Frank Lloyd Wright’s Musings on Air Conditioning
By David Meek | The Arizona Report
Famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright was a venerable sixty years old when he first arrived in Phoenix in early 1928. Wright and his wife would winter here in the Valley for another three decades. His 1937 Taliesin West residence and school, built into the brow of the McDowell Mountains, is open for public tours. Today, it features central air conditioning to assuage perspiring students and pilgrims of architecture. Few homes of the era featured such luxurious climate control. Mr. Wright didn’t experience air conditioning at Taliesin West though. It was his wife, Olgivanna, who retrofitted central cooling to the property in the 1960s and 1970s after the architect’s death in 1959. Today on the grounds of Taliesin West, Wright’s office, architecture school, garden room, kiva, theater, cabaret and gift shop all feature modern HVAC. What would he think about that?
