Back in May, I visited Age in Arizona (I am long overdue for another visit!). While I was there, we toured Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, which has been on my list to see since I was in high school! Her aunt and uncle are members and graciously gave us two of their guest passes for a tour.

It was difficult to whittle this post down but still capture the essence of Taliesin West and the details I loved about it. Frank Lloyd Wright is an icon, and his creations always represent for me what architecture should attempt to connote—attention to detail and human scale, an extension of place and fitting within a landscape, and thoughtful design.

Photographs can't do justice to walking through and experiencing one of his creations as a brief inhabitant of the space; the drive to Taliesin West gave me a taste for the desert landscape which enchanted Wright and caused him to locate his architecture school here. The low, flat forms of his buildings echo his earlier works, the Prairie School style of architecture from his early career and for which perhaps he is best known.

The assorted buildings composing the heart of the Taliesin West campus each resonate with their individual, distinctive purposes, but share uniting qualities such as local materials, the use of natural light, and repeated design motifs.

I could write essays on this masterpiece, but so many other, more qualified experts have already done so, so I'll just mention a few of my favorite things from our visit. Perhaps most striking to me was FLW's use of natural light, not only as an element of his final design, but as a defining feature of it. Many of the buildings used tent-like canvas for a roof, clerestory windows, skylights, and entire walls of glass, or varying combinations of these. In many of these features, the geometric shadows made by the architectural detail combined with the harsh Arizona sunlight are striking. I feel like that is what is best captured in these photographs, as well as the angular nature of these buildings and their exteriors and even the exterior shadows. I also loved the sculptural elements throughout the campus—a bronze bust of FLW, stylized animal figurines, geological specimens, mosaics, found petroglyphs on boulders throughout the site, pendant light fixtures, and Chinese ceramic theaters. That's what I loved in a nutshell, but beyond that, I think these photos speak for themselves.

If you find yourself in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, a trip to Taliesin West is a must and well-worth your time! Beyond the actual site itself, our tour guide was brilliant, we had great company on the tour in our fellow architecture-aficionados, and in our brief glance into the studio space we got to eavesdrop on some great snippets of conversation between the architects at work.

Next on the list of my unofficial-Frank-Lloyd-Wright-oeuvre-tour is Chicago—I have been dying to go for years but need to travel with a fellow architecture lover who is up for a day trip to Oak Park and an afternoon on the architectural river tour! (Any takers?!)

Oh how I love this quote from the movie Elf: "I passed through the seven levels of the Candy Cane forest, through the sea of swirly twirly gum drops, and then I walked through the Lincoln Tunnel."

Mostly that scene gets me every time because I can't really fathom how one would actually try to walk through the Lincoln Tunnel. so great.