30/7: When I was a teenager, I had an online friend called Daniel. We e-mailed and talked through MSN Messenger, and sometimes we even sent real, old school letters. Our korrespondence got really intense at times, while at others it could take months without me hearing from him. When I was 19, we met once, and a couple of years later he moved to Stockholm, but we never really managed to move our friendship from the digital out into the real world. There just was something with our communicatin that worked in writing, but not in spoken words. Now, I haven’t heard from him for years.
But back when we were the best of online friends, we sent mixtapes to each other. In one of the mixtapes, Daniel had recorded a song by Simon & Garfunkel. So long, Frank Lloyd Wright. And in the letter he wrote that Wright was an architect and that far too few songs were written in honour of the creators of our living spaces.
So, thanks to Daniel and Simon & Garfunkel, I knew who Frank Lloyd Wright was when we were told that he’d built his winter home in the middle of the desert on the edge of Scottsdale, thirty minutes drive from downtown Phoenix. Taliesin West. It was a school of architecture, and for a pretty juicy sum, one could get a guided tour around the premises. Mom and me had a day to spare, so we went to check it out.
It’s an incredible sight, the desert. Wright chose an impressive site to build his winter residence on.
And the buildings melted right into the landscape.
You see, things grow in the desert too.
One of the studios.
A classroom.
The red lecture hall.
The entrance to the theatre.
The theatre. Apparently, Wright loved to cabaret.
Art.
A Palo Verde Tree, the green trunked state tree of Arizona.
I’ve never felt anything special for art in the form of paintings. But architecture is something that really fascinates me. In a sense, it’s the most practical, concrete type of art, and it’s all around us. A society with good, innovative and playful architects, is a society with happier people. I believe in the power of architecture and city planning.
So, not surprisingly, I enjoyed our tour of Taliesin West. It was my kind of museum.
Katja Malmborg 