Phoenix Travel
Taliesin West and the Cosanti Foundation
Whatever its general appearance may suggest, Phoenix has managed to attract some visionary designers. Notable among them is Frank Lloyd Wright , who came to the city to work on the Biltmore Hotel , and stayed for most of the 25 years before his death in 1959. His winter studio, Taliesin West located at 114th Street and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, at Scottsdale's northeastern edge is now an architecture school and a working design studio, with regular multimedia exhibits of the man's life and work (SeptJune daily 9am4pm; July & Aug daily except Tues & Wed 9am4pm; tel 480/860-2700). Three different guided tours operate according to complicated seasonal schedules: hour-long "Panorama" tours ($16), 1hr 30min "Insights" ($22), and less frequent 3hr "Behind The Scenes" tours ($35).
Less well known, but in many ways more compelling, is the Cosanti Foundation , four miles west of Taliesin at 6433 Doubletree Rd (daily 9am5pm; $1 donation). The buildings, designed by Paolo Soleri , an Italian-born ex-student of Wright, and constructed out of rammed earth and concrete, have a much more organic feel than Taliesin. Crafts workshops make bells and cast bronzes, and a small museum shows drawings and models of Soleri's life's work: Arcosanti , a space-age, environmentally sensitive project designed to be (someday) an entirely self-sufficient community of five thousand people, which emerges from the desert just an hour's drive north, a mile east of I-17 at Cordes Junction. Three-hour guided tours are given throughout the day ($8 donation; tel 520/632-6217, www.arcosanti.org ), and an airy and spacious caf serves healthy and tasty meals.
Phoenix
The state capital and largest city in sunny Arizona. PHOENIX When it began life in the 1860s, it must have seemed like a good idea. The sweltering little farming town stood in the heart of the large Salt River Valley, with a ready-made irrigation system left by ancient Indians (the name Phoenix honors the fact that the city rose from the ashes of a long-vanished Hohokam community). Within a century, however, Phoenix had turned into what writer Edward Abbey called "the blob that is eating Arizona," acquiring as it did so the money and political clout to defy the self-evident absurdity of building a huge city in a virtually waterless desert. Now the sixth largest city in the US, it has filled the entire valley, engulfing the neighboring towns of Scottsdale, Mesa and Tempe in the process, with over a million people within the city boundaries and more than two million in the metropolitan area. Arizona's financial and industrial epicenter may just be getting into its stride; boosters claim the megalopolis will one day stretch 150 miles, from Wickenburg to Tucson.
The city's phenomenal rise was originally fueled by its image as a healthy oasis, where the desert had been tamed and transformed into a suburban idyll. While retirees still flock to enclaves such as Sun City , Phoenix now has a deserved reputation as a very pleasant city.
In winter, when temperatures rarely drop below 65F, tourists from colder climes arrive in large numbers. They pay vast sums to warm their bones in the luxury resorts and spas, concentrated especially in Scottsdale, that are the modern equivalent of the 1930s dude ranches. Unlike golf, tennis and shopping, sightseeing rarely ranks high on the agenda which is just as well, since there's a good deal of truth in the charge laid by Phoenix's older arch-rival, Tucson, that the city is sorely lacking in culture and history. Apart from the Heard Museum 's excellent Native American displays, and Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture studio at Taliesin West , Phoenix is short of must-see attractions. In fact, if you're on a touring vacation, you'd miss little if you bypassed it altogether; a day at one of the city's plentiful upscale malls is probably as authentic and enjoyable an experience as Phoenix has to offer.