Reflections on an AZ trip

This may surprise some who've heard, well, yeah, but it's a dry heat", but it's fookin hot there in July.

I visited Taliesin West and took the Behind The Scenes Tour. 60 bucks for three hours was a little surprising, but there were only six of us on the tour and we got to hear FLLW's personal physician (?!) and Roy Arnold (one of Wright's original/surviving apprentices) speak. They also served a small very tasty snack plate in the dining room.

To say the place needs an extreme historical landmark makeover is putting it mildly.

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concrete looks good, but pretty much everything else on the exterior of the buildings needs a lot of help. I'm curious how much the place has deteriorated in the last twenty years or whether they are barely holding their own. Anyone here visit the place?

I also visited Cosanti.

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Solieri is apparently still in residence, but I guess he was reclusing while I was there. I watched one of the foundry pours of their bronze wind chimes/bells and that was very interesting. Why someone in AZ in the middle of July would want a job that makes Hell look like an Autumn vacation, I'll never know.

R
Reply to
RicodJour
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They're going about it the whole thing in the wrong way. They're making the bulk of the money from tours, furniture and fixture licensing and a small amount from paying students. No way in hell can they make that float. What they need to do is to have a volunteer-for- free-board program, almost like a Habitat house, and have a craftsman course in construction. Architects can't build shit, and they need things built.

R
Reply to
RicodJour

How much they think it will cost, how much it will actually cost and how much they will actually get are very different things. The timing is the critical part - the buildings are in need of a major amount of work right now. Waiting in hopes of getting a huge amount in funding before starting repair and maintenance work is stupid.

R
Reply to
RicodJour

The place was famously built with slave er, student labour. I don't know if that holds true for the whole of it or not.

Reply to
gruhn

I believe most of it was. They still have the tradition that the second year architecture students are free to build/renovate their own lodging/habitat. No new sites can be built, but old worthy ones are occupied/remodeled, and the less worthy are razed to clear the way for something new.

It's not slave labor in any event. The students are paying for the privilege and paying for the construction (I think there might be contributions from the Fellowship of the Rin...sorry, wrong Fellowship).

I think architecture students should be required to build stuff and live in it. It's best to face your screw ups early on.

R
Reply to
RicodJour

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The concrete looks good, but pretty much everything else on the

never visited. Met a lot of people who lived there, though, most interesting of which was Svetlana Stalina who lived there while married for a while to an architect.

Agree. I visited Acrosanti in the summer, too, found the bells a nice feature (no pouring that day) and it was 115 in the shade. A lot of the metalwork was rusting, the exhibits looked more than a tad worn and if I hadn't known it was elsewhere, I would have thought it defined death valley and dusty dreams both. Saw a couple unique lizards, tried to juxtapose what I had read about its foundation in my youth, and bought some excellent fragrant dried herbs. Two years of excellent rosemary chicken and a buncha stocking stuffer type gifts came outa that trip.

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