ROUTE 66 2015

Wednesday 15, April

DAY 9

TALIESIN WEST...A DOCENT TIME WAS HAD BY ALL...

Fallingwater was my first official tour experience of a Wright creation. Spring Break in '92 (I think...the rhododendrons were just exploding at Mill Run.) We had driven down for a hockey game and a spin through the Pittsburgh Science Centre with Asher & Jules, and Fallingwater seemed an appropriate extension.

I remember the tour as being kind of technical...a lot about the cantilevering and covered exterior walkways, but even without the guide, the spaces and the views...and the eccentricities would have been sufficient.

It's quickly apparent that Taliesin West is unikely to explain itself, if only because we'll be lucky to see more than a fraction.

LEGO

Our guide, David reminds me of a tour guide/driver named Kwame who took us all over Barbados on a day in January.

In ordinary conversation Kwame might have represented anyone—a teacher, the son of the guy next door, a server at Starbucks; any differently accented guy you might interact with. Wearing his tour guide hat he transitioned quickly to performance. Extravagant vocabulary, fortissimo, diminuendo, ritardando, subito, crescendo; every natural description, all historical anecdote ended with the final sentence repeated three times, the terminal iteration a flat echo. Acting the guide part seemed mnemonic... Kwame's music was his key to the lyric. (Works the other way around for me.)

Anyway, David was dressed for a part. Tropical business-hipster hat, ponytail, brief van Dyke, rings and bracelets, no visible ink, short sleeves, off-white jeans. Linda said he had no creases...he seemed gently tumbled dry.

As he didn't have to cope with Barbados' winding roads his principal instrument was his body rather than his voice, although it was a flow diagram to his movement: He rose on his toes, he crept quickly, he swept his hand, he froze dramatically, he rose and fell. And what he was delivering was less Fallingwater technical than inspirational—he was proud to be the master's voice. If there was no other take-away than Frank Lloyd Wright as an icon of American Exceptionalism, it imagined Taliesien West as an example of the finest kind of American off-brand education.

Oh I'll concede that the brand is FLW, but if your idea of a learning environment was a recursive one in which you were constantly returned to the solitude of your own convictions within a collaborative living and working model, this could be your spot. You will need forty thousand for tuition (there are bursaries,) you'll live in a tent and work like a bugger looking after the crazy place, but your chances of being your own model are pretty good, I think.