Ingredients for Wright's Organic Architecture
Faced with the harsh, cold winters of Wisconsin, Frank Lloyd Wright, at age 70, staked out his claim in the desert terrain of Arizona. At his first sight of 600 acres of the dramatic Sonaran Desert in the foothills of the McDowell Mountains north of Scottsdale, Wright in 1937 declared this area to be his new desert camp.
My first walk among the flora of Wright's property revealed an extremely harsh environment of cacti and numerous species of legume trees. Thickets with their piercing thorns and jags tore at my clothing as I tried without much success to experience the desert that Wright would make his home, studio and laboratory.
Sand and rocks provided Wright with what he recognized as essential ingredients for organic architecture. Wright's tract of the vast Sonoran Desert that extends into California and Mexico is ideally suited for the development of his Usonian architecture. It presents a living environment teeming with some of Nature's most tantalizing smells, eerie sounds and vivid sights
It's incredible to think what Frank Lloyd Wright saw in the Sonoran landscape. He seemed to have in mind from the very beginning a scheme to create from the desert floor new kinds of dwellings that would prove beyond any doubt his emerging architectural style.