Taliesin West

Frank Lloyd Wright has been on my mind lately, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because his presence is always gently felt in the Valley, thanks to the various buildings he designed or influenced, most prominently the Arizona Biltmore and Gammage Auditorium. But mostly I think I think of him because of my lingering fondness for the modern over the postmodern. Only a modernist would say things like “The truth is more important than the facts,” “The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind,” and “An idea is salvation by imagination.” To the postmodernist, there is no “truth,” – just perspective. The postmodern heart is a suspect organ at best, thanks to all those pop culture references, and who can take seriously anyone who’d talk about “salvation” without irony?

Wright designed buildings that said, “This is important,” and we live in a time when “important,” if it means anything, means merely powerful and wealthy. Different times, different sensibilities. But if I ever reach a point when the present presses on me too insistently, I may return to Taliesin West just to be reminded what it must have felt like to be an artist who made his art without the slightest hint of irony, to be someone who suspected that beyond the welter of random facts lay something called “the truth.”