When, in the 1930s, Frank Lloyd Wright set his Arizona apprentices to clear some land for a permanent camp in the McDowell Mountains north of Scottsdale, they turned up a curious object. Stones were general in the hills, and some of them bore petroglyphic runes the students assumed had been left behind by the Hohokam, the pre-Columbian people who had eked out a living there for several centuries. One slab bore a human figure, an animal shape, and a curious square spiral that Wright imagined as a figuration of two hands shaking. The simple line work of that last mark was adapted into Wright’s signature geometric expressionist style, and it became the symbol of Taliesin West, his winter home and architecture school. That stone was the first point of inspiration for the building Wright derived from the indigenous cultures of Arizona— it would also be the last.
Climate Control
Climate Control
Climate Control
When, in the 1930s, Frank Lloyd Wright set his Arizona apprentices to clear some land for a permanent camp in the McDowell Mountains north of Scottsdale, they turned up a curious object. Stones were general in the hills, and some of them bore petroglyphic runes the students assumed had been left behind by the Hohokam, the pre-Columbian people who had eked out a living there for several centuries. One slab bore a human figure, an animal shape, and a curious square spiral that Wright imagined as a figuration of two hands shaking. The simple line work of that last mark was adapted into Wright’s signature geometric expressionist style, and it became the symbol of Taliesin West, his winter home and architecture school. That stone was the first point of inspiration for the building Wright derived from the indigenous cultures of Arizona— it would also be the last.