2023-05-13 20:52:54
The Archetype of the Cactus: Most people picture a prickly desert dweller as the ideal type of a saguaro. And the most beautiful specimens are in the national park of the same name near Tucson.
Image: ddp
“Grand Canyon State” is how Arizona is officially called, but the state has much more to offer: An architectural world heritage site, an ideal city of money and a cactus wonderland make it easy to forget the great canyon.
MNo one needs more, no more luxury, no more space, no more pretentiousness, nothing more than the marvel that the greatest of all American architects built in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. 86 years after the birth of Taliesin West and 64 years after the death of Frank Lloyd Wright, we are sitting in the living room of his winter residence on the outskirts of Scottsdale and can hardly believe how much beauty, truth and finality there is in his ideas and ideals to this day manifest in this property in an exemplary manner. Wright wanted to create an “organic architecture”, who used the word prophetically a hundred years before it became inflationary popular, an architecture that coexists in harmony with its surroundings, that opens up to the landscape, that makes use of obvious materials in every respect and which, what was most important to him, is always at the service of man.
humility and truthfulness
“A view over the edge of the world” is what Frank Lloyd Wright called the winter counterpart to his summer home Taliesin in Wisconsin, and it still lies lonely at the foot of a rugged mountain range in the middle of the desert landscape, having been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019. Wright looked then into nothing but wilderness, but before us now spreads Paradise Valley, a valley of monstrous wealth with thousands of millionaire mansions, where legions of Latin American gardeners are constantly busy greening the desert and creating the chimera of an earthly Garden of Eden create – which is not at all what the master architect intended, for whom humility and truthfulness meant much more than demonstrations of the power of human creativity.
#wonders #nature #culture #Arizona