Homesickness and Frank Lloyd Wright

I am sure that almost everyone has been homesick and one point or another. Perhaps when spending the night at a friend’s house or a relative’s house you were overcome with homesickness. I know when my cousin Kris stayed with me once she was really homesick. We loved spending time together and cherished our rare sleepovers. So she must have been conflicted to be homesick. When I went to camp for a week when I was 11 and again at 13 I was homesick. When I was away at college there were certainly times I was homesick.

When I toured Taliesin West, the tour guide was quick to remind us that it isn’t a museum. It is a living, breathing, ongoing school of architecture. The architecture program is year-round. They are in residence at Taliesin West in the Phoenix area from about October until May. Then they head to Taliesin in Wisconsin From late May until the end of September or early October. The students are from all over, and they live right there on the campus. Many of them are from the snowy parts of the country. Wright knew they would be homesick. He, of course, thought of the tiniest details. In the photo below, you will see two beams/cantilevers protruding under the roof on the right. Hanging from those 2 red beams are two long red shapes that look like long stretched-out triangles. Guess why those are there?

When it was snowy and cold in the north, Frank would have the students come outside and face the pool and building that housed the studios. He’d point out the two shapes—and say they were the Taliesin West icicles. Now isn’t that a wondrously thoughtful way to help the students? I really liked it. (My Art History prof would have said “Now isn’t that charming?”