Survivalist tiny dorms at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin architecture school

frank lloyd wright when he bought this land there was no Scottsdale Phoenix was just cattle ranches just nothing but farms ranchers Wild West the whole bit he had set up a remote camp a few years earlier he was going to work on a project a hotel project and to work on that project he built a camp called ocotillo which is the name of a plant out here and so then I think he got that experience camping and then he decided probably because he'd already been in the wilderness and tried it he decided as a 70 year old man to start a school out in the desert in Arizona profound desert where you know the water would often just come down off the mountain and wash them away it's very intimidating when the students come to school they stay in the shelter in the desert as you can see they're very rustic many of them don't have walls this one doesn't really have a roof because this roof is not waterproof by any stretch so they stay in these shelters college students right and so for example the students when they arrive they are given the shelter they'll they explore a little bit seniority they get to choose you know with pecking order and they find a shelter and they have to live there from October to May in the elements with no plumbing with no electricity very little light in this desert we're out in five hundred acres in North Scottsdale and what I do that I mean part of the ideas they learn about what's needed like what kind of shelter is actually necessary to sustain life the student that built this was experimenting several ways and one of the ways with with heating because the desert gets quite cold at night and so the idea was to build a fire here robust fire have it heat this platform and then enjoy the residual heat throughout the evening and the experiment was moderately successful I mean supposedly there was some heat but it quickly dissipated and that was that and what's most curious to me is this when I arrived here a year ago I met this delightful woman she had been a bachelor students and she was finishing up her master's she chose this shelter out of all the shelters that she could have had cause she had the most seniority so she had the pick of the litter she could have done whatever she wanted and she chose the shelter and as I was mentioning earlier this would be the sleeping platform and so she would just put her sleeping bag right here and when it rained since the rain would go right through this tarp she would put a plastic tarp over her to protect herself and that was her choice and she really loved it and you know what this is actually my favorite shelter too because it really asks you to think about what you really need to survive the students find out and they also find out the architecture can get in the way of experiencing your environment and so you don't want to put up walls or you want to put up columns that block your experience and so I think our students are really sensitive to that after having lived in this way that there's some privacy afforded here because there are other shelters and she wants privacy but at the same time things are framed very nicely by this can hunc these shapes interesting and how it interacts with the landscape how its part in part out and at many angles and it feels to me just like the desert that we were walking through okay we're walking on the crest here actually but well we're trying to be ginger I mean a little bit of trampoline won't destroy but it's when you build something and you really start to pull things up that's the problem doesn't look rugged and like totally indestructible and it just survives like 120 degree heat and it can take it and yet if you look here if we're off path you see all the tiny plants which is kind of dust over all the rocks and over the soil it's been referred to as a crust it's a very very delicate and apparently if you disturb it it just takes decades to grow back and for that reason we have about 500 acres out here but we really try to corral the students and where they build things because the ecosystem is so delicate there's a swaro for you up close and personal only found in the Sonoran Desert and those just take decades upon decades I get to be 200 years old and so many things are quite delicate other things are robust and grow quickly but nevertheless we try to be careful and so as you walk through this desert you'll be surprised I'm surprised I'm always surprised you'll just come across a structure ok I've never seen this one before huh no no the hang is literally a tent suspended from a pole so the hanging tent it's completely suspended by a cable we have to take a ladder to get up to it and there's a platform and then you step off the platform into the tent and it's just one big bed basically the concept was there was a couple here believe he was the student and I think she was the partner and she said she was fed up with living on the desert floor and that he better get her off a desert floor and so this was his solution I've been told it's really over engineered like it doesn't need to be that sturdy but I guess to make everyone feel good about being suspended that it's that it's not going anywhere so have a student he's a master student here from India and he's been staying in there and when I asked him how his time is going here you know enjoying herself are you having a good time in America he loves that shelter his eyes just light up and he says that what's most amazing to him is he can lay in bed and look at the Stars he's kind of an alternative dorm yeah this is this is the dorm this is under construction so all students filled our work yeah one horde okay right so how does that work okay so the students can choose to like live in one like this that was built a long time ago by another student and then they can choose to work on it help with remodeling and rehabilitating and that's often how they cut their teeth and then decide to build their own shelter I love this one it's when it was done it was just nothing but benches in like a you and can imagine it's just a big conversation pit right just a huge conversation pit and it all opens up all these panels open up to this kind of circles back to what you were saying about what makes a shelter you know what's necessary for sustaining life I mean of course they have access to a kitchen and a studio to work but when you looked at the original camp it was just white tents in the desert and that's what Frank Lloyd Wright was working with so all the kitchen was a tent the studio was a tent his quarters or tents and then slowly they built up more substantial things and then they used each attempt to experiment not let's not kid ourselves this is very recent this is well post frank lloyd wright's death you know this is what I don't know maybe 15 years old but the spirits still the same where the students are experimenting with methods and materials and from there they are using it as a canvas you know is it about privacy is about openness they have to make a lot of decisions about that and a lot of them of course enjoy having a fire pit that's I guess primeval something about it and not just because it's cold but I think because they just enjoy it that's probably a fire pit oh oh yeah I can see there's coals there's a great the students are forced to live with the rhythms of nature they have to wake up with the light and go to sleep with the night in fact one stood was complaining to me he found it really challenging that he would have all-nighters working on architecture projects and then he couldn't sleep in cuz he's outdoors and when the light would shine and the heat would add up over he would be forced out of bed makes you industrious to have to wake up with the light some of these pads go back to the 40s I mean obviously Scottsdale really wasn't doing much at that point so we have someone who lives on campus still and she was raised in that compound of tent platforms right there's like two pads there and you would put a tent on top a sheep herders tent and that's what she was raised in her mother was Cornelia Brierley and she joined Frank Lloyd Wright in the 30s and was a leading player in his team and raised her children in this rustic environment and the student they swap stories at the dinner table about you know a javelina marched right through my shelter a wild boar with tusks that aren't very nice and although this you don't talk about the scorpions that visited them well so that's probably the most basic shelter degree just a file I think a lot of them are half finished ok a lot of visitors that aren't students will say they want to live in a shelter and then chickened out once do what he said that he was sleeping in his car the first week terrified terrified he wouldn't leave his car of sleeping outdoors this is what they're finding is essential I guess right there's a fireplace there's a bench but students that have lived there say there are scorpions in there and their theory is the scorpions get in and can't find their way out which is why a lot of students prefer the ones without walls see our walls can't wrap things in as opposed to keeping things out is what they've discovered but they also just love looking at here the quail and the rabbits and and so it's quite moving for them I think it's amazing how these rocks just scatter across the floor it's really gorgeous that's the patterns in nature exactly as Frank Lloyd Wright often said just study it study how it does what it does how does it create it structures its forms mimic them they work obviously they're successful and they evolved so how can we improve we just need to in some ways learn from it frankly right talked about architecture being musical and I think that if a building was out of sync with the environment it would be like a coffin II of sound it would be jarring to the ears so Frank Lloyd Wright was very sensitive to cost with his own building so he just used whatever was around both at Taliesin and Taliesin West and so too it is likely to be harmonious with the environment the buildings should complement nature it should complement the landscape not fight against it it should be as if it tumbled out of or rose out of the landscape the building shape itself and the weight situated on the land should be an organic outgrowth of that land this is so opposite of a city did he have much to say about city versus rural living I know that absolutely yeah broadacre there you go where in his ideal model you wouldn't have the kind of density that we have you might have a high-rise and he designed in his broadacre City a high-rise but a single one so that every apartment had an unencumbered view of the countryside so you could engage right nature even though you're in high-rise you can see all around you and so you stay in touch with nature and he went to detail and saying things like all the power lines need to be underground he really was into the aesthetics of engineering the whole thing do you see his power lines over there that happened in his lifetime it put up these power lines and so he reoriented the whole campus away from those power lines because before it was looking out over the valley and then he was so outraged that he then turned the orientation of the many of the buildings to go toward the McDowell mountains I want to be clear our students do their own work totally irrespective of what the work that Frank Lloyd Wright did but it's still interesting to have people around that were aware of the traditions so here is Victor's shelter that he did while he was a student here Victor is now the Dean of the School of Architecture but he was a student in the early 80s might be closed up for the summer no Frank Lloyd Wright also read voraciously he quotes often from various philosophers be it Whitman and Emerson lao-tzu so - I think he studied nature just the way he studied literature and took a lot out of it and then put it into his buildings and so that's why at the school we teach a lot of humanities this one is interesting it has a glass box with a solar array so here's someone who said okay I'm going to live in the desert but I'm going to create a box with the solar array because they weren't as comfortable with the concept of you know being out in the elements it has that clear story and it has a kind of feeling of a floating roof and then I did this mitered edge here so here a student was really playing with Radian elements of design like that whole vocabulary it's good of them they were experimenting they're playing with it who knows what they're doing now probably something very different but at least they just like when you're a student of any discipline you you play around you mimic you take elements and then you find your own voice and your own style add yours about cost are there limits what did students they're given a thousand dollars by the school and then they're encouraged to seek out funds donations help that's part of what we hope they'll learn to find ways of you know scrambling to get resources and then recruiting people to help them and if it's small you probably don't need too much you're getting maybe remnants or yeah anyway what you can so you work with what you have concrete's expensive they're always seeking out donations of concrete and then to experiment with material and hopefully upcycling material so finding material and finding ways of repurposing it and I like that there's this candle stuck here in the wall for practical reasons because otherwise how can they come out here at night but also what a beautiful way to live you know who came out here at Martha Stewart was out here a couple months ago she was just delighting like a child we have to keep in mind that she's a very mature woman and yet something about the spread out her sense of plant curious it's you know people from all walks of life find us attractive even in this hostile environment we're nomads right is that what it is we just want our little camp we want a shell you know we want a cocoon one thing you will not miss and is obviously the focal point of living out here are the sunrises and sunsets and right now it's just kind of Moody I don't know what kind of sunset we're going to get here sunrise in the sunset our life confirming I'll tell you that that dominates life out here someone once suggested that was visiting here actually a neuroscientist from Berkeley who said she want to come out and just hang out with us so she worked in the kitchen and just kind of experienced the campus in the place and she said oh my gosh they're really going on we should call it the dream vision question quest thank you Vision Quest it's happening whether you want it to or not there's really profound for them to be out here in these elements in a private way in the secluded way I find this desert in particular very grounding and very purifying so there's something very special about it

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 988,313

Keywords: off grid, off grid home, tiny home, small space, small home, tiny house, home size, simple living, simplicity, taliesin west, frank lloyd wright, off grid dorms, survival shelters, simple shelters, Stephanie Schull, architecture school, organic architecture, scottsdale, arizona

Id: STpvcR13_ok

Length: 21min 18sec (1278 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 27 2014