue silk scarf folds crisply inside his suit lapels, high and tight on his neck. The black broad-brimmed hat. The cane. He’s not dressed for the desert, but in spite of it, the classic operatic Wright persona, our all-seeing Zeus, the thundering sky god of the architectural profession.

I figure he’s not been exerting much psychic energy tracking my arrival. The closer I get, the more he appears to be looking past me, contemplating the brown vastness of the landscape below the thin blue of the Arizona sky. Suddenly he becomes real, a living presence: a man in his middle seventies now, fighting fragility, not a statue to my fantasies of who he might or should be.

As I climb the final step, his head dip towards me, the tiniest acknowledgement. He’s looking at me directly now. It’s not a negatively aristocratic gaze that judges everything before or below it. Although

skyroom

there is a feral inquisitiveness in play. I detect genuine curiosity about me. I also see the vulnerability in his eyes that strike me as an honest portal into the complications and conflicts of the man.

His handshake is soft, indifferent. Some part of him must demand remove from the supplicants on his doorstep. I respect the distance he creates. He’s an elder to me and to architecture.

Wright’s self-invention over decades into a larger-than-life character, grandiose, spendthrift, distinctly American, is the stuff of legend and headline-making scandal and personal tragedy. I wonder about the difference between the legend and the man. The evidence on balance is that he woke up one day not knowing the difference.

He gestures with his cane at the boulder with the petroglyph drawings. It features stick figures of humans and animals surrounded by geometric symbols that meant something to the Hohokam and Oasisamerican societies who lived around here in epochs long gone.

The images are beautiful in their simplicity. From the distance across so much time, you still have a sense of the hands and hearts that transfigured imagination or shamanistic insight on rock.

“Perhaps we would have been advised to leave these boulders where they originally were,” he says, his Midwestern drawl affected with a self-deprecating edge. Then, after clearing his throat, “You realize, the entire Southwest is a graveyard, a landscape ruin of bones and shell—of so many forgotten cultures.”

I know something about building around a ruin at Shobac, and I’m about to say as much, but he’s turned away to lead me inside. I’m soon enveloped in Wright’s design grammar that, inside, features thick low-rise walls produced from an unusual structural concoction, a cheap local mix of rocks and concrete, poured inside forms lined with old carpets. In the main drafting room, each skylight bay is covered in canvas scrims to soften the harsh desert light. In silence, we wander through a labyrinth of pavilions, gardens, courtyards and pathways. Like Wright’s best work, the compound relies on an open plan to break down boundaries between the indoors and outdoors, creatively introducing natural light into interior space, all the while making good use of local building materials. This place provides the complete Wright support system, his castle in the desert where he pursues his oversized dreams, the winter camp for himself, his family, his acolytes.

150

invisible conversations

151

Soon we’re outside again on a walkway under a lengthy pergola, ambling along through the striped shadows created by the crossbeams above us. He’s in no hurry to direct the conversation. After all it’s my psychological nickel we’re spending here. Not sure where to begin, I jump in head first: “In a thousand years, I’d like to think the archeologists of the future will come along and discover this place as a temple ruin, much like Stephens did with the Mayans in the jungle. And they will astonish whatever our civilization has become by then.”

He grimace-smiles, looking straight ahead. He’s used to fulsome praise and while not impressed, he’s not offended. I did the expected before the master. He stops and looks at me again.

“So what precisely are we here for, Mr. MacKay-Lyons?”

“Mr. Wright, I’ve tried over many years to model my practice on yours. I’m at another decision point, about where to go from here.”

“Decisions come and go, don’t they, that put our knickers into an existential uproar all too often,” he cackles at me.

“Couldn’t agree more, Mr. Wright.”

It’s Mr. Wright. Not Frank. I learned that from one of my mentors, Bruce Goff, my thesis advisor on my first professional degree.

Bruce had been a trusted associate of Wright’s for years and always called him Mr. Wright, never Frank. That was the expectation. I learned so much from Bruce, a gentle Texan, listening to his stories of working beside Wright, much like I sat at the foot of my grandfather’s rocking chair as a young boy, engrossed in his tales of life on the sea.

I’d be nowhere as an architect or a man without the mentors who saw something in me as I saw something in them.

“There are similarities between us, Brian, at least on the surface,” Wright says. “We’re country boys who acquired the patina of metropolitan sophistication, and then went home, to settle, protect the creative impulse, honor the agrarian tradition. Raise chickens, plough fields, live the rural idyll. And lick a few wounds, in my case. In yours?”

Hitting me with both barrels.

“I’ve been presumptuous,” he continues, a gently mocking apology, now scrutinizing me more closely: “I’m sure we understand each other, Brian. Just because a man takes to wearing bespoke suits and collecting Japanese prints doesn’t mean he’s forgotten how to appreciate the smell of cowshit in the field after a summer rain.”