In the late 1930s, Frank Lloyd Wright and his apprentices began painstakingly building what would eventually become Taliesin West, the architect’s winter home and studio. After a long day’s work, Wright would retreat to the Sun Trap, a small low-slung cottage that served as his temporary home, and his apprentices would make their way back to tents spread out across the Scottsdale desert.
“In the winter, there were sheepherders that would bring flocks from the north down to the warmer Arizona environment,” Fred Prozzillo, the Nord McClintock Family vice president of preservation and collections at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundations, tells AD. While moving the animals, the sheepherders would live in pyramid-shaped tents, which offered cheap and readily available shelter. Inspired, “Wright bought a bunch of them for his apprentices to live in while they built [Taliesin West].” The architect arranged them in a series of ten sites in triangular grids with the idea that the arrangement would foster community among the fellows.
Of course, living in the desert had its challenges: It wasn’t uncommon to wake up to an animal asleep next to you or find yourself shivering on a night when it was particularly cold. So when students had free time, they’d try to improve their makeshift homes. “They’d add a concrete base to get it off the ground or maybe a roof; it would grow from this tent to a true shelter,” Prozzillo says. Overtime, what was born from a basic human need grew to become an integral part of Wright’s Taliesin fellowship. “It was learning by doing,” Niki Stewart, vice president and chief learning and engagement officer at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, says. “That was Wright’s philosophy on education.”
At the beginning of the winter season, fellows would either move in to a shelter that was started by a previous apprentice or move back into a shelter they had began working on the year before. This cycle saw the original sites developed into multiple iterations of different shelters. At the end of each season, Wright would come out and critique the apprentice’s work. “They’d have a little party,” Prozzillo says. “It was a wonderful opportunity for architects in training to figure out how to take an idea, translate it into a drawing, and figure out how to build it.”
Wright not only wanted apprentices to get hands-on experience in designing and building structures, but it also gave them unmatched opportunities to study and immerse themselves in nature, arguably the most important muse in all of Wright’s work. Prozzillo, who was an apprentice from 1997 until 2000, spent three winter seasons in the shelters. “There were times of struggle and times or real joy,” he remembers. “I definitely learned to connect more with nature.” He noticed how the stars moved across the sky, something lost in the traditional house he lives in now, and became more intimately acquainted with the moon’s cycles. Some moments were less picturesque—one morning he woke up with a family of pack rats asleep next to him—but it all greatly influenced his perspective and approach to both the built and natural environment. More importantly, it taught him how the two can exist together.
For some, these lessons could be a brutal. “Some people self-selected out and left,” Prozzillo says, but most who came to Taliesin West to learn under Wright—or through his legacy after his death—were looking for an out-of-the-box education. “Wright was espousing this new way to think about living, building, and designing for society, and these were people that were interested in that,” Prozzillo says. “He was putting forth this idea to the American people about not living in Victorian homes with a bunch of boxes as rooms, but rather creating open plans and open-space buildings that connected to nature.” Most fellows were ready for a challenge and open-minded about the ways they’d learn. “You already had an understanding that there would be some kind of connection to nature, and this was a wonderful way to make it happen,” Prozzillo adds.
Now, for the first time ever, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which operates from Taliesin West, is offering tours of the apprentice shelters to the public. These 90-minute excursions take place through the first week of April and offer visitors the chance to learn more about Wright’s education philosophies as well as peek into what life was like at the Scottsdale property. Stewart, who leads tour groups, says that many people start the journey believing they could never live immersed in nature in this way but change their minds by the end. “They think, Maybe I could do this, and that’s just after 90 minutes” she explains “Imagine what it was like as an apprentice. Maybe at the beginning of the season it didn’t sound great, but by the end it changed you.”
