Architects in Arizona and other places with extreme heat are working to design their buildings to withstand those temperatures. While modern technology can give those efforts a big assist, Leilani Marie Labong, a design journalist based in San Francisco, argues looking to the past can also be helpful.
Labong looks at the influence the famed architect and part-time Valley resident continues to have here in a piece for Bloomberg headlined “What Frank Lloyd Wright Learned from the Desert.”
Labong joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Leilani, let's start with the title of your story. Based on your reporting, what exactly did Frank Lloyd Wright learn from the desert?
LEILANI MARIE LABONG: Well, first of all, OK, so he had this design philosophy called organic architecture. We have to remember that Frank Lloyd Wright came from Wisconsin, which is rolling and supple and green and leafy. And so when he arrived in the desert in 1928, he arrived to consult on the Arizona Biltmore.
The desert was really shocking for him, all of the harsh angles. He said that the Arizona landscape was sculpted by wind and water and patterned like a leopard skin. And I think the desert really deepened his idea of organic architecture, which is simply just designing buildings that feel like a natural extension of the land.
He's not the first person to design a climate-adapted shelter. That honor goes to the desert’s first great architects, the Indigenous peoples. And he really admired their innate understanding of place.
So what they did was a lot of passive survival based moves, I guess — like desert masonry, thick walls made of stone that diffused the heat, I guess. Passive cooling. He oriented the buildings to catch the breezes.
He came up with this idea called the dotted line, based on the saguaro cactus. So if you look at a saguaro cactus, it's ridged on the outside. It makes alternating bands of light, shadow, light, shadow, which is theoretically what we see when we think of a dotted line. So half of the plant is always in a cooling shadow all day long. And he applied that to his architecture as well.
BRODIE: And as you write, he also was very interested in using materials that were from the area in which he was working, right? So if he was building big stone walls, he wanted to use stone from the desert.
LABONG: Right. So Taliesin West is probably the clearest example of that. He built it with rocks that were gathered there, right on the site, and he embedded those rocks into concrete and made these thick walls of high thermal mass. And I explained — probably not very convincing before — but high thermal mass just means using heavy materials like stone or concrete that soak up the heat during the day and slowly release it overnight.
Now we're going into summer, so in summer, those walls help keep interiors much cooler during the hottest hours of the day by delaying or softening that heat. But aesthetically, that desert masonry was similar to how he described the mountains of Arizona, which is like a leopard skin.
BRODIE: So you mentioned that Wright was not the first person to use this kind of architecture, that Indigenous people had been doing this for many, many years before this. I'm wondering if you see his legacy after him — like this certainly seems like something that a lot of architects, both here in Arizona and elsewhere, are looking at in terms of trying to design and build buildings in an increasingly difficult climate.
LABONG: Yeah. So I talked to Whitney Warman, who is the senior associate at Studio Ma, which is a Phoenix based architecture firm. And Wright's basic principles or best practices have long been best practices for sustainable design. And I also want to clarify that the scholars do not think of Wright as a sustainable architect because that term came much later, after his passing.
So while his principles are best practices for sustainable design — so that would be high thermal mass walls, passive cooling and using shade orientation, that kind of thing. I think that the modern technologies would fit into his philosophy of organic architecture. And modern architects are incorporating those two things together.
BRODIE: Is there a sense of how consciously Wright was designing his buildings to withstand the summer heat here, as opposed to just sort of having it sort of blend in and work with the landscape and use native materials. Was he concerned about, you know, how these buildings were going to feel when it got to be 100+ degrees?
LABONG: Yes. I think his best move there was the high thermal mass walls, just making these walls of stone as thick as possible so that the interiors would feel cool. Now, he didn't really have HVAC to work with. But also to have HVAC, you have to have these sealed surfaces so that you’re energy efficient with the mechanics.
And he wanted to be as in touch with the climate as possible. So the best way to do that is to build some really thick walls.
BRODIE: Based on the folks with whom you spoke for the story, did you get the sense going forward that architects are going to continue to sort of look back to what Frank Lloyd Wright was doing and try to either adapt that to their particular needs or adjust them in some way, or maybe just flat out use what he used in their building designs?
LABONG: Absolutely. As I mentioned, his basic principles are best practices for sustainable building today, and modern technologies fit into his or his philosophy of organic architecture. Yeah.
