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Desert
Shelter Explores Wright's Design Principles
9/1/2006
By
James Murdock
 During
their first year at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture,
students design a shelter capable of comfortably housing a person
in the Arizona desert at Taliesin West, where the school holds winter
sessions. Constructing it is optional, though, and most people complete
their huts within a few months. Trevor Pan spent 400 days, stretched
over two years, working on his project, and even remained at school
to finish it after graduation.
What took so long? Pan explains that his shelter,
dubbed 3 Desert Way, was his first built project—a labor of
love. But the 24-year-old Colorado native is also in love with architecture,
which he reverently spells with a capital A; he refers to it in
the feminine gender, moreover, as though Architecture were a ship
or a woman. “Architecture is an ideal,” Pan explains.
“It’s a nice way of personifying it, I guess you could
say, by calling it ‘her.’ ” In its ideal form, he
adds, architecture produces buildings that can exist in only one
location, made of materials taken from the earth nearby: an organic,
holistic approach.
Organic design sports the “green”
label today, but Wright was working this way a century ago—so
for Pan, there was no better place to study than at the school that
Wright himself founded. “When I first visited, I realized this
was the place,” says Pan, who received his master’s degree
there in May. “Seeing how the building and the landscape are
one thing was a life-altering experience.”
Also life-altering was 3 Desert Way, a Wright-inspired
bungalow consisting of only one, 100-square-foot room. Pan maximized
every inch, adding built-in seating for twelve and a foldaway bed.
Outdoors, he landscaped a 150-square-foot patio, more than doubling
the shelter’s livable area.
Frank Henry, Pan’s mentor and the school’s
studio master, explains that the shelter assignment explores Wright’s
“learn by doing” directive. “You learn the nature
of materials, their limitations, and how to attach one to another,”
he says. “In a traditional school of architecture, you don’t
have that. You may study physics and construction documents, but
you don’t get your feet dirty and learn what concrete really
is.” Most shelters soon fade into the desert, Henry adds, but
Pan’s dedication ensures that his will survive.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Pan
was among the handful of students who stuck by the Wright school
during its recent turmoil. When the dean left in 2005, several faculty
members and students also left, leading a national accreditation
board to put the school on notice.
But the school is on the mend. With a new
dean, enrollment is rebounding. Another reason for optimism: As
interest in green architecture keeps growing, future generations
will likely be drawn to learn Wright’s organic principles.
At least, that’s what Pan expects.
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