22/12/12 – Art Meets Science

Great days sometimes happen without a great deal of planning and today was just such a day. It turned out to be day filled with a wonderful mix of art and science. We had originally planned to travel directly to Tombstone but instead we meandered through the suburbs of Phoenix and into posh, upmarket Scottsdale, where we found Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous winter residence. With my Dad’s background in architecture we really could not drive past this place. We weren’t sure what to expect but it was a glorious journey through one man’s egocentric determination to change the way people lived and ultimately viewed the world – a bit like Steve Jobs in this century.

Hard times after the depression had forced Mr Wright (as they referred to him on the tour) to take in pupils to his Wisconsin home (Taliesin East). Not long after this he contracted a bad case of pneumonia and was advised to take a trip to a warmer climate and so he visited a friend in Arizona, was shown a large plot of land on a hill overlooking Scottsdale  and quickly came to be inspired by the ‘Nature of the site’ and the ‘Site’s nature’. These two were the foundation of his beliefs about organic architecture and led to him designing (and getting his young student ‘apprentices’ to build) structures that combined art, music and theatre into the highest form of art as he saw it – architecture. 

Taliesin West is built on the brow of the mountain (so as not to upset the flow of the landscape) and a tour around it takes you on a journey filled with mystery. It is hard to find the front door and when you do you getting through it and into the house involves the almost hobbit like experience of ‘compression and release’ as you enter through a small space and then are released into wonderful and truly unique series of large and airy rooms. Everything (as was the case in the old days) was designed by Mr Wright and if you even moved a piece of furniture from where he had decreed it was to go you would not be granted the red square at the front of your home that was his signature and sign of approval and ‘authenticity’.

And the furniture is something else again. Most of it is deliberately low so that you are encouraged to look up at the mountain (or perhaps to pay homage to your host as he was not a tall man). We sat in the chairs in his piano room (modern day reproductions cost $4000 each) and they were small and tight and designed to make you sit upright and have your knees and hips at 90 degrees. This way you were forced to ‘look good’ in his chairs! The larger entertaining room (set up like a cabaret theatre as the third Mrs Wright was a dancer from Montenegro) was a mathematical masterpiece that used the science of non-parallel walls to perfect the acoustics by eliminating echo. The chairs were an example of reflective seating (angled to the left because Mr Wright liked to have Mrs Wright seated on his right) so you needed to extend your right arm and cross you left leg over your right in order to face the front to see the show. (Are you getting the feeling that this guy was a control freak?)

Frank Lloyd Wright was the man, who after designing ‘Fallingwater’ for the CEO of Kaufmann’s Department Store in Pittsburgh (claimed to be the most influential building design of 20^th century in the USA) got himself on the cover of ‘Time’ magazine and was hailed as the master American architecture. Interestingly he did most of his greatest works from the age of 71- 92 years when he died in 1959. Some would claim him the master of 20^th century architecture. Being the devoted daughter of a big fan of Rennie McIntosh, I will fail to support that claim!

And all that was before lunch….

As we travelled south on the Interstate 10 to Tucson we saw the signs to ‘Biosphere 2’ and thought why not balance the day with a little science. We had heard of this experiment to sustain life in a closed environment and we were keen to learn more.

In the 1990s Ed Bass (a Texas millionaire) gave a huge endowment (of which 150 million dollars bought the land here in Arizona) to look into ways to sustain life on another planet. The experiment was set up to last 100 years with the initial ‘biospherians’ set to complete two years in the dome and those thereafter to complete one year each for the next 98 years.






However the second rotation came out after only 7 months as they were unable to sustain the caloric intake necessary to complete the work to sustain life unassisted due to dome maintenance taking each person 66 hours a week. The ‘biospherians’ had been responsible for all aspects of their life – cultivating, harvesting and preparing food. They had a largely a vegan diet supplemented with meat from animals they had slaughtered on Sunday nights and some products from the goats they raised. Rice and fish came twice a month with the harvest. This left little time for keeping the dome in working order (huge engineering feat) and conducting research on the world’s biomes – rainforest, wetlands, savannah, desert and ocean. So in the end it became clear that the experiment could not succeed and the facility was handed over instead to the University of Arizona which now uses it for various biological and earth science large scale research projects. 

The current Biosphere 2 program (Biosphere 1 is our world today) has simplified its original brief and now looks at how water affects the landscape and therefore life on earth because water is the essential link between our chemical and biological worlds. Central to this is the newly constructed LEO 10 (Landscape Evolution Observatory). The research currently being undertaken here looks at what may happen to our world in a time of climate change. What will happen to the rainforests that supply our oxygen if the world has less rainfall? How is soil made from rocks? How do desert plants like those in Australia, Nambia and Baja California get water from fog? What may be the long term effect of plastic in the ‘northern pacific garbage patch’ on the cycle of life? What kinds of bacteria eat plastic and how do we design a better plastic for the future?

This is big science, big questions with people from different disciplines working collaboratively so it struck me that this project and the essential questions it seeks to answer could be a wonderful real world introduction to the fishtank/garden hydroponics sustainability experiment that Oliver Gee and others do at Wesley. Imagine how exciting it would be to look at Biosphere 2 and then get the boys to design similar action research for themselves – Think Global, Act Local.

After this fascinating afternoon we drove to Tombstone and took up residence in the Doc Holliday room at the Larian Hotel. It was supposed to be haunted……..