Thanks! And I’d love to see pics if you go. Full disclosure – I’m not a fan of either deco or Arts & Crafts, so that gets in the way of my appreciating Wrights’s houses.

Thanks again for your site and your thoughtful posts. Cheers!

It’s ma’am. But I kind of enjoyed being called sir. 🙂

Steve,

Sorry for not replying earlier; I noticed your reply when more recent comments appeared. In person I’ve only seen the Guggeneheim and Fallingwater and Ennis house (only from the outside). I guess I’d just like say that I can recognize an architect for innovation, vision and iconoclasm without liking his/her work itself. Wright clearly paved the way for development of new architecture in America (despite coating all his buildings with William Morris or European deco or Pre-Colombian or whatever finishings). But while I recognize his contribution, as does the AIA, I am making a more simple point. I simply dislike his aesthetics, and wouldn’t want to live in any of the houses based on what I’ve seen. I’d want to gut them, work with the bones, refinish. By way of contrast I would love to live in Aalto’s Villa Mairea as is. The sensitivity extends to the use of materials in every way, the wood, the textiles – it’s like the difference between a stage set and a real house meant for humans. Lastly, on a slightly different note, I was in NYC for one of the Guggenheim’s anniversaries and they were running an exhibit on the history of the building. The way it looks today, the clean white snail that I love from the outside, is entirely the doing of Solomon Guggenheim. Have you seen FLW’s drawings? It’s a decorative, pink folly. I can’t find one of the more decorative versions online but I’m sure you’ve seen this: http://architecture.about.com/od/museum1/ss/Guggenheim-Color.htm
Solomon’s the one who pared it down and I believe his solution was superior. To me the exhibit was really instructive.

Ah, yes. The fairy lights were nice. On a rock ceiling heavily coated in mortar that has been scored into lines. That’s all I can tell you. Again I’m puzzled by the seemingly deliberate clumsy mortaring everywhere; I’m sure there’s an elaborate explanation for it. I found it jarring, so clumsy as to seem to be making a point. Especially when juxtaposed with all the highly finished, imported Asian elements (doors, sculpture). I’ve been in village/desert environments all over the world and never seen Fred Flintstone mortaring like this. What’s it’s function? It has the look of someone making a point about mortaring, not solving an actual functional problem. I don’t know. But I felt the same way about the rest of the finishing as well as furniture: crappy presentation in a room with unbelievably superior acoustics. That’s the weird thing about FLW for me; the underlying superiority of the basic structure, jarringly juxtaposed with a distinctly un-pleasing resolution in materials, colour, aesthetic. I can’t shake the sensation it’s an affectation. I think Wright liked what he was doing, and I suspect he was internally conflicted about tradition.

Underlying form seems to be at war with the finishing, as if he didn’t think humans (including himself) could handle the new forms without an overlay of something historically familiar, like ancient Egypt/deco, while also pulling against that with slapdash rock wall construction. I’m trying to focus on function not form here, but the forms and aesthetics in his work (not just Taliesin West) are so dominating for me, so badly resolved that I start to lose faith in its functional superiority too.

Compare: http://blog.ounodesign.com/2009/06/20/aaltos-villa-mairea-in-finland/

PS I wanted to just add that I don’t believe the failures (in my view) are due to the ad hoc nature of the site, the fact that it started as a camp, or the poverty of the budget. I actually think sometimes that the more money you apply to a project, the worse the result, so perhaps the more funds he applied to the site, the worse it got. I’d like to have seen it in its early days. I just don’t believe he understood his own creation well enough to finish it successfully at all. What was most cheap were his own secret aesthetic commitments.

I don’t remember that ceiling, Janki! Do you have a photo? Are you talking about the theatre? And I do think local materials could have been used better.