FOREWORD

William J.R. Curtis

Memories, dreams, reflections: the universe of Frank Lloyd Wright

“The past reappears because it is a hidden present”.2

This book was written in a wooden cabin in a grove of trees on the northwestern coast of Sicily, a magical place that provided the author with inspiring views across the Gulf of Cofano, a landscape haunted by Antiquity. As the ocean breezes rustled the carob trees and palms surrounding his rural retreat, the writer cast his mind back to another landscape, that of the parched desert of Arizona with its saguaro cacti, sandy arroyos, and vast mountain horizons where he had spent a key period of his youth three decades before. Francesco Santoro used the enforced confinement of 2020 to recreate events and places that he had experienced when he had left behind Italy and set out on a voyage of discovery and self-discovery in early 1989, enrolling for a year and a half in the Frank Lloyd Wright Taliesin Fellowship. This was housed in Taliesin West, the architect’s desert masterpiece, designed and constructed from 1938 onwards at Scottsdale not far from Phoenix. With its rocky platforms, crude stone and concrete walls, and leaning tent-like roofs held up on timber trusses, this extraordinary work was like a mythical landscape full of archetypal resonances. It was Wright’s hymn to the southwestern desert, its overwhelming natural features, and its ancestral Indian memories.3

Fed up with the sterility of Italian architectural education, and prompted by the Wrightian champion Bruno Zevi, the twenty-year-old Italian student made a leap into the unknown. This is the adventure recaptured in this book which charts a youthful search for architectural knowledge. The text itself has the character of a personal journey back through space and time. But Apprentice at Taliesin. A personal experience in the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture is more than just an autobiographical recollection. It is reinforced by solid historical research on the evolution and personalities of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Foundation since its creation in the 1930s. Santoro’s account of daily life at Taliesin offers insights into the inheritance of the original value system (“learning by doing” “an organic philosophy”) and of ways that it changed over time. He recounts the teaching methods used at the end of the 1980s and the communal activities, whether for work or for leisure. Then there are the personalities: William Wesley Peters one of the old generation, and above all Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, the guardian of collective memories and of the archive of drawings kept in a secure vault.

There is probably no better way of learning the fundamentals of architecture than to experience a great work firsthand, gradually penetrating beyond appearances to the guiding principles and philosophy which lie behind the forms. Even better if one can inhabit such a world over a long period of time, absorbing the spaces, materials, and atmospheres as these reveal themselves throughout the day, the night, and the changing seasons. Architecture communicates in silence, touching the mind and all of the senses, gradually revealing itself and its pervasive aura to the inhabitant. If in addition one can somehow be integrated with the way of life and social vision for which the structure was first envisaged, then the lessons to be absorbed take on new dimensions of meaning altogether. In effect, one lives the building and the site from day to day while reliving the intentions and imagination that created the work in the first place.

Santoro’s account is full of acute observations about the architecture of Taliesin West, especially the relationship to the surrounding landscape. He grasped the primary intentions, including the orchestration of views of key mountains in the distance. The plan of Taliesin West is like a map of human relationships charting the ebb and flow between different functions, such as the airy studios, the dining hall, or the introverted Kiva, a closed room at the heart of the plan resembling a lodge of secret knowledge. The plan combines orthogonal and diagonal geometries and the terraces engage with the horizon. Santoro began to understand the underlying geometry, especially the square spiral focussed on the Indian rock