Archinect - News

Experience Frank Lloyd Wright works online through virtual tours

2018-06-21T15:31:00-04:00

Virtual tours of Frank Lloyd Wright's properties will be available online through Leica Geosystems partnership with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. With technology services from Multivista and Matterport, detailed experiences of the architect's iconic works can be explored from exterior grounds to the interior home, including minute detailing, 3D views, and floor plans.

Taliesin West will be the first property available online here. The endeavor is part of a larger scheme by Leica Geosystems to use digital innovation to capture, document, and preserve architectural history.

A Spiralling Frank Lloyd Wright house in Phoenix has been donated to the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture

2017-06-12T12:21:00-04:00

Last week marked what would have been Frank Lloyd Wright’s 150th birthday. Celebrating the occasion, Zach Rawling and his family donated his Wright-designed home in Phoenix to a foundation under the auspices of the Arizona Community Foundation to benefit the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.

The house, designed for the architect’s son, was saved from demolition by Rawling and, with its distinctive spiraling ramp, is seen as a precursor to the Guggenheim Museum in New York, according to Aaron Betsky, dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.

The donation “will allow us to use that great legacy to be a living laboratory in which we will figure out how to use what Frank Lloyd Wright taught us about living in the desert Southwest, to make the life in this desert and in this community even better in the future,” said Betsky.

Rawling bought the property back in 2012 for $2.4M in order to save it from demolition. While he wanted to restore the building and turn it into ...

After a tough couple years, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture has a new lease on life—and a new name

2017-04-24T20:41:00-04:00

T he Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture has had a rough go of things the last few years. The school, which is located at the historic winter home of Wright, Taliesin West, almost lost its accreditation because it wasn’t financially independent from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Things got so bad that they temporarily suspended new enrollment.

Then, the critic Aaron Betsky took over the deanship and was able to fundraise enough to keep the school accredited. Now, to mark their new, more-removed relationship to the Foundation, the school has been renamed the School of Architecture at Taliesin.

“Adopting this new name, the School of Architecture at Taliesin, helps us to secure our identity as an experimental, forward-looking architecture program that is deeply rooted in the Taliesin Fellowship,” Betsky states. “The process in which we developed our new relationship with the Foundation and our accreditors has been an opportunity to closely examine who we are as a school and ho...

The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture to remain accredited

2017-03-10T18:00:00-05:00

After years of uncertainty, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture has had an application approved that will enable it to remain accredited. Previously, the school’s accreditation was threatened because it wasn’t operating independently of its sponsoring organization, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. The application that was approved enables the school to separate itself from the Foundation while still using its facilities.

Last year, when the school attempted a similar application, officials found that they did not provide sufficient evidence that they would be able to meet several standards, such as maintaining a staff capable of running high-quality programs.

Part of the new plan entails that the school and foundation will collaborate on founding a K-12 program. The foundation will also expand its STEM (science, technology, engineering, art and math) programming.