At Wright’s Architecture School, Students Heed His Lessons, and the Desert’s

Stairs lead from the buildings at Taliesin West to the desert area where many students sleep in shelters they’ve designed.

Scottsdale, Ariz. — Frank Lloyd Wright or the pack rats?

It’s hard to know who has more influence over architecture students building shelters for themselves here in the Sonoran desert around Taliesin West, the winter campus of the architecture school that Wright founded in Wisconsin in 1932. The school still espouses Wright’s pioneering organic vision of architecture and continues many of the traditions he began, among them that many of the 30 or so students sleep in the desert. But the pack rats are every bit as much of a presence, chewing up students’ bedding and carrying off anything that strikes their fancy—especially anything that sparkles.

It’s because of the pack rats, Chelsea Clark told me, that the shelter she’s designed for herself will be raised off the ground, taking advantage of four posts remaining from an earlier student’s shelter. Ms. Clark, a second-year master’s-degree candidate, was showing me around the part of the desert where some of the shelters are scattered. Some shelters are no more than simple tents on concrete bases, but there are also handsome Wright-like shelters built as long ago as the 1950s and striking shelters put up within the past few years. In many, students had taken anti-rat measures, such as packing bedding up in a plastic container and weighing down the lid with a fire extinguisher.

The shelters—with fireplaces for cold nights and shade for hot days—are one reason Ms. Clark enrolled at Taliesin, she told me as we scrambled through dry washes and followed trails around cactus plants. Like most of the school’s students, she came after spending a few years working for an architecture firm, in her case as an interior designer. She liked the idea of a small community whose members live and work together, with each member pulling his or her own weight by pitching in with chores in the kitchen and elsewhere. She currently shares one of the oldest shelters with another student—a pack-rat-free structure with an angled concrete roof.

She also liked the idea of designing her own shelter. To avoid disturbing the school’s 500-acre property more than necessary, students are now required to reuse existing sites for their shelter projects, and the four posts left over from a shelter that had two drawbridges became the basis for Ms. Clark’s elevated sleeping quarters. She and a student who has designed a shelter for an adjoining site plan to relandscape what will serve as a common area for the two structures. She’ll get a $1,000 construction grant from the school and may solicit donations of materials to supplement her budget, she said.

“I want to be frugal,” she told me, looking around the site. Her other constraint is manpower. “You think you’re going to get all this help, but you don’t. It’s just you.”

Indeed, manpower has always been a factor here. Wright purchased the property in the mid-1930s, in part with money from the commission for his most famous house, Fallingwater, and came here in 1937 with 23 students. He set them to building the low, stone-walled buildings that house the school—a studio with plenty of natural light for drawing, a kitchen and dining room, a living room and private quarters for Wright and his third wife, Olgivanna. To keep costs low, Wright relied on stones from the property, which students set in concrete to make the walls. They stretched canvas for roofs.

In the early years, the buildings lacked running water, electricity, and window glass. Wright, ever the rebel, intended Taliesin West to be a desert camp—in keeping with his desire to give students a refuge from traditional universities, for which he had little use. (He had himself left the University of Wisconsin at Madison after a short period, instead seeking a job with the architect Louis Sullivan and learning from him.) Electricity, water, windows, permanent roofs, and air conditioning all arrived eventually, but Wright’s spirit is very much in evidence.

Among other unusual traditions is the school’s annual migration to Spring Green, Wis., where students and faculty members occupy Wright’s original Taliesin all summer. The complex here, though, is far more famous. It attracts about 100,000 visitors each year, according to Victor Sidy, an alumnus who is now the school’s dean. Revenue from tours helps the school keep down its $30,000-a-year tuition, which covers all costs. The pack rats, of course, are free.

The living room and the Wrights’ quarters are at right, with the dining room and kitchen at left.

The studio originally had a canvas roof, later replaced.