Unlike the gem box that is Mies’ Farnsworth House -- where visitors are asked to remove their shoes and don surgical booties before they cross the threshold – Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West is roughshod and frayed from all the foot traffic that shuffles through, leans on the walls, and sits on the furniture.
It’s either that traffic or the fine layer of Arizona desert dust that covers everything and acts like a sort of sandpaper that has left it looking tattered and tired – or maybe it's a combination of the two. But it’s certainly this same quality that makes it feel like the older, tired, worn at the seams college professor – the one that you’re just a little bit afraid to approach because he’s so well known in his field – only to find that he’s perfectly accessible once you work up the courage to ask him a question.
Any question will do: because the story he tells on the way to the answer is the reason that you came.
The requisite Flickr slideshow from last weekend’s visit to Taliesin West »
1 comment:
I did some research at the FLLW archives in August 2005 (god, was it hot). Really an amazing complex. Even more amazing was the sorry state of the research room -- a single, old microfilm reader behind a desk with no printer -- I had to take digital images of the ground glass otherwise I would have been transcribing for WEEKS. I was researching an unrealized rammed earth project in metro Detroit from 1941-42.
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