Harboe Architects releases a plan to restore the Arizona campus while the future of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture is uncertain
It took more than 16 months of research, interviews, and combing through thousands of photographs, documents, and butcher-paper drawings to assemble an exhaustive account of the site in its heyday and since. Finally, this fall, Harboe began presenting the preservation master plan to the public, first at Taliesin West in October, and then at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in November, where he spoke wistfully about the seductive impact of Wright’s early designs. “Some of that meaning has been eroded,” he said. “Our goal is to get back to that original essence.”
The resulting 740-page document is a blueprint for the site’s architectural aspirations, though it leaves out an estimated schedule or budget. One of Harboe’s goals is to have Taliesin West (along with nine other Wright buildings) anointed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, a distinction that could further boost the profile of the compound and bolster fundraising for what promises to be a long and expensive restoration process.
In other respects, the future of Taliesin West is murky. Last year, the foundation and the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, the descendant of the apprentice-architect and fellowship program Wright began in 1932, split into two separately incorporated bodies. They did so in response to a new requirement of the Higher Learning Commission, which accredits the school, that “accredited institutions must be separately incorporated from sponsoring organizations.” Now the school faces a fundraising deadline at year’s end to secure its independence from the foundation. (The current dean of the school, Aaron Betsky, is a regular contributor to ARCHITECT.) If those efforts fail, the school may cease to exist at the end of this month, a blow that the school’s supporters say would be irreparable to Taliesin West’s identity. “The school was integral to the way the place functioned, to the way the people lived,” says Don Fairweather, who studied and worked under Wright between 1948 and 1952, and who served on the foundation board between 2007 and February 2015.
