Sonoran Desert Colors at SAMARA
Approaching the carport in bright sunlight with shadows cast on the reddish-pink brick driveway creates silhouettes resembling the way cacti and sagebrush appear on the Sonoran Desert at Taliesin West.
A broad pink-colored brick chimney mass comes into view to anchor the house to its firm base. The red-pinkish brick on the side of the house dispays a range of colors typical of the desert palette.
Attention is drawn through a dark, shadowed space under the carport. A walk through the carport brings people face-to-face with the Taliesin red concrete floor and steps which on the outside of the house in the bright sunlight yield a softer pink hue.
The appearance of the red concrete floor under these conditions creates the distinctive pink color of the Sonoran Desert. This is nearly identical to the way the Sonoran lanscape appears from high in the sky over Arizona.
The steps leading to the front door remind us of the pink concrete seen in the experimental hut designed and built by a Taliesin West architect student. Clearly, four decades after Wright's passing, Wright's Sonoran camp north of Scottsdale continues to produce designs typical of his original desert palette.
In sometimes subtle ways, SAMARA expresses some of the most striking features of Wright's southwest color schemes. Somehow, he seems to know how and when to touch SAMARA with a brush here and a stroke there of his exquisite desert palette.