Frank Lloyd Wright was ninety years old when I arrived. In the mornings he would slowly walk around the camp (Taliesin was a winter camp in the desert) talking with his students, watching the work going on, and designing new projects in his mind as he did so.  Afternoons he spent in the drafting room, looking over the drawings which had been done and sketching in changes he thought were needed.  He had an early supper and usually was in bed by 7 p.m., to preserve what energy he had.

When I arrived, there were about eighty people there, counting Mr and Mrs Wright, their daughter, Iovanna, son-in-law Wesley Peters, who had been married to their other daughter, Olgivanna (a lovely woman, I heard, who had been killed in a car accident); also there were men and women who had been with the Wrights for many years, and their children; plus all the newer apprentices and their wives, if they had any.  The Wrights and the people who had been there for years all lived in permanent quarters; the newer people, like myself, lived in tents out in the desert, away from camp.  We were to spend the six winter months there at Taliesin West, the summer months at Mr Wright's home and farm back in Spring Green, Wisconsin, where we studied architecture and grew our own food.

At Taliesin West, we were allowed to pick the location (within a certain area) where we could place our tents and where we would sleep each night.  We were helped to pour the concrete slab and raise the standard tent, approx. 12 feet by 12 feet.  Also we were given a cot and an air mattress and a sleeping bag.  If we wanted more, or if we wanted to design our own habitat, Mr Wright would pay for the materials and we were allowed to build what we wanted.  All within reason of course. 

But I felt that I had come to study architecture with the greatest architect of all time, Frank Lloyd Wright, and not to become a tent maker; so I was content with the minimum tent in order to spend my time where I thought it mattered.

It was cold on the desert at night, and yet so warm during the day, even in January, that I often took my shirt off to add to my tan.  I used to love walking into the camp from the desert in the mornings.  Usually still cold, the air crisp; I needed to cross two dry arroyos, each about eight feet deep and twelve feet wide, which during the rainy season would be roaring funnels of water, carrying the runoff from the mountains beyond.

That winter tent camp, set in the middle of the Arizona desert as if it had simply grown out of the soil and rocks, spreading out along the desert floor, its masonry walls made from those same rocks and concrete, battered in angles reminiscent of the mountains and hills beyond, its wood fins accenting the roof line in jagged slashes, bordered by the desert with its saguaro cactus sentinels stepping among the buildings like sentries. 

Mr. Wright designed Taliesin west to be a winter "camp".  And he used a mixture of concrete and stones indigenous to the site, topped by light wooden framing and translucent canvas stretched between, which was the roof, and which suffused the spaces below with a wonderful, soft light. Forms were built for the low concrete walls and stones placed inside the forms and then the concrete poured around the stones: a method of construction that Mr Wright invented.  (I designed one house with walls such as these; but, what seemed simple and cheap when constructed by twenty young volunteers, was expensive and a terrible pain when contracted out to a builder here in Atlanta.  I did only the one.)

But I loved Taliesin West.  In fact, it is my favorite of all of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings.  After I left, it was more than two years before I stopped having dreams of being back there.  Of course one had to check out the heights of beams and ceilings before running through the area with abandon: I laid my scalp open once or twice on a low hanging beam.  In fact, this reminds me: three of us young men were standing in the lobby of the underground theater at Taliesin one day when Mr Wright entered.  Mr Wright was five-six, whereas each of us were six-one.  The ceiling (concrete) of the small lobby was only one inch above our heads.  Mr Wright looked up at us and with a twinkle in his eyes, said, "Well, boys, if people had been as tall as you are when I began my career, the whole scale of my buildings would be different."  And then he laughed and walked on.

I doubt it.  I think Mr Wright did his buildings for himself.

And I see nothing wrong in that.  Of course if he had had a client who was well over six feet tall, I'm sure he would have taken the fact into consideration.