[Note:  Photos are in an image gallery at the end of this post.]

Although I have never written down a bucket list, I have a mental one, and one of the things on my list was to visit Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter camp in Scottsdale, Arizona.  We have toured Taliesin in Wisconsin and Fallingwater in Pennsylvania as well as his home/studio, Unity Temple, and some 15 houses in and around Oak Park, Illinois, the S. C. Johnson building in Racine, Wisconsin, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.  I am a long-time, big fan of his architecture.

Scottsdale is a suburb located ENE of Phoenix and ~70 miles north of Arizona City.  Since we knew we would be hanging out in Arizona City for a week we decided a couple of weeks ago that we wanted to take the “Behind The Scenes Tour” and purchased two tickets for the 9:15 tour today.  We set our alarm clocks for 6 AM and left camp at 6:45 AM.

We had researched coffee shops last night and had an address for a Seattle’s Best not far from Taliesin West.  We left early enough to go there and enjoy coffee and a bagel and still get to Taliesin West on time.  Or so we thought.  We used our GPS to navigate to the coffee shop, fighting our way through stop and go traffic, construction, and general urban congestion only to discover that it was no longer there.  By that point we did not have time to try the alternative location we had identified so we just went on to Taliesin West.

We arrived at 8:30, took care of getting our tickets in the bookstore, and then grabbed a table by the outdoor coffee kiosk which did not open until after 9 AM around the time our tour began.  Why the kiosk was not open much earlier was a mystery to us, but whatever the reason, it meant no coffee for us this morning 🙁  They did supply bottled water for our tour, however, which was appreciated.

The tour took three hours and we got to see some areas of the camp that folks on shorter tours do not.  That included a stop at the dining room where we were served a light lunch of fresh fruit, a small croissant sandwich, and a date nut bar and “Arnold Palmer” to drink.  A women who apprenticed under Frank Lloyd Wright, and still lives at Taliesin West, visited with us during lunch and shared personal reflections about her life.

The most interesting thing to me about Taliesin West was learning that FLLW regarded it as his “winter camp” and that most of the original construction was open to the outside and “rougher” than we have seen at other sites.  When construction began in 1937 there was no road to the site, which sits on high, sloping ground at the base of small mountains.  There was no electrical power, no water, and no heavy equipment; everything was done by hand.  They used kerosene lanterns and candles and trucked the water in.  Shutters allowed buildings to be closed off from the weather or light if desired, or opened to admit a breeze or reveal the night sky.

Windows were eventually added to some buildings at the insistence of the 3rd Mrs. Wright and many of the spaces now have air-conditioning.  As buildings were added and others reshaped or repurposed over time Taliesin West took on a more refined quality but its origins and use as a winter camp are still very evident.  Like his home/studio in Oak Park, Illinois and his estate at Taliesin, Taliesin West was a living laboratory for his ideas about the way architecture should/could connect people to the place where they live and actively enhance the quality of their lives.

We spent a few minutes in the bookstore after our tour.  The items available from the FLLW Foundation are very nice but we did not buy anything as we trying not to collect things at this point in our lives.  We had done research on vegan restaurants and found one in Tempe, just south of Scottsdale, which had a nice menu and good reviews on Happy Cow.  Before going to lunch we used our GPS to navigate over to RV Solar Electric.  For the second time today we discovered that a business did not appear to exist at the address given on the website.  I called the phone number and talked to owner Doug Kirkby who indicated that they were an online only store and the address was a storage bay where they warehouse their products, and was, indeed, at the location indicated by our GPS (but on the other side of the street).  I had overlooked that little detail on their website, but it wasn’t far from Taliesin West and we were only going to window shop anyway, so we hopped on Scottsdale Road and headed south to the restaurant.

The New Green American Restaurant was on the south side of the Arizona State University central campus and we had an up close view of Scottsdale, which is a very upscale place, on the drive down.  With the exception of Sublime restaurant near Ft. Lauderdale, Florida our experience with vegan restaurants is that they are usually slightly funky little places near college campuses and New Green American was no exception.  We studied the menu, made our selections, stood in line, placed our order, took our number placard, and found a table to sit and wait for our food which did not take long to arrive.  I had a mock breaded fish fillet po’boy and Linda had a mock chicken marinara po’boy, both with savory French fries lightly seasoned with Thyme.  The food was very tasty.  The also had almond milk milkshakes.  Linda had a chocolate one and I had strawberry and they were a real, and rare, treat.  It’s probably a good thing that we do not have a vegan restaurant like his anywhere close to where we live as we would eat out too often.

By the time we got back to camp it was pushing 4 PM.  We had left windows open and fans running to keep it comfortable enough for the cars and left the door unlocked in case Lou or Val needed to get in.  By 5 PM our rig was partly in shade and as the afternoon gave way to evening it cooled back down to a more comfortable temperature. We left the windows and ceiling vents open all night but I turned off the exhaust fans before I went to bed.  By the time we got up in the morning it was chilly enough inside the coach that we put on our sweats for a while.  But that’s a story for another day.

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