Taliesin West, Model of "Ocatilla" Camp in Chandler
You may not have heard of Taliesin West but I am sure you have heard of Frank Lloyd Wright — probably the best known architect ever. His popularity even overlapped into popular culture — note the Simon and Garfunkel song from 1970, "So Long Frank Lloyd Wright". Taliesin West is Wright's winter home and architecture school located just outside Scottsdale at the foot of the McDowell mountains. Wright began coming to this area in 1933 and in 1937 he purchased the land for some $ an acre. Additional land was added and subtracted over time but the property still consists of about 500 acres. The architecture school survived with students spending part of the year here and part of the year in Taliesin in Wisconsin until quite recently. Due to conflicts between the school and Taliesin West, the school is changing its name and moving to Paolo Soleri's Cosanti. Here stands a model of a design camp called "Ocatilla" which was built in Chandler (not far from my townhouse). I found the backstory on the Chandler Museum website. "Dr. Chandler [founder of the town of Chandler] and Frank Lloyd Wright met in 1928 [before Taliesin was even started] while Wright was in Phoenix consulting on the construction of the Arizona Biltmore Hotel. Chandler approached Wright with an idea for a grand hotel on land he owned in present day Ahwatukee. The two met at a time Wright was struggling financially and was willing to visit the site Dr. Chandler described. After exploring the desert location, Wright eagerly accepted the commission to plan a large hotel called the San Marcos in the Desert. He set up camp with his team and family at the site the following winter, calling the camp Ocatilla, an intentional misspelling of the ocotillo plant which grew in abundance on the site. Despite finishing the plans for the hotel, the stock market crash in October of 1929 forever doomed the building of the hotel."
Size: 7232px × 3508px
Location: Scottsdale, AZ, USA
Photo credit: © B. David Cathell / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
Keywords: apprenticeship, architect, arcosanti, arizona, art, arts, az, bdavid, camp, chandler, cosanti, desert, dinnerware, fabrics, fellowship, foothills, frank, furniture, glass, graphic, lighting, lloyd, marcos, mcdowell, model, mountains, music, ocatilla, ocotillo, paolo, pavilion, rugs, san, scottsdale, soleri, taliesin, west, winter, wright
