building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

Dodge, and as I rode beside him Nature staged a show for us all the way" 141 . For
those places Wright drew up a series of ideas, including a project for a residential
complex for Mr Johnson, a private chapel and a house for himself. Of the project
made for Johnson we are left with very few drawings and two fascinating
photographs [Figure 64] on which quick notes had been written for the project,
which anticipated the lines and the approach of Taliesin West (1937).
The unforgettable spectacle offered by the desert only became, however, a
concrete building opportunity for the most ephemeral of Wright’s projects in 1927:
Ocatillo [Figure 65], the encampment built around Chandler, Arizona to improve the
drawings of the complex of San Marcos in the Desert, and never implemented due
to the economic crisis of 1929. Ocatillo, according to Wright, appears to be the story
of a utopian community of the nineteenth century, of a group of people moving
towards something revolutionary:
We had got back to Taliesin. I was at work on this project for some two
months, when a telegram came from the Doctor [Mr. Alexander
Chandler, the client of San Marcos in the Desert, editor’s note]
suggesting we all come out and make the plans for the new resort right
there. Joyful news. A swift “comeback” at last! A $40,000 fee in that
direction. And we were, at the moment, housebound at Taliesin in a
blizzard, twenty‐two degrees below zero and blowing hard.
Nevertheless, ignoring mentor La Follette ‐Phil‐ secretary now of F.L.W.,
incorporated, we broke away and went out into a blowing snowstorm
on the way to Arizona. A real blizzard. The household and workshop at
Taliesin were quickly closed and the trek by automobile to Arizona
began, fifteen of us in all […] So we finally arrived at Chandler after
extraordinary risks in […] 142
The descriptions of the landscape, in which the Ocatillo encampment was to rise,
revealed a passionate enthusiasm towards the place and the architecture that was
going to be built there 143 . Wright even quoted a sentence by Victor Hugo to explain
141 Ibid.
142 Ibid. p. 307 (Italian translation p. 274)
143 Ibid., p. 307‐309 (Italian translation pp. 275‐276) “Why not camp now? […] I took this idea to Dr.
Chandler and said that if he would give me a site somewhere we would build the camp ourselves. He
reached for his hat, led the way to the little gray Ford coupé which he drives around the mesa at an
average of fifty miles an hour and we went over toward the Salt Range. Ten miles away we came
upon a low, spreading, rocky mound rising from the great desert floor –well away from everywhere,
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