building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

the unusual character of the place: “The desert is where God is and man is not” 144 .
The shacks of Ocatillo were built with hemp cloths and wooden boards
whitewashed in a dull rose colour, “the color to match the light on the desert
floor” 145 , in Wright’s mind were butterflies fluttering over the projecting rocks rising
from the surface, or a small fleet of sailboats rocking in the breeze.
The message from Ocatillo, which was to become architecture in Taliesin West, has
fired other experiences, rekindling the flame of the architectonic utopia. Just think
of Arcosanti, the experiment started by Paolo Soleri, 70 miles from Phoenix, in the
Arizona desert. After all, as Banham suggests, “[...] Soleri and Wright found in the
desert what other men found in the desert: an uncluttered landscape,
unencumbered by other people’s buildings and other people’s cultures, and it
offered them something very like a clean slate, on which to make a new start, and
fulfil an unhindered fantasy” 146 .
However, if the concrete results for utopias are few and far between in terms of
architectural and town planning, the spiritual heirloom of the experiences discussed
so far is still vast and unexplored. The story of the rush to the landscape during the
but within view of the site of the new resort. […] It was all too good, but it was true. Lumber began
to arrive that afternoon. […] Out here in the great spaces obvious symmetry claims too much, I find,
wearies the eye too soon and stultifies the imagination. Obvious symmetry usually closes the
episode before it begins. So for me I felt there could be no obvious symmetry in any building in this
great desert, none especially in this new camp –we later named the place Ocatillo and partly for this
reason. No, there would be nothing like obvious symmetry in the new .
The sound constitution of any entity is pregnant with graceful reflexes. Seek those, young architect!
Now by way of an architect’s work‐camp comes fresh adventure in the desert. We called the camp:
. […] The Yankee‐Hopi house is the Phoenix favourite just now. In all this weird,
colourful, wide‐sweeping terrain nothing is quite so deciduous as Arizona buildings, unless the crows
lighting on the fences of the irrigated fields only to fly away. Unspoiled native character insulted like
this. Arizona character seems to cry out for a space‐loving architecture of its own. The straight line
and flat plane must come here ‐of all places‐ but they should become the dotted line, the broad, low,
extended plane textured because in all this astounding desert there is not one hard undotted line to
be seen. The great mature‐masonry we see rising from the great mesa floors is all the noble
architecture Arizona has to show at present and that is not architecture at all. But it is inspiration. A
pattern of what appropriate Arizona architecture might well be lie there hidden in the Sahuaro. The
Sahuaro, perfect example of reinforced building construction. Its interior vertical rods hold it rigidly
upright maintaining its great fluter columnar mass for six centuries or more. A truer skyscraper than
our functioneer has built. And all these desert remarkable growths show scientific building economy
in the patterns of their construction”.
144 Ibid., p. 309 (it. tr. p. 276)
145 Ibid., p. 311 (it. tr. p. 277)
146 BANHAM , Reyner, Scenes in America Deserta, Salt Lake City, Gibbs M. Smith inc., 1982, p. 87
(Italian translation by Raffaella Fagetti, Deserti americani, introduction by Marco Biraghi, Torino,
Einaudi, 2006, p. 78)
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