News

Jul 18, 2023

Taliesin West working on accessibility, infrastructure

Painted to blend in with the surrounding environment, a metal ramp provides

Painted to blend in with the surrounding environment, a metal ramp provides access over the steps outside Frank Lloyd Wright's office as accessibility improvements at Taliesin West. (David Minton/Staff Photographer)

Taliesin West, the famed winter home of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, is nearing the end of a nearly four-year renovation to make the facility more accessible and is about to renovate a water and sewer infrastructure that is over eight decades old.

Railings have been added, bathroom accessiblity improved and parts of the campus made more level to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Replacement of the sewer and water infrastructure is expected to begin next spring and take a year.

"The last couple of years, we’ve focused on improving accessibility," said Fred Prozzillo, the vice president of preservation at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. "Our main goal is to share Taliesin West with as many people as possible and it's a tricky thing to make the historic site accessible."

The site received The National Endowment for the Humanities grant for $50,000 in October 2019 to become more ADA-compliant.

However, this proved to be a challenge for the historic property.

"We’re limited with what we can do because we are a national historic landmark and a World Heritage Site," Prozzillo said. "We don't want to take away from the property's historic character or remove historic materials. So, we must devise creative ways to get people through."

One of those ways involved blending the new additions with the property's historic architecture.

"We’ve improved surfaces and walkways and ramps to allow people to get through with walkers and wheelchairs, we’ve added handrails at steps and we’ve worked to create pretty simple clean lines so that the handrails kind of fade into the background and don't detract from the character things," Prozzillo said.

Although the renovation started smoothly, it was significantly derailed in March 2020 by nearly a year and a half because of pandemic lockdowns and supply shortages.

"With the changes in the accessibility of the site, having to work from home and the workforce issues that are coming up now and the issues with the supply chain, so that makes it a little more challenging," Prozzillo said.

"We have things like air conditioning units that we’d typically get within a week and now we’re waiting four to six months for things like that. So that hurts."

Rising costs have also put the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in a pinch since the foundation is a nonprofit organization.

"As a nonprofit you know, we depend on tourism and gifts from donors and grants," Prozzilo said. "However, by the time we go out to do the actual construction, numbers have changed and then that's really tough on us because it's hard to go back to a donor and say, ‘you know what, now it's two times what we estimated.’

"So that poses a real challenge to cheer our team to be able to go out and fund a lot of this work."

However, Prozzillo was able to manage and is seeing the project through to its final stretch.

His two other projects involve redesigning new water and sewer infrastructure for the property and replacing the canvas roofs over the main buildings.

"The whole infrastructure of this site was all done by these young men and women who were 20 to 30 years old and were learning construction by building these walls and by putting the plumbing in the ground," Prozzillo said.

"While it was a great learning experience for them, today for us, it makes it challenging because they weren't trained plumbers and they weren't trained electricians. The materials and the way they put things together, over time, have deteriorated and are at the end of their lifespan."

"Without water and restrooms, we can't open to the public," Prozzillo said. "That's work that could be disruptive to a site so we had to be careful with planning. We worked with a local civil engineer to come up with ways to loop the new water system around the property so that we’re disturbing as little surface ground as possible."

The canvas roofs that loom over the main buildings are currently being assessed to be redesigned with new panels made out of contemporary fabrics capable of withstanding the harsh desert climate.

In preparation, the Foundation's preservation team has been monitoring the interior environment in Wright's office – one of the facility's signature buildings – since October 2021 to track temperature, humidity, rain and other natural elements to understand the effect those elements have on the building.

Once a year's worth of data has been compiled, the team will create a computer-generated model with the proposed panel designs to test different materials, such as polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) coated fiberglass fabrics and aerogel insulation to measure durability and impact on the interior environment.

"We want to look at restoring the site to the character that was stored in Wright's lifetime and this idea of having fabric groups is intriguing to us," Prozzillo said. "So, we want to get back to that canvas tent-like feel because the idea of making this feel like a camp was very important to living here.

"We want to get back to the camp-like feel but we need to do it in a way that the Frank Lloyd Wright foundation can occupy the site year-round and we can have people going through the site year-round."

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