Courtesy of Wayne and Carla Anderson

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West house in Arizona has been renovated to be the way it was when Wright died in 1959.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. - As fans of architects, Frank Lloyd Wright, we were in Phoenix with an Elderhostel group to visit his buildings, including Taliesin West, his winter home and school from 1937 until his death in 1959 at age 92. When building began, Taliesin West was about 26 miles east of the small city of Phoenix, population 50,000, and had no water or electricity.

In 1932, Wright had not received a contract for a building for six years and was in dire need of money. His third wife, Olgivanna, suggested that they offer apprenticeships to students wanting to study with the master builder, who still had a considerable reputation.

The first year, six fellows signed up at $350 a year to come to the first Taliesin in Wisconsin to learn by being in the presence of Wright. They were expected to help grow the food, prepare it and build structures from the ground up using local materials.

To avoid the Wisconsin climate after a bout of pneumonia in 1936, Wright, at the age of 69, started Taliesin West as his winter base of instruction. The students brought their drafting boards, cooking equipment and tools for building. For the first few years, the Wrights and the students lived under very primitive conditions and had only the facilities and structures the students constructed. The second year, Wright found water at 500 feet, but it was eight years before electricity reached the site.

The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture has only 19 students, but can grant degrees in architecture that are recognized in every state.

The buildings are constructed of flat-sided large reddish stones set in raw-looking concrete. The buildings were originally open to the air as Wright was too strapped for money to afford glass. Later, Olgivanna prevailed upon him to install glass, and the rooms are now air-conditioned. With no electricity available in the early days, the rooms were designed to use the natural light of the desert. All of the rooms were flooded with light by the Arizona sun.

We were shown the meeting areas, the conference rooms, but were not allowed into the largest area, the drafting rooms.

Because entertainment was important to Wright, several rooms were assigned for that role. The first was a gathering room for the fellows with specially designed furniture by Wright.

The "origami" chairs, cushioned in blue, had cost $5,000 apiece and were manufactured in Italy, and although strikingly different were not particularly comfortable - a not unusual reaction to some of the furniture designed by Wright.

In the room is a bust of Wright by Elizabeth R. Mitchell, who had come to study with him and stayed to become a sculptor. Her work - noteworthy for a wide range of styles - adorns the area, including many pieces in a sculpture garden.

Wright was a workaholic and expected long hours from his "boys," which also included the women. The fellows in the program were expected to work from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.

But all was not work; along with tools, they were told to bring their tuxes and evening gowns. Wright felt that architects must know the ways of the rich so that they would be comfortable designing homes for them.

Some of the rooms, especially the rooms for entertainment, had roofs of canvas, renewed each year, on frames with hinges, allowing the desert breezes to cool the rooms.

Wright is noted for inspiring Americans to move out of their box-like buildings into houses with wide-open spaces using materials reminiscent of his native Midwestern prairie.

He wrote: "Whether people are fully conscious of this or not, they actually derive countenance and sustenance from the ‘atmosphere’ of the things they live in or with. They are rooted in them just as a plant is in the soil in which it is planted."

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