Little Shelters in Taliesin West
The learners that joined the Little Maps Design and Build Studio at Taliesin West from January to May 2015, planned and constructed a couple of shared shelters and a collective learning space, along a wash of that extremely beautiful part of the Sonoran Desert. Daniel Chapman, Mark-Thomas Cordova, Jaime Inostroza, Dylan Kessler, Pablo Moncayo, Natasha Vemulkonda and Pierre Verbruggen embarked in a sixteen-week journey of self-discovery and collective effort.
Taliesin West was built by apprentices. This desert compound was a living laboratory, where new ideas were constantly tested and improved through the years. Frank Lloyd Wright's apprentices built their own shelters in the desert, around the campus, where they rested and had their own privacy and contact with nature after a hard day's work. This tradition is still alive at The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. Currently students live, transform and build their own shelters as part of their learning experience.
-What did we do?
-This was the first shelter studio that was ever organised at Taliesin West. Its goal was to share and make a knowledge and tools that would help the seven young fellows that enrolled the studio to become better architects: improving their critical thinking, observation and transformation skills, ability to make poignant questions and give relevant -built and non-built- proposals to make a particular environment home. To do so, we followed and altered our little maps cartography. And as a practical example, we designed and built a shelter that is part of the desert encampment where Taliesin West learners live. The first three weeks, we worked on a brief exercise in which everyone had to make their own overnight shelter to spend a night in the desert. The only two restrictions were that they could only use materials found on site, and that they had to carry, assemble and disassemble them that same night, leaving no trace. At first everybody looked for an isolated place to camp, but one day, while walking around in the desert looking for resources, we came to a place during sunset that had good conditions to become a campground. We looked at each other and realised that it was better to camp together.
The chosen night, it was very windy and cold. So when we got to the site everyone ran to find a spot protected from the wind. Each one spontaneously helped each other to assemble their shelter. Daniel's canvas broke, so Pablo gave him a part of his own shelter, and so on. That night, we learnt three things: It's better to camp together. We can help and learn from each other. Sleeping in the desert is not about designing a fancy shelter, but about not only getting the conditions to survive, but to enjoy a memorable night.
From what we learnt in this first exercise, we decided to design and build our shelter collectively. We got a 25 metres paper roll in which we drew the shared ideas during the whole process. We gathered as much data as we could to understand how the school was now, and how could this shelter help it. This process brought to seven design hypothesis. With them in mind we were able to choose a site where we could develop them. We chose the most difficult, ugly and ruined one available. Everyday we went back and forth from the studio to the site to the workshop. Mockups were easily built and checked under the sun.
The school provided a 2000$ budget. The premise was to use as many on-site resources as possible. However, we gave us the freedom to get standard, cheap materials from regular warehouses.
This humble but great collective effort, following the little maps cartography during twelve intense weeks, led to a first construction of two shared shelters and a gathering space. On following years, these shelters will be inhabited by different learners, who will transform, maintain, improve and document them. All this lifecycle will be presented on the little maps website.
-What did we learn?
-a. To collaborate.
Architecture has always been and is a collaborative effort. What is collaboration? It is TRULY working together for the common good, listening, sharing, respecting each other, and a collective process of building ideas that substitutes individual authorship, pyramidal hierarchies and power relations. The studio was an explicit test ground on diverse modes of learning from each other and working together. Architecture schools, as our entire profession, need to shift from competition to collaboration.
b. To survive.
In the Sonoran desert, making architecture is not about comfort, or belonging. Not even about our needs. It is about survival. Everything here is a menace to human life -and unfortunately when driving around Scottsdale it seems that human presence is a menace to life here. Making a living environment is not a trendy game, a cool divertimento or an egotistic statement. In such a resource scarcity, a construction is more obviously a device that gives a fragile environment to stay alive. What links Taliesin West shelters with the brightest examples of architecture -a family to which Taliesin West belongs to- is that by living there, going back and forth into and out of the desert everyday, among critters noises, stars and sunsets, the young architects’ experience slowly distilates into tools, not for comfort or dreaming, but for making places that arise full consciousness, allowing us to be ourselves.
c. Anticipation awareness and acute observation.
Architecture’s materialisation process is an open book. Design decisions are transparent. A trained designer can read all the doubts, conflicts, accidents, mistakes, steps, search, priorities and confusions that shaped a construction. However, there is always some missing steps you have to research and study. Taliesin West and even Ocatillo -only present through some pictures and drawings- are a constant spring of these magician’s tricks. The knowledge implied in every design decision is not obvious, not shown. But we can grasp it and keep it in our own top hat.
d. The little joys of building.
Constructing can be very tiring, sometimes very frustrating. Under the Sonoran sun, it can be nerve breaking. Experiencing this in our own bones can help us foresee easier, more efficient and relaxed ways for others to construct our future projects.
When you glimpse a colleague’s happy face of discovery, the joy of seeing things that you thought of actually work out, the most daring, intriguing, wild ideas running smoothly, the light coming out of these faces gives you the greatest feeling possible. Don’t expect architects who haven’t experienced that to understand it.
More info at www.littlemaps.net