Talieson West

April 1, 2018

 



Sedona 



Talieson West

With the music festival concluded, it was time to head towards Colorado Springs to check on the progress of the landscaping at our new Colorado house. With spring upon us, we are finally able to make some progress on the extensive landscaping project. We had rented a car for the one way drive up to the Springs, but wanted to take a couple of days to explore some of the sights along the way, 
having not spent a lot of time in this part of the west, most of the area was pretty unknown to us.







 



We did not make it far for our first stop, just up the road in Scottsdale where the winter home and desert school of famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Talieson West was located. Having grown up around architecture her entire life, Kathy was especially keen to check out the home, so we arranged to take the popular ninety minute tour of the home, school and grounds that gave us a look into the life and work of this historic man.



 



Taliesin West was architect Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and school in the desert from 1937 until his death in 1959 at the age of 91. Today it is the main campus of the School of Architecture at Taliesin and houses the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.







Taliesin West is Scottsdale's only National Historic Landmark. It serves as a prime example of Wright’s organic architecture in that the structures are built of the rocks and sand of the Sonoran Desert and melds to the lower McDowell Mountains. The grounds and buildings were constructed over a period of approximately twenty years by Frank Lloyd Wright and his apprentices. Set amid a Sonoran Desert Preserve of 491 acres, Taliesin West tours wind through provocative terraces, landscaped gardens and walkways commanding dramatic views of Camelback Mountain and the Valley of the Sun.









The tour was spectacular, the guides are all experts who travel back and forth between Talieson West and the original Talieson located in Wisconsin to give tours at both locations. Unlike most museums, Talieson is still a working school and in use daily, as such all the original furnishings and decorative elements are still in place and visitors are welcome to sit on the furniture and interact with the surroundings.







Our drive to Colorado took us by and through a number of wonderful natural areas, the first stop we made was at Montezuma Castle National Monument in Camp Verde, Arizona. The park is home to a set of well-preserved dwellings which were built and used by the Sinagua people, a pre-Columbian culture closely related to the Hohokam and other indigenous peoples of the southwestern United States between approximately 1100 and 1425 AD. The main structure comprises five stories and twenty rooms, and was built over the course of three centuries.

Kathy







Montezuma Castle is situated about 90 feet up a sheer limestone cliff, facing the adjacent Beaver Creek, which drains into the perennial Verde River just north of Camp Verde. It is one of the best-preserved cliff dwellings in North America, in part because of its ideal placement in a natural alcove that protects it from exposure to the elements. The precariousness of the dwelling's location and its immense scale - almost 4,000 square feet (370 m²) of floor space across five stories - suggest that the Sinagua were daring builders and skilled engineers.











Upon leaving the park, we drove the beautiful route through the amazing rock formations surrounding Sedona, Arizona, where we stopped for lunch before moving on. The incredible orange and red sandstone formations loom over the desert landscape and are some of the most beautiful anywhere, photos truly cannot do their majesty any justice. Kathy and I stopped a few times to hike around the beautiful natural areas around Sedona.











We also stopped at the incredible Chapel of the Holy Cross, a Roman Catholic Chapel built high into a butte in Sedona. It is a fairly amazing structure. We parked next to a home at the base of the butte that was for sale for an asking price of only thirty million dollars.









Our travels took us to Flagstaff, where we settled in for the evening. Flagstaff is a cool smaller town with a college town feel and lots of cool restaurants, bars and such in the downtown area. We hit a few of the breweries which seemed to proliferate the place and had a great night to finish off our first day of travel to Colorado.